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20 states allow marriage between first cousins.
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Computer says no.
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And remember, like political consultant James Carville once said, “The thing about Pennsylvania is, you got Philadelphia, and you got Pittsburgh, and in between, you got 300 miles of Mississippi and Alabama.” Things you expect to be strong political capital elsewhere may not count here.
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Huh, I thought it was allowed more widely. Probably confusing it with stepsibling marriage, which is only illegal in Virginia.
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He is correct, though. Marrying your second cousin is legal in most places, and is unlikely to result in any genetic issues. Now, if your parents were also second cousins, and their parents also second cousins, and your spouse’s parents were your parent’s second cousins, then that’s how you get Charles II.
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On the contrary, Dr. Oz is, if anything, overstating the risk here. Check out this New York Times article, No Genetic Reason to Discourage Cousin Marriage, Study Finds. Even first cousins are fair game.
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If It’s a singular cousin marriage, the risks are very low. It’s when multiple couplings are related that problems develop (i.e. cousins on one side, also thirds cousins on another side and your mother married her great-uncle). Related marriages are the cultural norm in Saudi Arabia and the have a higher risk of genetic disease.
Even if you’re not marrying direct relatives, but are part of a small insular group that intermarries, you can have issues, for example, Ashkenazi Jews, and some Amish and Mennonite groups in the US and Canada.
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AKA “Pennsyltucky”
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He’s technically not wrong, but he left out the followup of “… as long as there’s not too much of that going on elsewhere in the family tree.”
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This thread and the 'well actually’s therein…
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Yes, the problem is small, inbred gene pools. Not people being able to marry a first cousin.
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There sure is a whole lot of folks who I’m pretty sure want to bang their cousins and have the precedents all worked out in detail.
Anybody asked the cousins yet?
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Nope.
Neither my parents nor grandparents had siblings.
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Forget Dr. Oz. The person who’s opinion on this topic really matters is Rudy Giuliani.
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I don’t care what consenting people do together, cousins, siblings, whatever. I may not recommend they do those things, but that’s not my issue. Consent, of course, means fully capable of giving consent, age, mental state, and all that.
Of course I’ve also moved over 1,000 miles away from anyone who’s actually related to me by blood and never intend to be in the same county as any of them ever again. I don’t consent for them to give me a handshake, let alone anything else.
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Well, I’m sure no one was insulted by that!
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Should I have tried harder?
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Dr. Bittles, who is working on an update of the 2002 study, and other researchers argue that laws against marriage between cousins were rooted in myth and moral objections, and that they amounted to genetic discrimination akin to eugenics or forced sterilization. People with severe disorders like Huntington’s disease, who have a 50 percent chance of passing it on to their offspring, are not barred from marrying because of the risk of genetic defects, he said, so cousins should not be, either.
Historically, marriage between cousins has been seen as desirable in many parts of the world, and even today, slightly more than 10 percent of marriages worldwide are between people who are second cousins or closer, Dr. Bittles said. In the United States, the percentage is thought to be much smaller, although it is difficult to estimate, since such marriages have long been an underground phenomenon, because of laws forbidding them and because of the lingering incest-related stigma.
It’s possible that the counter example of the Hapsburgs might not strictly be based in fact, and survives because it serves certain agendas.
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we are literally cousins with our pets
and with the rosebushes in the yard
the concept of “cousins” includes all life on earth—it’s just a matter of counting the numbers
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