And
@StudentofHim gets the blue ribbon! The whole thing about birth defects is way overblown and is primarily baseless mythology attached to anecdotal 'evidence' for which a whole host of other factors could have come into play. It's the word game people play with statistics: do children of 1st cousins have a .3% increase in birth defects or a 27% increase? (it raises from 1.1% to 1.4%) And what
types of birth defects increase? Well, turns out they are almost entirely what would be considered insignificant birth defects (e.g., missing earlobes, which is nearly meaningless); as far as defects universally considered detrimentally serious, statistically there's no significant difference between children born to 1st-cousin parents and children born to parents whose closest relative was Genghis Khan himself.
Yes, 1st-cousin offspring marrying 1st-cousin offspring starts to raise the birth-defect rate, but I have three things to say about that:
- (Warning: anecdotal) Marrying 1st cousins was a common tradition on my father's side of the family. My grandparents were 2nd cousins, but my great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and great-great-great grandparents were all 1st cousins, and prior to that they were Jewish Gypsies, so I suspect the unrecorded tradition goes back even further, which makes the Martin and Ferguson families very interwoven. And yet somehow that didn't stop my grandparents' three surviving sons from becoming an electric engineer who invented the first vertical-take-off-and-landing aircraft; a nuclear engineer who was the last person to testify before Congress to gain authorization for a new nuclear plant; and the head of operations for the
- The myth of European royalty being rife with defective offspring is hooey. In fact, almost all royal lines practice something like what the British do: require that those in the line of succession to the crown marry someone in the other 'House' (Tudor and Windsor). By doing so they not only prevent the compounding effect of 1st cousins marrying 1st cousins, it is demonstrable that more hardy bloodlines are produced. (Identification of the cause of how Prince Charles has turned out has not been successful.)
- Even in the case of significant birth-defect anomalies, many are more highly associated with the age of the mother and/or the father at conception. Are we, for example, going to criminalize or condemn sexual relations between husbands and wives over the age of 35 just because the rate of Down Syndrome ratchets up?
In the United States, 22 out of 50 states flat out permit marriage between 1st cousins -- and, as ironic as it is that polygyny is illegal when unmarried musical-chairs cohabitation is celebrated, 18 of the remaining 28 states fully permit 1st-cousin cohabitation but prohibit marriage licenses for them. Therefore, 80% of the United States fully tolerates 1st cousins bringing children into the world together.
Parenthetically, the birth-defect rate only increases to 1.7% when brothers produce children with sisters. Leviticus 18 prohibits such unions, and Yah's Word is good enough for me on the matter (
@Bartato is correct about 1st-cousin marriages being permitted by Scripture), but if Leviticus 18 were
not part of Torah, would being concerned with this really be at the top of our list of concerns? For a group that probably nearly universally condemns abortion, what are we talking about here, anyway? Is any one of us so perfectly-made that we can support concepts that basically imply that certain types of people are not worthy of life? In my observation, adversity challenges people to transcend them and accomplish things they otherwise wouldn't have.
And then there's this, because of the malleability of statistics: fully 98.3% of children born to parents who are full brother and full sister are born without birth defects. 98.3% of people aren't even either kind or nice, and I'd much prefer a kind person with birth defects to a genetically-pure douche bag.
When Kristin and the boys and I moved to Alaska back in 1998, the state had just passed a law outlawing all incest, a move that reflected the sensibilities of Anchorage, which contains over half the state's population. However, that didn't sit well with the Native population, which ultimately has the greatest degree of power due to their ownership of most of the oil resources. Except those temporarily living in Anchorage and Fairbanks as university students or oil company employees, most Natives live in villages, and the average size of a village is 30 people; it's not at all unusual for villages to be limited to a dozen individuals, and the majority of Natives live in the same village their entire life. If you grew up in a village of 30 people, and the life expectancy is 60, that means you will likely be the only person your age, and there will be someone 2 years younger, 4 years younger, 6 years younger, etc., and 2 years older, 4 years older, etc. -- and only half of them will be the opposite gender. If the only unmarried and thus available opposite-gender individual within 5 years of your age when you become a teenager is your sibling, what are you going to end up doing? (Keep in mind that there are 10 major tribes, and most of them don't get along all that well with each other -- and none of the 5 or 6 nearest villages, which themselves are remote, are people of your tribe -- so going wife-hunting isn't really feasible.)
The law was rescinded within a year.
Left on the books was a law that remains to this day outlawing marriage between 1st cousins. No one had ever threatened to enforce that in the Native villages, so they had no incentive to demand its removal, but that creates the anomaly of it being illegal in Alaska to marry one's first cousin but perfectly permissible to marry one's brother -- even if you, too, are a boy.