Meeting your wife at the family reunion ain’t a phenomenon peculiar to Tennessee[1].
It began as the kind of childhood crush that often becomes family lore shared at reunions years later.
Eventually, first cousins Donald W. Andrews Sr. and Eleanore Amrhein realized they had a deeper love and wanted to wed. It couldn’t happen in their state of Pennsylvania, though, or 23 other states that prohibit first cousins from marrying each other.
Instead, they tied the knot in Maryland last month.
”This is a decision me and my husband have made on our own,” said Eleanor Andrews, 37. ”We didn’t want the publicity. We wanted the rights like anybody had the rights.”
Advocates say the issue is misunderstood. Such marriages are common in the Middle East, Asia and Africa and are legal in Europe and Canada.
Everyone has advocates these days!
Robin Bennett, associate director of the medical genetics clinic at the University of Washington, said laws prohibiting cousins from marrying are ”a form of genetic discrimination.”
Close cousins face a risk of birth defects that is 1.7 percent to 2.8 percent higher than for unrelated couples, according to a study, funded by the National Society of Genetic Counselors, and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.
That part is accurate. The actual risk of producing an offspring affected with a serious recessive inherited defect is relatively small – certainly lower than the existing frequency in the population of dominant gene defects that predispose us to cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases.
For example, this new finding may explain why prostate cancer is more prevalent in African American populations. 70% carry an anti-malaria gene that “reduces production of a chemical used by malarial parasites to infect red blood cells but also may play a role in inhibiting the growth of new blood vessels the tumors need to grow”.
Genetics is complicated.
For all the raised eyebrows the topic draws, the primary risk in consanguous marriages is the complications they raise for relationships in the extended family. When you have a fight and both go home to mother, it’s probably best that they not be the same woman.
Footnote:
[1] Don’t even think of sending me hate mail.
Hatemail? Everybody knows people in Tennessee can’t read.
You know you’re from Tennessee when you get your ex-wife to mind the kids while you take her daughter to the stock-car races…
Hillbilly Lore:
If she ain’t good enough for her own family, what stranger would want her?
One of the best stories from my college years was based on a ‘meet cute’ at a family reunion. One of the kids on the dorm floor had met a girl at a mixer and it was instant dislike for both. Then cut to that next summer and they both show up at a family reunion in Iowa. Pow! Instant lust. After two years of sneaking her into the Dorms and living off campus, they got married-to all of the family’s disgust and our delight. Still were married the last time I saw them-in the mid 80’s-and mobbed up with kids and all. They were somthing like nth cousins, but the frission of taboo lit their powdertrain.
Kinda sweet, in an Animal house sort of way.
Grin
JD
Exhibit “A”? Our own royal family.
Remember waaaayyyy back, when gay marriage was preposterous. Well now it’s quite obvious that we were all wrong about it (or right about it, since most seemed to have jumped on that ban wagon in the last few years).
So, I can’t fathom how Canadians can discriminate against close relatives getting married, based on birth defects, since our betters and proponents for gay marriage proclaimed that having children should not be the authority for legitimizing marriage, and children with defects can be, and are, aborted before birth anyways.
It is not illegal for women to smoke or drink during pregnancy (which we all know can really f**k up a kid), and abortion is sacred in this country – so sacred that debate is forbidden. Specific tests are provided for expectant mothers for the sole purpose of detecting defects in the unborn child, to help the woman determine whether or not she want to keep the child. Extra tests are given to pregnant women over the age of 35, since the risk of defects increases with age.
Heck, since gays can marry and cannot possibly produce children of their own, why should we prevent two brothers or two sisters from getting married? I know a few sets of old spinster sisters and bachelor brothers who have lived together for most of their adult lives and would benefit economically by being married.
One can’t simply say that it’s unnatural, or “just not right”, or you could possibly be labelled a bigot (not yet, of course, but when we become more tolerant and progressive).
Anyways, people with mental and physical defects are no longer “special” and some are quite capable of serving society.
For the record, I’m not suggesting that we SHOULD allow brothers, sisters, and close cousins to marry. I’m just wondering what an arguement for preventing it would be.
This is why I come to SDA.The lengths you go, to bring us the stories we crave,sets you apart,Kate, from the humdrum word of terror,corruption,nanotechnology and digital cameras.
Cousins…, that’s not too terribly progressive.
I see about every 5th Gov. of Canada/Ontario and City of Toronto worker has pictures of their cats and or dogs tacked up in their cubicles. (no people).
Get ready.
Is there a more widely “understood” instrument than the banjo for setting a mood?
Well, as they say in Louisiana, you can tell that the toothbrush was invented in Mississippi because anywhere else it would have been called a teethbrush.
Hey, it works for horses, or so I was told while in Kentucky…and I’ve often wondered about a coupla folk I’ve known from Newfoundland…
“Hey it works for horses”. ya mean if i marry me cousin Dorcas our kid could win the Kentucky Darby someday ?
Only if your cousin Dorcas is a horse.
Oh please no.. don’t be riding that pony off the bridle path and into the woods. I already get enough pervy google hits….
Marriages among cousins is the norm in much of the world (such as the ME and parts of Asia). The genetic thing is pretty minor. Yeah, ick and all that, but it is not particularly dangerous.
My first wife is my first cousin. We have 3 kids together, all are very smart and attractive.
We were married in California, and got a dispensation from the Catholic Church. The tough part was to get Arizona residency when we returned for the reduction in tuition where we went to college.
We divorced after 17 years, and I later married a woman who wasn’t my cousin.