Cousin marriage law in the United States
Cousin marriage law in the United States
!Laws regarding first-cousin marriage in the States Legal Allowed with requirements Banned with exceptions1 Statute bans marriage1 Criminal offense1 [1 Some states recognize marriages performed elsewhere, while other states do not.](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/CousinmarriagemapUSA.svg/330px-CousinmarriagemapUSA.svg.png)
Incidence
Some studies have cast doubt on whether offspring of first cousins are at as significant of a health risk as is popularly assumed. However, professors Diane B. Paul and Hamish G. Spencer speculate that legal bans persist in part due to "the ease with which a handful of highly motivated activists — or even one individual — can be effective in the decentralized American system, especially when feelings do not run high on the other side of an issue."
History
Cousin marriage was legal in all states before the Civil War. Anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer suggests (1996) that marriage prohibitions were introduced to maintain the social order, uphold religious morality, and safeguard the creation of fit offspring. 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 (see widow inheritance), 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. Morgan himself had married his cousin in 1853.
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