Approach Christian Counseling Counseling Couple Marriage
Approach Christian Counseling Counseling Couple Marriage
History
According to Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers University, it is likely that 80% of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer. It is generally accepted that the founding population of homo sapiens was small, anywhere from 10,000 to 700 individuals, and combined with the population dispersal caused by a hunter-gather existence, a certain amount of inbreeding would have been inevitable. Rates 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. But in many other world regions cousin marriage is still strongly favored: in the Middle East some countries have seen the rate rise over previous generations, and one study finds quite stable rates among Indian Muslims over the past four decades.
Cousin marriage has often been chosen to keep cultural values intact through several generations, ensure the compatibility of spouses, and preserve familial wealth, sometimes via advantages relating to dowry or bride price. Other reasons may include geographic proximity, tradition, strengthening of family ties, maintenance of family structure, a closer relationship between the wife and her in-laws, greater marital stability and durability, ease of prenuptial negotiations, enhanced female autonomy, the desire to avoid hidden health problems and other undesirable traits in a lesser-known spouse, and romantic love. Lower domestic violence and divorce rates have also been claimed. Many such marriages are arranged and facilitated by other extended family members.
United States
Cousin marriage was legal in all US states in the Union prior to the Civil War. However, according to Kansas sociology professor Martin Ottenheimer, after the Civil War the main purpose of marriage prohibitions was increasingly seen as less maintaining the social order and upholding religious morality and more as safeguarding the creation of fit offspring. Indeed, writers such as Noah Webster and ministers like Philip Milledoler 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 was writing about "the advantages of marriages between unrelated persons" and the necessity of avoiding "the evils of consanguine marriage," withdrawal from which would "increase the vigor of the stock." Cousin marriage to Morgan, and more specifically parallel-cousin marriage, was a remnant of a more primitive stage of human social organization. Morgan himself had married his mother's brother's daughter in 1851.
In 1846 the Governor of Massachusetts appointed a commission to study "idiots" in the state which implicated cousin marriage as being responsible for idiocy. Within the next two decades numerous reports appeared coming to similar conclusions, including for example by the Kentucky Deaf and Dumb Asylum, which concluded that cousin marriage resulted in deafness, blindness, and idiocy. Perhaps most important was the report of physician S.M. 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.
These developments led to thirteen states and territories passing cousin marriage prohibitions by the 1880s. Though contemporaneous, the eugenics movement did not play much direct role in the bans, and indeed George Louis Arner in 1908 considered them 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." In any case, by the period up until the mid-1920s the number of bans had more than doubled. Since that time, the only three states to successfully add this prohibition are 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.
Europe
Only Austria, Hungary, and Spain banned cousin marriage throughout the 19th century, with dispensations being available from the government in the last two countries. But the Swedish Church, though Protestant, had banned first-cousin marriage until 1680 and required dispensation until 1844. England maintained a small but stable proportion of cousin marriages for centuries, with proportions in 1875 estimated by George Darwin at 3.5 percent for the middle classes and 4.5 percent for the nobility, though this has declined to under 1 percent in the 20th century. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were a preeminent example.
The 19th century academic debate on cousin marriage evolved differently in Europe than it did in America. Despite the writings of Scottish deputy commissioner for lunacy Arthur Mitchell that cousin marriage had injurious effects on offspring, these conclusions were largely contradicted by researchers like Alan Huth and George Darwin. (At one point Mitchell had claimed that inbreeding in Scottish fishing communities led to a lower average hat size of six and seven-eighths, a quarter inch less than their more outbred neighbors.) In fact, Mitchell's own data did not support his hypotheses, prompting him to later speculate that the dangers of consanguinity might be partly overcome by proper living. Later studies by George Darwin found only much smaller effects that closely resemble those estimated today, and perhaps in response to his son's work, Charles Darwin eventually withdrew some earlier musings that cousin marriage might pose an evolutionary risk. In the end, when a question about cousin marriage was considered in 1871 for the census, according to George Darwin it was rejected "amid the scornful laughter of the House, on the grounds that the idle curiosity of philosophers was not to be satisfied."
First-cousin marriage was legal in ancient Rome from at least the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) to its ban by the Christian emperor Theodosius I in 381 AD in the west and until after Justinian (d. 565 AD) in the east. However whether the incidence of such marriages was low or high has been debated. Anthropologist Jack Goody advanced the position that cousin marriage was a typical pattern in Rome based on the marriage of four children of Emperor Constantine to their first cousins and what he considers the dubious nature of writings by Plutarch and Livy indicating the proscription of cousin marriage in the early Republic. Professors Brent Shaw and Richard Saller, however, counter in their more comprehensive treatment that cousin marriages were never habitual or preferred in the western empire: for example, in one set of six stemma belonging to Roman aristocrats in the two centuries after Octavian, out of 33 marriages none were between first or second cousins. Shaw, Saller and Goody mutually agree that such marriages certainly carried no social stigma in the late Republic and early Empire. They cite the example of Cicero attacking Mark Antony, who married his father's brother's daughter, and note that if Cicero could have cast aspersions on Antony using this fact he surely would have. Instead the attack was exclusively directed against Antony's divorce.
Shaw and Saller propose in their thesis of low cousin marriage rates that as 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 from tombstones further indicates that in most of the western empire parallel-cousin marriages were also not widely practiced among commoners. Spain and Noricum were exceptions to this rule, but even there the percentages did not rise above ten percent. They further point out that since property belonging to the nobility was typically fragmented, keeping current assets in the family offered no special advantage compared with acquiring it by intermarriage. Jack Goody claimed that early Catholic marriage rules forced a sharp change from earlier norms in order to deny heirs to the wealthy and therefore increase the chance they would will their property to the Church. But Shaw and Saller believe the Church often merely took the place of the earlier position of the emperor in acquiring the inheritance of aristocrats who lacked heirs, instead averring that the Catholic injunctions against cousin marriage were due more to ideology than any conscious desire to acquire wealth.
For some prominent examples of cousin marriages in ancient Rome, such as the marriage of Octavian's daughter to his sister's son, see the Julio-Claudian family tree. Marcus Aurelius also married his maternal first cousin Faustina the Younger and had 13 children. Cousin marriage was more frequent in Ancient Greece, and in fact marriages with the niece were also permitted there, one example of which was King Leonidas I of Sparta who married his half-niece. A Greek woman who became epikleros, or heiress with no brothers, was obliged to marry her father's nearest male kin if she had not yet married and given birth to a male heir; first in line would be either her father's brothers or their son
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