MORALLY UNTROUBLING, BUT STILL A BAD IDEA:

Keeping marriage all in the family (Steve Chapman, May 12, 2005, Chicago Tribune)

You might be a redneck, says Jeff Foxworthy, if you go to your family reunion to meet women. That's the sort of attitude faced by Eleanor Amrhein and Donald Andrews, first cousins who fell in love and decided to get married. When Andrews proposed, he asked his beloved, "Are you prepared to go through the hell we're going to go through?"

He knew what he was talking about. When the two started living together, they told the Washington Post, Amrhein's parents severed relations with her and friends accused them of defying rules set down in the Bible. "Everybody thought I should be ashamed of it," said Amrhein.

Lots of couples have to deal with disapproval of their marital choices. But Amrhein and Andrews had to deal with something more formidable: the state law of Pennsylvania, where they live. Like 23 other states, it forbids first cousins from marrying. (Illinois allows it if the partners are over 50 or if one is sterile.)

The cousins went to court to request a waiver. But a judge refused, citing the risk of birth defects in any children they might bear--though they said they did not plan to have kids.

So they drove to Maryland, which takes a more relaxed view of such unions, and said their vows there. In no time at all, a Maryland state legislator said he might introduce legislation to outlaw first-cousin marriages. "It's like playing genetic roulette," said Democratic Delegate Henry Heller.

Much of the world, particularly the Middle East, regards marriages between first cousins as no big deal. [...]

[I]t's hard to see any convincing reason to stand in the way of cousins who think they were meant to be more than cousins.

Cousin Marriage Conundrum: The ancient practice discourages democratic nation-building (Steve Sailer, Jan. 13, 2003, The American Conservative)

[A]mericans know so little about the Middle East that few of us are even aware of one of one of the building blocks of Arab Muslim cultures -- cousin marriage. Not surprisingly, we are almost utterly innocent of any understanding of how much the high degree of inbreeding in Iraq could interfere with our nation building ambitions.

In Iraq, as in much of the region, nearly half of all married couples are first or second cousins to each other. A 1986 study of 4,500 married hospital patients and staff in Baghdad found that 46% were wed to a first or second cousin, while a smaller 1989 survey found 53% were "consanguineously" married. The most prominent example of an Iraqi first cousin marriage is that of Saddam Hussein and his first wife Sajida.

By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding makes the development of civil society more difficult. Many Americans have heard by now that Iraq is composed of three ethnic groups -- the Kurds of the north, the Sunnis of the center, and the Shi'ites of the south. Clearly, these ethnic rivalries would complicate the task of ruling reforming Iraq. But that's just a top-down summary of Iraq's ethnic make-up. Each of those three ethnic groups is divisible into smaller and smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families -- each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds. And the engine at the bottom of these bedeviling social divisions is the oft-ignored institution of cousin marriage.

The fractiousness and tribalism of Middle Eastern countries have frequently been remarked. In 1931, King Feisal of Iraq described his subjects as "devoid of any patriotic idea, ? connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever." The clannishness, corruption, and coups frequently observed in countries such as Iraq appears to be in tied to the high rates of inbreeding.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2005 5:11 PM