annedey:

lyannas:

i hope americans realize that marriage among cousins is only considered incest in the US and like, five other countries

In light of some the answers you have gotten (the kind “cousin marriage = bad because incest and incest = bad because genetically dangerous”) I wanted to add the following:

In this kind of conversation it is important to remember that incest and consanguinity are different things! Are they correlated? Yes. Are they causal (does consanguinity causes incest)? No.

If you don’t make a difference between the two or don’t know that there is a difference between the two I would advise you to not give your opinion as if you held any sort of authority on the subject.

Consanguinity: the degree of blood closeness between two individuals (hence the fact that our laws consider the degree of consanguinity). Consanguinity is a scientific measure of kinship. By extension we call consanguineous marriage/relationship marriage and relationship between individuals with a close kinship.

Incest: Sexual relationship between individuals that are legally prohibited to marry because of family ties (correlated with kinship but not only and not always). Sometimes incestuous relationships/marriages aren’t prohibited by law directly but are frowned upon socially (cousin marriage in the US). Incest is a social construct.

That being said there is no such thing as “scientific incest”. You can’t scientifically measure incest with test tube and pipette in your lab. You can scientifically study it yes, but this refers to the application of the scientific method as used in sociology or anthropology. Incest varies widely from one society to another which tend to prove that it is only lightly based on natural reality.

Don’t trust me? Here is a list of incestuous relationships (or that used to be considered incestuous) that aren’t consanguineous (please note that this will change from one culture to another):

– Marrying your in-laws: this used to be illegal (without a papal dispensation) in Europe (remember this tiny business between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, you know when she insisted she was never really married to Arthur Tudor and therefore that her marriage to Henry VIII was perfectly legal?).

– Marrying your adopted children: no consanguinity to be found here, but it is still very much illegal in a lot of places or at the very least very much socially frown upon.

– Marrying your adopted siblings: no consanguinity here either, but same thing as above.

– Marrying your step-siblings (here to be read as the children from another marriage of your step-parents): might not be illegal everywhere but is socially frowned upon.

– Marrying your step-children: maybe not illegal (see W. Allen’s case) but also socially frowned upon.

The contrary also exists, there are marriages/relationships that are consanguineous but not incestuous, some are even socially considered among your best option for a marriage. Here the best example is cousin’s marriage. It goes to the point that in some culture some cousin marriages are required when available while other with the exact same degree of consanguinity are incestuous and prohibited (it depends on which uncle/aunt this cousin is the child of).

Incest is taboo not only because consanguinity is “genetically bad” (if it was the case all consanguineous relationships would be banned nearly everywhere and no-one would have problem with unrelated family members having sexe with each other) but also because incest pushes families to close up on themselves threatening society. Indeed families are social structures that are needed for society but could also compete with society on the long run.

Which leads me to the argument of “cousin marriage is not good for them?”. Not good for who exactly? Because the people marrying their cousins won’t see their health decrease because of their marriage. Not good for their children? Well it might be less good than a marriage between not closely related individual, as @lyannas have already noted it is less a problem than the average westerner believes it to be.

In addition consanguinity among children from cousin’s marriage is hardly the only hazard factor for offsprings health. Having two parents who have in both of their family cases of the same genetic diseases is a high risk factor for the health of their children. Here is another slightly more concrete example: a woman who has a brother who is hemophilic has ¼ chance to give birth to an hemophilic son and ¼ chance to keep on transmitting the gene to her daughters (and it’s only if she is unsure that her mother has transmitted her the gene, otherwise if she knows she is carrying it the proportion goes up to ½). Perfectly unrelated individuals can be genetically incompatible.

That is not a reason to say to any of this people that their marriage/relationship are bad or “not good for them”. If we know there is a risk that their children are going to be in poor health what we should do, and are doing, as a society is proposing them extra scrutiny during the pregnancy or even genetical selection of embryo.  

Because any other solution, moralisation (“this is wrong!”) would be, well, eugenic.

So when your only argument against cousin marriage is poorly researched pseudo-scientific slightly eugenic attack on the “genetical wrongness of incest”, you should probably not try to explain that this is definitely not about you attacking other cultures from the presupposed moral superiority of yours.