Why can't monsters find love?

I recently finished reading the anthology, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and was quite enjoying it right up until the last story, “You were Neither Hot nor Cold, but Lukewarm, and so I Spit You Out,” by Cara Spindler and David Erik Nelson. First, it was only a mediocre story, competently, but not excitingly written, less than gripping, with its mock-allegorical style—hardly the strong finish an anthology should have. The real disappointment came, however, on the penultimate page:

Maybe Cain rose up because he’d found himself a girlfriend and there was no room in that tiny half-past-Eden world for a warped stray, not in the land of pairs two-by-two. Maybe Abel wasn’t so much favored by God as he was an aberrant freak, a half that could never find its better half because it had been born malformed, half-formed, quasi-modo, twisted and stunted at birth. (p. 371)

I rankle at so many things in that paragraph: the lazy biblical revision (it’s just so easy to adapt biblical stories to your agenda; at least put some effort into it; this revision takes into account none of the details of the story and could therefore be applied to almost anything), the grating language (the juxtaposition of modern colloquialism [“he’d found himself”] with an attempt at something poetic [“born malformed, half-formed, quasi-modo, twisted and stunted at birth”], the awkward-sounding repetition of the word “half”), the fact that this “profound” conclusion doesn’t mesh well with the premise previously laid out in the story (that the protagonist’s wife turns into a monster every night—I guess it’s okay because she’s a really hot monster?).

What’s really upsetting about it, though, is the fact that few people would find it upsetting. This “epiphany” comes at the expense of a club-footed character (who inexplicably develops a bad arm at the climax of the story—perhaps to make him even less sympathetic?). The idea is that the deformed brother wants to kill the protagonist’s wife, not because the protagonist himself was afraid for his life and wanted to kill her only a few pages earlier, but because he, the Club-Footed Janitor, can’t understand love, you know, on account of being so … deformed and all.

This idea is extended beyond just the one character: by using the archetypal Cain and Abel, the authors implicitly include all deformed people in their conclusion. To sum up: deformed people—freaks—can’t get girlfriends, don’t understand love, and should be eliminated. Imagine any other minority in there—Black, Jewish, homosexual—and the insult becomes clear. The fact that I have to explain to norms why this passage is so offensive is what makes me sad.