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Who says cousin marriage is wrong? Who says it’s not a legitimate political issue?
I am supposedly on blogging hiatus right now, but I just had to announce the arrival of this awesome new article from the New York Times by writer Sarah Kershaw.
WHEN Kimberly Spring-Winters told her mother she was in love, she didn’t expect a positive response — and she didn’t get one.
“It’s wrong, it’s taboo, nobody does that,” she recalled her mother saying.
But shortly after the conversation, Ms. Spring-Winters, 29, decided to marry the man she loved: her first cousin.
Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her “cusband,” proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends, and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not concerned about genetic defects, Ms. Spring-Winters said, and their fertility doctor told them he saw no problem with having children.
This article contains a lot of new and previously unearthed material, including quotes from cousin couples and also Representative Harvey Hilderbran, who authored the recent Texas statute in 2005 banning cousin marriage.
Those interested should also check out the new cousin marriage Wikipedia page that I have updated in the past few days.
68 Comments
recycling your posts? I commented on the last one you did.
Do you have something personal to gain by removing the stigma of incest?
do you ask that question of gay and lesbian activists working to make marriage a legal option for their families?
I didn’t equate gay marriage with incest, and they are not the same.
This isn’t an issue where I am trying to impose my beliefs on someone else, or interrupt their happiness.
Family trees that look like wreaths decrease genetic diversity and increase mutations and genetic disease.
interfamily breeding has a stigma that should remain in place, that is not the same homophobia.
http://www.deseretnews.com/user/comments/1,5150,635182923,00.html
http://judaism.about.com/od/health/a/geneticdisorder.htm
This may not be the same post exactly, but her agenda is “cousin marriage” .
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/author/khin
they are both human rights issues. two adults wanting the right to marry. do you have a problem with that?
You want to boink your cousin, go ahead. They are not the same. Gays aren’t going to have retarded babies, in fact they make good parents. Can’t smear me with that one, sorry.
Shit happens, cousins fall in love.. but that doesn’t mean we should take the stigma off of it. Science doesn’t lie, it’s not bigotry.
of course it IS bigotry.
it’s NOT about sex. it’s NOT about having children (unless you are proposing that be made illegal?).
it IS about the right to marriage for people who may already be living as family and with children. it’s about denying them the right to visit their spouse in the hospital and be considered next of kin for medical decisions.
it is NOT about science.
It’s not about science? and I am a bigot. whatever.
Are you also a global warming denier? because denying science is more correlative than bigotry against incest and homophobia.
I took a look at that FLDS article. Yep, it’s a classic founder effect, and in that situation cousin couples (probably any couples) should consider having genetic counseling before deciding on whether to have kids. But that’s not the average case.
Really? Have you read it? If you had, you’d know it’s not recycled.
Do you have something to add beyond irrelevant personal queries?
My cousin makes a wonderful Chestnut stuffing:
CHESTNUT TURKEY STUFFING
The FLDS in Utah, near where I was raised have this disease:
Fumarase Deficiency is an enzyme irregularity that causes severe mental retardation, epileptic seizures and other cruel effects that leave children nearly helpless and unable to take care of themselves.
Same kinda thing happens here among the Amish.
kinh, if you want to marry your cousin and have children, go to a green state and get married, no one is stopping you.
ok. i’m going to try to lay this out as calmly as i can.
the decision of two adults to have children is their decision, and not ours. not even if there is health risk. otherwise it would be acceptable to put limits on the age of the mother, etc. since the children of older women can also have additional risks.
the decision of two adults with or without children who have decided to live together as a family is also their decision, not ours. given that they have made that decision, to deny them the right of marriage because it offends you is something i hope you will reconsider. that’s the most gentle way i can say it. i make no guarantees about my future comments.
please reconsider.
it’s not about me, so there is nothing for me to reconsider.
There are risks. “Cousin Marriage” is not inconsequential, and that’s the reason for the stigma.
It was common at one time.
If you see these kids you might think a little differently.
If you want to do it, then follow Elliot’s advice.
and Thanks Elliot.
I’m now on the road, but I’ll try to refute some of these misleading statements later. Many refutations, however, are in the article.
khin, i’d never given any thought to this issue until you started posting on it. thank you for giving me the chance to think about it.
if any of the responses you’ve gotten here are painful to you, please accept my apology on behalf of us all.
Don’t apologize for me.
I live in Amish country, just take a stroll around the Green Dragon Farmer’s Market and you can see why there’s a cultural taboo.
But, I also have a first cousin, past the age of childbearing, who fell for her first cousin (on the other side). They could marry if they chose to and who cares?
wow. are you saying that if they weren’t past childbearing age you would deny them the right of marriage?
yep
I wouldn’t arrest them for cohabitation, I wouldn’t abort their babies, I wouldn’t interfere with parental custody; but I would bring to bear the power of society to discourage and prevent them from getting involved in the first place.
And I would not campaign to turn any green state white or red.
The heart will go where the heart will go, but society has a vested interest in discouraging it.
i’m seriously stunned, disheartened and in shock.
do you even know, without looking it up, what exactly the “vested interest” is? and how it compares to the risks due to the age of women when they give birth?
would you also make it illegal for people who are disabled (via dominate recessive genetic defect) to marry?
nope
I’m sure you meant one or the other, dominant or recessive.
thanks. you’re right. should be: dominate, heterozygous.
i’m so upset i can barely type let alone think.
p.s. i thought advocating bigotry was against site rules?
dominant
…..
i give up.
I’m not advocating bigotry.
please, i beg you, reconsider the possibility that indeed you are.
selise, I hope you can appreciate that an honest difference of opinion is not bigotry.
as i’m sure you know all too well, i have differences of opinion with people all the time. comes from being opinionated and argumentative i suppose. but it doesn’t have to be a big deal, i don’t take honest disagreements and arguments about ideas personally, and i learn a lot from them and people who disagree with me (not so fond of arguments that become personal though).
but sometimes people also have honest differences of opinion about matters of bigotry. and i think this is one of those times.
because i think so well of you – have such high regard and respect for you — i want to try to lay out in a logical way (without any of my earlier outrage) why i do think this is an issue of discrimination, and for some of the comments above, an issue of bigotry.
this is one of those times i wish writing clearly wasn’t so hard for me. but i’m going to try my best to really think it through and lay out my arguments (the logical kind, not the mean kind) as best as i can. hopefuly this thread will be open for a couple more days so that will be possible.
Should you be able to marry your father?
Let me rewrite this in case the question offends you – should my sister be able to marry my father?
i think you are confusing here the issue of abuse with the issue that has been raised.
oh and I’d also prohibit you from marrying your father, your son and your nephew.
and your brother
but selise, like I said, society has a vested interest in discouraging close relations from birthing babies.
i remember when society supposedly had a vested interest in discouraging interracial marriage. and still a lot of people think society has a vested interest in discouraging gay marriage. but that doesn’t mean they were or are correct. not unless you favor traditional norms over human rights.
what is the point of advocating in favor of denying someone their human rights when you don’t know and can’t even be bothered to even find out what, exactly, the “vested interest” is? you fracking don’t know — and yet you advocate discrimination!?! that says to me the issue isn’t the “vested interest” at all, because otherwise you would have carefully weighed the competing interests before advocating denying another human being their rights.
exact opposite.
Maybe selise is khin’s kin.
The wealthiest family in the world was founded on incest as a means of maintaining the family fortune. Dozens of marriages to first cousins and nieces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#French_branches
“An essential part of Mayer Rothschild’s strategy for future success was to keep control of their businesses in family hands, allowing them to maintain full discretion about the size of their wealth and their business achievements. Mayer Rothschild successfully kept the fortune in the family with carefully arranged marriages between closely related family members.”
Thanks also to BillWhite, PJEvans and ThingsComeUndone for sober and useful contributions to the discussion.
….that agree with you..
I’m writing from an iPhone, but here are a few brief points.
The genetic risk from two first cousins having children, on average, is about the same as the risk a 41 year old mother has when she gives birth. Thus, if you want to ban one, you must also ban the other. Otherwise it’s just bigotry, and yes, people making that argument are spreading bigotry. Please inform yourself of the most basic facts before making prejudiced statements. And the personal attack above by shekissesfrogs shows that prejudice very clearly.
Secondly, the afflictions of the FLDS and certainly Amish (who ban first cousin marriage, generally) may not be due to first cousin marriage at all but rather a founder effect. There’s a good Discover article on it called “Go Ahead, Kiss Your Cousin.”
Maybe it’s not predjudice.. maybe you’ve won me over and it’s a compliment. At least you and selise will have less christmas presents to buy.
Anselm Salomon von Rothschild: “In 1826 he married his cousin Charlotte Nathan Rothschild (1807-1859), daughter of Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836) from the London branch of the family; they had eight children:”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_von_Rothschild
In 1836, Lionel de Rothschild (son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, brother of Charlotte) married Baroness Charlotte von Rothschild (1819-1884), the daughter of Baron Carl Mayer Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family of Naples. They had the following children:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_de_Rothschild
Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild: Known as “Natty”, he was the son of Lionel de Rothschild (1808-1879) and Charlotte Rothschild (née von Rothschild), grandson of Nathan Mayer Rothschild after whom he was named: On 16 April 1867 he married Emma Louise von Rothschild (1844-1935), a cousin from the Rothschild banking family of Germany in Frankfurt. They had the following children:
Walter Rothschild was the eldest son and heir of Lord [Nathan] Rothschild, an immensely wealthy financier, and the first Jewish peer in England.
As an active Zionist and close friend of Chaim Weizmann, he worked to formulate the draft declaration for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. On 2 November 1917 he received a letter from the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, addressed to his London home at 148 Piccadilly. In this letter the British government declared its support for the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people”. This letter became known as the Balfour Declaration.
Incest is the best. Do it enough and empires your descendants control will declare other people’s land on faraway continents to be family property.
Maybe you should start a blog, where you can type all about this topic, day and night. No one will ever differ with you, and you will be relieved of having to convert their concerns, however real or not, into bullshit and fling warped assertions of prejudice.
You are like the Bush-era Republicans, who when confronted with the truth about Jamie Guckert, accused Democrats and Liberals who objected to a plant in the White House briefing room with documented proof of his ‘party operative’ status (and oh, by the way, a prostitute who advertised his wares on the Internet for a mind-numbingly hypocritical Gay clientele) of homophobia.
If you want to plant these particular seeds, fine. But when you run into some well-justified flack for your opinion, you resort to castigating dissenters. It is almost as if even you feel like your positions are indefensible, and if you can just fling enough charged feces, you can obscure that ‘indefensibility.’
Of course, you could just be a trouble-maker, a shit-disturber. Could be that you are trying to stain this place, make a bright, repellent mark. That would be my vote.
i have no idea and make no claims about motives, but the facts are on the side of the poster. it is you who are making unjustified personal attacks with, “You are like the Bush-era Republicans.”
shame.
if personal attacks and promoting bigotry are against site rules and grounds for having a comment deleted, your comment @36 will surely be gone.
Spicy stuff!
Let me get this straight – likening the poster’s argument to Republican-like tactics is a personal attack, and opposing cousins marrying is bigotry.
Obviously the health care debate isn’t stimulating enough these days.
nonsense. that’s not what you did. don’t know why i need to explain this, but apparently i do:
you wrote:
the above is a personal attack.
if you had written:
that would not be a personal attack and your statement above, “likening the poster’s argument to Republican-like tactics” would be an accurate description of your comment. but that’s not what you wrote and pretending it was doesn’t make it so.
…
and yes, advocating that a group of people be denied their equality and human rights, is bigotry.
here’s merriam webster
I can think of plenty of things that would be personal arttacks. But I said:
From my comment, you can imply anything you wish, but someone not vested in triumph over context might read it as a comparison of the argument to those used by Republicans to defend their sorrowful actions and policies. But since you are more interested in the win, you cherry-pick and extract more (or less in this case) than is there, and that is mighty convenient.
At no point have I taken issue with the so-called facts stated in the diary, or subsequent comments by the diarist. Instead, I opined on the diarists defensive posture, and offer a possible explanation:
Then I commented on the diarist’s motives; hence, the last graf:
Strayed pretty far from the pack, selise. It is beneath you to grab the first words of that paragraph and morph it into something more useful to your accusation. As for your motives for doing such a thing, I can only surmise, but will do so privately.
Bigotry is defined roughly as an irrational belief in the superiority of one’s views despite the facts. What I said above is simply that if you are picking and choosing which marriages to ban based on these arbitrary and irrational criteria, yes, it’s bigotry. Many people, of course, just aren’t aware of the facts. But when it gets to the point where people are labelling you a troll, making personal attacks, etc., then it’s clear they could care less about rationality or facts. I’m skipping the rest of this vulgar fulminating.
While I don’t think this is a critical issue, it is clear that some “progressives” have a knee jerk irrational response to this simply because of the ick factor.
You don’t need to be a eugenicist to recognize that this society allows and encourages plenty of procreative decisions which are not strictly prudent from the point of view of genetic health, for example in the case of older women having children, or if someone has a certain harmful genes.
So it’s rationally incoherent to say that only in this case should the heavy hand of the law be used toward that end.
thank you.
i never even thought of it before reading the diary. but human rights aren’t human rights unless they are universal.
so, while i wouldn’t be upset if the diary didn’t get much attention, i’m stunned by the irrationally negative responses here — which are hardly those of a community committed to human rights and true liberal values.
Thanks for this unbiased and reasoned comment, Russ. Your main point is absolutely on target: we shouldn’t be picking and choosing like this. I do, however, want to point out that the current proportion of first cousin marriage is, according to the only data we have, roughly comparable to the proportion of black-white marriages in 1960. So going strictly by numbers it’s not incomparable in terms of importance.
Don’t you dare suggest that someone is a “shit-disturber,” and then say that selise’s argument is beneath her. You’ve made it clear that little is beneath you. Don’t expect any more replies.
Using random numbers Cousin Marriage has acceptable risks however the numbers change if both people wether cousin or no know they have a fatal genetic defect and have kids anyway.
We are rapidly moving to a world where genetic testing is becoming more common Cousins marriage very well might soon after a quick cheap test be considered more likely to produce healthier kids than 2 strangers getting married.
Cousin or not where do we draw the line at a kids health? Obviously if there where a 100% chance of a couple passing on fatal defects I can see Government getting involved. But what if the odds are only 90%, 80%, 70%?
That debate is the one I think we should be having.
If you decide to have kids the kids health comes first.
Well, the risk here is not 70%–it’s more like 6-7% on average compared to 3-4% normally.
That is an interesting comment about genetic testing, though. Eventually in fact it may be possible to pick and choose embryos to suit the desires of the parents, which I’m not sure is such a great development. It may be coming, however.
I’m going to weigh in here, from my own knowledge and experience:
I have several cousin marriages on my family tree, the closest documented relationship being first-cousins-once-removed (his mother’s father was an older brother of her father). No signs of problems caused by the (minimal) inbreeding in any of these.
I also have a not-close cousin who married a non-relative, and discovered they share one recessive gene that can result in a lethal condition when homozygous.
So I’m going to recommend caution in the marriage of first cousins – know the possibilities, but don’t ban it.
Wow, I feel so special. I’m the son of two first cousins AND gay as a picnic. Kinda makes me an “authority” on this thread. Gee, if we were on Huff Po, I might actually avoid Miss Manner’s censorship for a change.
First of all, hey everybody and Happy Thanksgiving!
Second, PJEvans, ThingsComeUndone, et. al. you rock us with your reasoned, rational tolerance.
Everyone else, RELAX. Think about all you have for which to be thankful, think about all the truly immediate issues that face us against which we must unite (e.g. Wall Street’s takeover of the nation, the JSOC’s takover of the military, and the alien abduction of our President–at least I assume he was abducted, ‘cuz, God knows, I don’t recognize that douche in the WH as the guy for whom I voted) and ask yourself, Should you really be concerning yourself where I and people like me put my junk?
Wow! What an interesting background. And the point you make is entirely true.
I’d like to thank selise for her kind and smart comments here. It’s so refreshing to see someone actually understand the discrimination and prejudice that is going on.
I really don’t think prejudice is the issue here. I grew up in a small town where everyone knew everything about other people’s business. There was a family who had been practicing in-breeding for years. The members if the family that I knew were teenagers and they were the saddest people I have ever known. They were stunted both mentally and physically. Shy, withdrawn. I know nothing about the science of this but I do know from personal experience that tragic things can happen.
Inbreeding over generations would raise the odds of harming the children. Assuming no genetic testing science comes about where should we draw the line? Should Cousin Marriages be forced to provide a family tree? A look at insurance records and death certificates could give the couple and the state an idea of what they are in for.
I could also see this happening for straight marriages.
Last message was a reply–I forgot the dang reply link.
Tragedy can strike in any family. A girl I know decided to do drugs after she got knocked up. Now her four-year-old daughter has brain cancer. The risk of drug (or tobacco or alcohol) use during pregnancy can be far higher than for cousin marriage. Should we ban the drug addicted from marriage?
The idea of reasoning from one case to make policy for everyone in a category is also the very core of discrimination. If we reason from this girl alone, we should most definitely ban drug-addicted marriage. Obviously, that’s bad reasoning.
I kinda think that people who are actively engaged in abusing drugs and will continue to abuse drugs while pregnant are pretty much the kind of people that should be discouraged from marriage and pregnancy.
Me too for pregnancy. However, even for this far-worse-than-cousin-marriage case, I don’t think a legal ban is appropriate. (BTW, alcohol abuse can be worse for pregnancies than cocaine, so it’s not just illegal stuff either.)
You might do well to treat love, marriage, and procreation as separate things for your discussion.
People keep mixing them in the argument and it gets a bit confused.
Agreed.
I think the question of harm is settled for cousin marriages. Now then if a family has within 1, 2, 3, generations another cousin marriage in a direct line of descent should they marry? Where do we draw the line what level of danger to the kids do we accept?
Yes we do allow Alkies and Druggies to marry and have kids but they do face severe social stigma if
theythe mom uses with child and maybe they both should face some legal barriers as well.How and what kind of barriers? Is this even possible we can’t monitor everyone’s bed room and mass forced sterilization or birth control on the unwilling is a worse moral evil in my view.
What level of danger to kids do we allow as a society and really just what can we do about it besides going Orwell in the bedroom?