Marrying your cousin in the USA

I'm so glad that New York and California are on that list as well as the South.

How bad can cousin-marriage be? After all, Darwin married his cousin.

[Coupled cousins]

this bad.

So did FDR...although I thing Eleanor was something like a fifth cousin once removed.

One original reason for cousin marriage is the same as the original reason against: it allows wealthy families to consolidate property and keep it in the family, as do the uncle-niece marriages common in some countries. That was the real reason the Catholic Church banned it, though they took it to extremes, probably because the legal dispensation to allow even second or third cousins to marry brought in a nice chunk of revenue.

The genetic "argument" was actually brought up by the same pseudo-Darwinist eugenics folks in the early part of the last century as brought us forced sterilization of "undesirables" and the "feeble-minded". Most of their statements about close relatives marrying have been proven wrong: for instance, "feeblemindedness" in some areas of the Southern US was drastically reduced by people being able to afford shoes. Wearing shoes decreased the incidence of hookworm, the subsequent anemia, and the resulting lack of nutrients to the brain in childhood.

Then, OTOH, there's always the example of the Hapsburgs and Bourbons of Europe.

... so if you live in a Mississippi River drainage basin state, you are less likely to be allowed to marry your cousin? (Unless you live in the northwest, your state also borders Lake Michigan, or if your state is Tennessee.)

Apparently, NV and NH don't really follow this rule (and its exceptions).

I assume cousins who marry in a state where it is legal have their marriage recognized in states where it isn't?

Actually, no. The whole point of the Clinton-signed Defense of Marriage Act is to give the states permission to ignore marriage licenses from other states if they so choose.

I see that as a blatant violation of the 14th Amendment, but mere "cousin marriage" hasn't been a hot-topic issue enough to get it to court. Only gay marriage might, as the act was specifically written to allow states to ignore gay marriage from other states if they so choose. In addition, bills before congress have in the past tried to limit (in accordance with Article 1) the right of the Federal courts to actually even hear cases about constitutional rights that might be violated by the DoMA. I'm not sure if any have actually been signed into law yet.

Shelby

is this a reference to shelbyville, where they marry their cousins???

Even before DoMA, the Full Faith and Credit clause had an exception for marriages that went against "public policy" - states weren't required to recognize cousin marriages or interracial marriages from other states (though it might have been common for them to do so anyway).

So, Kentucky does not allow cousin marriage, and Massachusetts does? That is SO not what I expected. Are we talking first cousins? That's pretty funny, that blue-state Massachusetts types could, in theory, be more inbred than red-state hillbillies...

My dad's family has lived in Kentucky for over two hundred years; there are a heckuva lot of cousin marriages in my family tree. Although in those days of big families and not many "outsiders", if you didn't marry a cousin of some sort, that didn't leave many options. Most were not first cousins, though -- I think there was only one or two first-cousin marriages in my family (that I am aware of). Some families were really notorious for marrying close cousins, like the "Blue Fugates" and as you would expect had a higher than normal incidence of strange genetic diseases.

When were the cousin-marriage laws enacted?

Maybe the states which have laws against cousin marriage are ones that need it and can actually pass it?

All of this is really historical, since these laws aren't exactly new, but with that in mind...

There may have been be significant resistance to laws banning cousin marriage in the deep south.

Cosmopolitan states like CA, NY, and MA may have seen resistance to such laws from some immigrant communities, but also don't really have a problem with cousin marriage being a social norm.

Anyways, the occasional couple sharing a grandparent isn't really much of a problem. It gets problematic from the inbreeding POV when it is normal, and the family tree of such a couple contains many instances of cousins marrying in previous generation.

Maria, you are being perhaps a little imprecise. Did not the Loving decision not only require states to respect interracial marriage from other states but also to require that they permit interracial marriage within their own borders?

What about French colonisation? the maps of Nouvelle France an the Louisiana territory seems to match with most of the distribution.

DSW

Cousin marriages are not nearly as bad genetically as most people think, as long as it doesn't go on for multiple generations. There's a poor village in Syria where they've taken it to the extreme to keep business and property in the family for over 100 years. The village of 5000 now has 800 children with extreme birth defects.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6509680

There are lots of risks to children that are forbidden by law, such as not using infant car seats. There are others that are legal but strongly condemned by society in general, such as anything less than constant vigilance near a swimming pool.

Ordinary cousin marriage is far more hazardous than either of those examples.

Under the Canon Law of the Catholic Church, marriage between cousins is prohibited (to the 4th degree, I think), but often allowed by dispensation. When Henry VIII of England broke from Rome, the Church of England adopted new rules, and allowed cousin marriage (including first cousins). The map of US states may have something to do with the proportion of Catholics and Protestants in them.

I remember in Ireland the Catholic church forbade members from marrying first cousins, and you had to get a dispensation for 2nd cousin marriage, not for 3rd or above though.

I saw on Science Daily a while back a report from Iceland that third cousin marrages were the most fertile. There was the stuggestion that decrease in fertility in developed countries was, in part, due to difficulty in finding third cousins to marry.

Part of the objection to inbreding is that deleterious recessive genes will be expressed. If a population has been small for some generations, isn't it possible/likely that most deleterious genes have been lost?

A joke: If a married couple from Arkansas moves to California, and gets a divorce, are they still legally brother and sister?

Interestingly, I know someone in CA whose marriage to his cousin got her U.S. residency.

Speaking of same-sex marriage, my understanding is that the federal government of the U.S. would treat them as unmarried, hence no residency.