The Marriage Act of 1961 (Cth) states that a person can marry if he is: In the 18th and 19th centuries, it is known that the Hindu kurmis of Chunar and Jaunpur were influenced by their Muslim neighbors and widely adopted the custom of marriage between cousins. [202] You are also not allowed to marry a child you adopted (would you like to be another Woody Allen anyway?). But under Australian law, you are allowed to marry a cousin, niece or nephew, and even an aunt or uncle. Robin Bennett, a researcher at the University of Washington,[164] said that great hostility toward married cousins is discrimination. Shaw and Saller, in their thesis on the low marriage rates of cousins, suggest that since families from different regions were incorporated into the imperial Roman nobility, exogamy was necessary to accommodate them and avoid destabilizing the Roman social structure. Their data on tombstones further suggest that in most of the Western Empire, marriages of parallel cousins were not widespread, even among commoners. Spain and noricum were exceptions to this rule, but even there the rates did not exceed 10%. [91] They also point out that, since the property of the nobility was usually fragmented, [clarification required] the preservation of current assets in the family offered no advantage over acquisition by mixed marriage. Jack Goody claimed that the rules of early Christian marriage forced a significant change from previous norms to deny heirs to the rich, thereby increasing the chances that those with wealth would hand over their property to the Church. However, Shaw and Saller believe that the lands of the heirless aristocrats had already been claimed by the emperor and that the church simply replaced the emperor. They believe that the Christian commandments against marriage between cousins were due more to ideology than to a conscious desire to acquire wealth.
[91] In contrast, Maryland delegates Henry B. Heller and Kumar P. Barve supported a bill in 2000 to ban first-degree marriages. [150] It went further than Kahn`s bill and passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 82 to 46, although most Republicans voted no, but eventually died in the state Senate. In response to the marriage of Pennsylvanian first-degree cousins Eleanor Amrhein and Donald W. Andrews Sr. in 2005 in Maryland, Heller said he could revive the bill because such marriages are “like playing genetic roulette.” [151] Isn`t it true that the more first cousins you marry, the worse the genetic defects get, so if it`s only from time to time it`s not that bad, if it`s consistent, then you get the European royal families. The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, who are predominantly Christian, strictly practice non-consanguineous marriages, in which parents and cousins are not allowed to marry or have privacy. Therefore, men and women are prohibited from marrying within the framework of their recent patrilineal and matriliness. Before the advent of Christianity through colonization, the Igbos had always disapproved and expressly forbade blood-related marriages, both parallel and crossed cousin types, which are considered incestuous and cursed. Arranged marriages, although in sharp decline, were also organized to consciously prevent accidental blood relationships and bad marriages, so that future in-laws were aware of each other`s family history.
Currently, as in ancient times, before the onset of courtship, extensive research is carried out by both families not only to identify character traits, but also to ensure that their children are not related by blood. Traditionally, parents keep a close eye on who their children are closely associated with to avoid committing incest. Proactively, it is common for parents to care for their children in a way that knows their immediate cousins and, if appropriate, their distant cousins. They encourage their adult children to disclose their love interests in blood screening parents. [63] Repeated blood relations within a group are more problematic. After repeated generations of cousin marriages, the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship suggests. In Pakistan, where there have been cousin marriages for generations and the current rate can exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7% for first-degree married cousins, 7.9% for first-degree cousins, 9.2% for first-degree cousins/second-degree cousins, 6.9% for second cousins and 5.1% for unrelated second cousins. Among the offspring of the first-degree double cousin, 41.2% of pre-breeding deaths were associated with the expression of harmful recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1% for first-degree cousins, first-degree/second-degree cousins, and second-degree cousins. [211] A bill to lift the ban on marriage to first cousins in Minnesota was introduced by Phyllis Kahn in 2003, but died in committee. Republican Minority Leader Marty Seifert criticized the bill in response, saying it would “turn us into a cold Arkansas.” [148] According to The Wake of the University of Minnesota, Kahn knew the law was unlikely to pass, but introduced it anyway to raise awareness of the problem. She came up with the idea after learning that marriage between cousins is an acceptable form of marriage among certain cultural groups that are highly represented in Minnesota, namely the Hmong and Somalis. [149] All Arab countries in the Persian Gulf currently require a genetic screening procedure for potential married couples.
Qatar was the last Persian Gulf country to introduce mandatory testing in 2009, mainly to warn related couples who are considering marriage of the genetic risks they might face. The current rate of marriage between cousins is 54%, an increase of 12 to 18% compared to the previous generation. [127] A September 2009 report by the Dubai-based Center for Arab Genomic Studies (CAGS) found that Arabs have one of the highest rates of genetic diseases in the world, nearly two-thirds of which are associated with inbreeding. Ahmad Teebi`s research suggests that blood relations are declining in Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco and among Palestinians, but are increasing in the United Arab Emirates. [128] Anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer argues that marriage bans were introduced to maintain social order, maintain religious morality, and ensure the creation of appropriate descendants. [97] Writers like Noah Webster (1758-1843) and ministers like Philip Milledoler (1775-1852) and Joshua McIlvaine helped lay the groundwork for such positions long before 1860. This led to a gradual shift from anxiety about affinity bonds, such as those between a man and his deceased wife`s sister, to bonds of inbreeding. In the 1870s, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) wrote about “the benefits of marriages between unrelated persons” and the need to avoid “the evils of blood-related marriage,” the avoidance of which would “increase the strength of the tribe.” For many (including Morgan), marriage between cousins, and parallel marriage to cousins in particular, was a remnant of a more primitive phase of human social organization.
[98] Morgan himself had married his cousin in 1853. [99] Marriages between cousins have genetic aspects that give them an increased chance of sharing genes for recessive traits. The percentage of inbreeding between two individuals decreases four times as the youngest common ancestor goes back a generation. First cousins have four times more blood relations than second cousins, while first cousins who were abducted once are only half the number of first cousins. Double first cousins have twice as many as first cousins and are as related as half-siblings. Even if there is no preferred blood relationship, alleles, which are rare in large populations, can randomly reach a high frequency in small groups due to the founding effect and accelerated genetic drift in a small reproductive pool. [212] For example, since the entire Amish population descends from only a few hundred 18th-century German-Swiss settlers, the average inbreeding coefficient between two random Amish is higher than between two second-degree non-Amish cousins. [213] Marriage to a first cousin and a first cousin is taboo among the Amish, but they still suffer from several rare genetic diseases. In Geauga County, Ohio, the Amish make up only about 10 percent of the population, but make up half of all special needs cases. In the case of a debilitating seizure disorder, the total of 12 cases worldwide is only in Amish patients. [214] Similar disturbances have been noted in the fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which allows marriage to first cousins and 75 to 80 percent of which are related to two founders from the 1830s. [215] [216] Confucius describes marriage as “the union of two surnames, in friendship and love.” [21] In ancient China, some evidence suggests that, in some cases, two clans had a long-standing agreement that they would only marry members of the other clan.