The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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(Photo by Mark Bryce)

Whose business is it, anyway?

“You can’t marry your cousin! You’ll have cross-eyed children!”
“So, how are you inbred lovebirds doing?”
“Aren’t you afraid you’re contaminating the gene pool?”
(examples of various comments we’ve heard over the years, the first in 1958, the other two as recently as 2002)

“When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man.”
— Charles Darwin, who married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood

Six years and one day ago, in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, the people in this photo did something that’s very common, and legal, in all the world outside the U.S., but prohibited in Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming, and permitted with restrictions in Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Maine, Utah, and Wisconsin. All of that is illustrated in a color-coded map at one of several web sites about cousin marriage.

About a year ago, the newswires were abuzz with a story The New York Times headlined: "No Genetic Reason to Discourage Cousin Marriage, Study Finds"

Here's the lead on that story, reproduced here under the "fair use" provision of U.S. copyright law:

“Contrary to widely held beliefs and longstanding taboos in America, first cousins can safely have children together, without a great risk of birth defects or genetic disease, scientists are reporting today. They say there is no biological reason to discourage cousins from marrying.”

CNN also covered that story: medical reporter Elizabeth Cohen told us that even though there was no scientific reason why cousins shouldn't be allowed to marry, there was still what she called "the yick factor." Good thing she didn't inject her opinion into that report. Later the same day, "TalkBack Live" host Arthel Neville declared that even though there was no medical reason to prohibit it, she thought cousin marriage was "disgusting." Arthel, you're probably not old enough to remember this, but once upon a time there in your neck of the woods, they had these things called anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial couples from marrying or even hanging out together, because a lot of people considered that "disgusting." Today a TV talking head, even on the right-wing channels, who expressed such an opinion would not likely be seen on the air again for a long, long time. Coincidentally, nearly a year after she declared us "disgusting," Ms. Neville's show got cancelled.

Last year's story wasn't exactly breaking news: Nobel-Prize-winning geneticist Dr. Joshua Lederberg said pretty much the same thing in a 1977 letter to syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers.

Here’s a more recent news item that illustrates just how silly all those laws are, since according to the most recent U.S. census, whether people are legally married has less and less to do with whether they have children, together or otherwise:

“Unmarried men and women who live together are nearly as likely as married couples to be raising children, according to a census report to be released today.”

Anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer has written a book about all this, Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage, published by the University of Illinois Press.

Here are some other resources about cousin marriage. Google lists them under "alternative lifestyles."

Special thanks to my advisor during my two years at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, Dr. A.K.M. Aminul Islam of Bangladesh, professor of anthropology, who happened to mention the cross-cousin marriage traditions of certain Philippine tribes in one of his classes back in 1970. Even though I did not become an anthropologist (or even a college graduate) after all, I did remember that story, and after Michael and I found each other and began corresponding, I looked up the words "Philippine" and "cross cousin" on the Internet. That led me to this page, which details a similar form: patrilineal parallel cousin marriage. Thank you, Dr. Islam, thank you, University of Manitoba, and thank you, Jane Matheson for making it all legal and official, no matter what anybody in Kentucky, or on CNN, may think.

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @8:02 AM

14.3.03