Divorce the State and use Ketubah

[Mc_B]

The Bible permits the marriage of first cousins. It is not incest.

There is also an increased risk of genetic problems for the children of those unions.

It is inadvisable for that reason, but can still be holy and blessed in the sight of God.

This pretty much sums up the issue for me lol

 

[Edward]

I have definitely considered changing it all, but haven’t pulled that trigger.

Same here.

 

[MemeFan]

I dislike the government being involved in marriage, but in our instance the legal process allows for marrying before having reached our state's age of majority. Marriage is between a man, his woman, and Yah. But I don't see anything wrong with utilizing legal procedures.

Every society has legal system because there is always need to solve disputes between people.

Only questions are:
1) What are rules?
2) How much person can freely choose rules for himself?

In West today answers are:

1) Current rules are under heavy influence of anti-biblical ideologies
2) Little or none, except some influence who will be married. I have written "some influence" because state is always a member. There is practically zero chance for reform in next few years.

And don't forget other laws like education and child protection which take power from parents and empower state. In fact no area is free from state meddling. What stops state is booing of politicians and lack of enforcement power.

 

[Keith Martin]

I personally think the state should have zero say in marriage, but then again would it be the states job to prevent 1st cousin marriages or worse?

1st cousin marriages are completely fine. People get grossed out by it, but there is enough difference in DNA at that point for it not to be a problem. It's perfectly legal everywhere as far as I know.

It's illegal throughout parts of the US. I would recommend looking into the epidemic of genetic defects affecting Muslims around the world, around 1/3 of all Muslims are participating in 1st cousin marriages and causing major genetic issues within their communities. It's especially bad in the UK

The Bible permits the marriage of first cousins. It is not incest.

There is also an increased risk of genetic problems for the children of those unions.

It is inadvisable for that reason, but can still be holy and blessed in the sight of God.

From my understanding, there is no significant increase in the chance of genetic defects for the children of first cousins. The issue arises if the gene pool remains isolated. So if the child of first cousins also married a first cousin, it would begin to cause significant issues. But it is still allowed Biblically. I think fathers and young men looking to marry need to take genetic compatibility into consideration, but no general rules should be made beyond what is in Torah.

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:

1. (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
2. 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.)
3. 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.

 

[Bartato]

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:

1. (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
2. 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.)
3. 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.

Besides all that Fanny Price of "Mansfield Park" married her first cousin (sort of foster brother) Edmond Bertram. If Jane Austen approved it in her novel, then it must be proper. Doing so helps keep money and property in the family.

 

[Bartato]

Besides all that Fanny Price of "Mansfield Park" married her first cousin (sort of foster brother) Edmond Bertram. If Jane Austen approved it in her novel, then it must be proper. Doing so helps keep money and property in the family.

I probably just lost some "man card" points by referencing Jane Austen.

Instead, I should have pointed out thar Aragorn married his first cousin (removed quite a few times) in Lord of the Rings.

 

[Joleneakamama]

I probably just lost some "man card" points by referencing Jane Austen.

Instead, I should have pointed out thar Aragorn married his first cousin (removed quite a few times) in Lord of the Rings.

I'm not a Tolkien fan, but because it is connected to the concept of law, enforcing and who gets to or wants to....

 

[Keith Martin]

Aragorn married his first cousin (removed quite a few times) in Lord of the Rings

. . . and so I can't resist pointing out that one's first cousin once removed and second cousin once removed can end up being the same person; more importantly, for the sake of our genetic-damage conversation, a first cousin 3 or more times removed becomes more distantly related to one than one's second cousin.