false! marrying relatives no matter how close the blood relationship is, has been going on since marriage was invented..
I have no doubt that somewhere in your linage there was some sister ******* going on ...
you can pitch a fit now!
Did government sanction it?
irrelevant
History[edit]
According to Professor
Robin Fox of Rutgers University, it is likely that 80% of all marriages in history may have been between second cousins or closer.
[9] The founding population of
Homo sapiens was small, anywhere from 700 to 10,000 individuals. Considering the population dispersal caused by a hunter-gatherer existence, a certain amount of inbreeding would have been inevitable.
[10] Proportions of first-cousin marriage in the United States, Europe and other Western countries like Brazil have declined since the 19th century, though even during that period they were not more than 3.63 percent of all unions in Europe.
[11][12] In some other world regions, cousin marriage is still strongly favored: in the Middle East, some countries have seen the rate rise over previous generations. One study finds stable rates among Indian Muslims over the past four decades.
[13][14][15]
Cousin marriage has often been chosen to keep cultural values intact through many generations and to preserve familial wealth, sometimes via advantages relating to
dowry or
bride price. Other reasons for cousin marriage may include geographic proximity, tradition, strengthening of family ties, maintenance of family structure, or a closer relationship between the wife and her in-laws. Many such marriages are
arranged and facilitated by other
extended family members
[3][9][16][17][18] (see also pages on
arranged marriage in the Indian subcontinent,
arranged marriages in Pakistan, and
arranged marriages in Japan).
United States[edit]
Cousin marriage was legal in all states before the
Civil War.[
citation needed] However, according to Kansas anthropology professor Martin Ottenheimer,
[19] the main purposes of marriage prohibitions were maintaining the social order and upholding religious morality and safeguarding the creation of fit offspring. Indeed, 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.
[20] Morgan himself had married his maternal uncle's daughter in 1851.
[21]
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 "that multiplication of the same blood by in-and-in marrying does incontestably lead in the aggregate 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.
[22]
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. Ottenheimer considers both the bans and eugenics to be "one of several reactions to the fear that American society might degenerate".
[23] During this period, up until the mid-1920s, the number of bans had more than doubled.
[7] Since that time, the only three states to add this prohibition have been Kentucky in 1943, Maine in 1985, and Texas in 2005. The
NCCUSL unanimously recommended in 1970 that all such laws should be repealed, but no state has dropped its prohibition since the mid-1920s.
[1][9][24]
Cousin marriage - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
the answer is yes...
Feds charge former Bay Area resident with $90 million in health care fraud
