About 'Cousin Marriage'

So, there was a recent article in the Economist:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/02/15/cousin-marriage-is-probably-fine-in-most-cases

It’s subscription only so I haven’t actually read the article. And for reasons of a typo (corrected) the subject came up in the comments section of one of the chapters of the (now up to five books) serialized story that’s for paid subscribers.

There were joking comments about ‘Maybe in Arkansas’ and one poster pointed out that while all that is illegal in the (redneck) states that are usually referenced, marriage to close cousins IS legal in some Northeast blue states. Massachusetts is one that was mentioned.

(However, it should be noted that in some distant times, 1920s, the people of rural/mountainous Massachusetts were considered in the same fashion as, say, the extras from Deliverance. See also H.P. Lovecraft’s characterization of them.)

When I lived in rural Georgia, I had a friend, female, who was born and raised in that area. When we moved there there were only 30,000 people in the county. It later grew into a bedroom exurb of Atlanta. But she was from a multi-generation ‘never left the county’ family going back to its founding. And she had an insight on ‘cousin marriage’ among rural folk I’d never heard.

“Back in the old days, there wasn’t as much available transportation. For generations, nobody came to the county and nobody left. So, the only people that you ever MET were your cousins. They might be fifth cousins, but they were in some way related.

“There were old ladies that kept up with the genealogy in their heads and would say ‘That’s a kissin’ cousin, that one ain’t!’ Kissing cousin generally being at least third removed.”

She was the first person in her family line who had married someone from OUTSIDE THE COUNTY! GASP!

So, that is one reason that there are so many jokes about rural people ‘marrying their cousins.’ And those jokes have been around for a long time and made by urban folks who simply had a wider selection of people to court or date.

The other interesting thing (to me at least) is the whole thing about ‘rednecks are always having incest sex.’ It’s a ‘known fact’ like ‘police are always shooting black men’ that rednecks, especially in Appalachia, are highly likely to practice incest. (In this meaning, sex with someone very close like their own child.)

My ex wife worked for a while as a foster care worker which means she was a CPS investigator. She told the story of how ‘CPS had broken the Appalachian incest culture’ by ‘taking endangered children out of homes.’

It was known for decades that the Appalachian culture was inbreeding because of all the birth defects that were in the culture that turned out to be… bad nutrition. (Which was why, BTW, the DOD introduced the School Lunch Program back in the late 1940s. To cut down the rate of 4F from childhood nutrition deficiencies.)

Now, with DNA, we can peer into the past of the Appalachian culture and show that those toothless (from poor nutrition) rednecks were…

Not actually sleeping with their daughters. The DNA shows no higher rate of actual incest in traditional Appalachian culture than in the general background of the US.

I won’t mention where the highest is found. Take a guess.

We have hundreds of years of false mythology about what certain cultures are ‘like.’ Things that we know are the way and the truth and the light.

And how many of them are so much bullshit?