LogFAQs > #884955445

saspa posted...

Cousin marriage isn't incest... are Americans that misinformed? I always thought it interesting that usa has a weird hangup about cousin marriage when the rest of the world doesn't. Wonder what it stemmed from.

looks like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

United States

Cousin marriage was legal in all states before the Civil War.[citation needed] Anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer argues that marriage prohibitions were introduced to maintain the social order, uphold religious morality, and safeguard the creation of fit offspring.[20] Writers such as Noah Webster (1758–1843) and ministers like Philip Milledoler (1775–1852) and Joshua McIlvaine helped lay the groundwork for such viewpoints well before 1860. This led to a gradual shift in concern from affinal unions, like those between a man and his deceased wife's sister, to consanguineous unions. By the 1870s, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) was writing about "the advantages of marriages between unrelated persons" and the necessity of avoiding "the evils of consanguine marriage", avoidance of which would "increase the vigor of the stock". To many, Morgan included, cousin marriage, and more specifically parallel-cousin marriage, was a remnant of a more primitive stage of human social organization.[21] Morgan himself had married his cousin in 1853.[22]

In 1846, Massachusetts Governor George N. Briggs appointed a commission to study "idiots" in the state, and this study implicated cousin marriage as responsible for idiocy. Within the next two decades, numerous reports (e.g., one from the Kentucky Deaf and Dumb Asylum) appeared with similar conclusions: that cousin marriage sometimes resulted in deafness, blindness, and idiocy. Perhaps most important was the report of physician Samuel Merrifield Bemiss for the American Medical Association, which concluded cousin inbreeding does lead to the physical and mental depravation of the offspring". Despite being contradicted by other studies like those of George Darwin and Alan Huth in England and Robert Newman in New York, the report's conclusions were widely accepted.[23]

These developments led to 13 states and territories passing cousin marriage prohibitions by the 1880s. Though contemporaneous, the eugenics movement did not play much of a direct role in the bans. George Louis Arner in 1908 considered the ban a clumsy and ineffective method of eugenics, which he thought would eventually be replaced by more refined techniques. By the 1920s, the number of bans had doubled.[5] Since that time, Kentucky (1943), Maine (1985) [ETA: First cousin marriage is legal in Maine so long as the couple undergoes genetic counseling to ensure that – should the couple wish to have children - there is little-to-no risk of serious health defect], and Texas (2005) have also banned cousin marriage. The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws unanimously recommended in 1970 that all such laws should be repealed, but no state has dropped its prohibition.[3][10][24]
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sigless user is me or am I?