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I think the OP grossly underestimates the driving force of adolescent male hormones, for one thing, and the prurient interest of some adult males in their pubescent female family members. Also, if you throw alcohol into the picture, anything can happen, but "anything" can happen even without alcohol.
Cousin relationship was prevalent until recently, Einstein married his first cousin, Charles Darwin, Rudy Giuiliani (2nd cousin), Winnie the Pooh "Christopher Robin" who the cartoon was based off of grew up to marry his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt married Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even recently I had a co-worker from Jamaica who recently slept with his cousin (apparently his brother did also).
So it might be gross but its happening.
Interesting. And how is it, that you were privy to this bit of news?
Child marriage was common in the Virginia colony. (Col. Daniel Parke's wife was 14; Martha Washington's first husband was her son.) But Edgar Allen Poe merits comment here when at 27 he married his first cousin who was 13. Her mother was Maria Poe. (Today, first cousin marriage is prohibited in VA, those between 16 and 18 can marry with the parents' permission.) Apparently first cousin marriage did not become illegal in many states until after the 1860's.
Cousin relationship was prevalent until recently, Einstein married his first cousin, Charles Darwin, Rudy Giuiliani (2nd cousin), Winnie the Pooh "Christopher Robin" who the cartoon was based off of grew up to marry his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt married Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even recently I had a co-worker from Jamaica who recently slept with his cousin (apparently his brother did also).
So it might be gross but its happening.
Eleanor and Franklin were fifth cousins once removed. That's hardly the same thing as first cousins.
we have been socialized to think that marrying a relative is something abhorrent
If you grow up in a society and era when it's considered normal to marry a relative, then you don't have the same negative reaction to the idea
I'm happy to live in a time and place when intrafamily marriage is not a common practice, but I know to not judge people of another time and place by the standards I am used to
The verb disgusted is in the title of thread. Cant be more accurate than that.
The substantial gist of this thread is sibling and cousin incest, not parent-child incest, which you correctly point out has a long history of being shunned.
In other words, it's mostly about sexual relations between individuals who would be otherwise unremarkable pairings except for close genetic relation - of similar or at least compatible ages.
Yes.... I always chuckle a little when some zealot tries to lecture me about "biblical marriage." The point about the royal families of Europe constantly intermarrying in a small pool is well taken, that's my main appreciation of Harry & Megan breaking with tradition.
That tradition is pretty long gone such that I wouldn't consider Harry and Megan to have been the ones who broke it. Harry's parents were 16th cousins. Hardly incest. And Prince William and Kate Middleton are 11th cousins, once removed.
I believe Most of the Windsor line married distant cousins like that, but not close enough to be considered incest to most people. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, notably, were 1st cousins, though. I have a hypothesis that the more peaceful the times (within the sphere of European relations) the more distant relations become between royal coouple since there is no diplomatic urgency.
As far as Royal marriages, or any other, I would say that 1st cousin marriages are undesirable from both a cultural standpoint to me (though they persist, even in developed countries today) and from a genetic perspective, though I wouldn't consider it incest, per se. And although defects from 1st cousin pairs are relatively rare, on a large scale they do make an impact. Apparently Pakistan has one of the highest rates of 1st cousin marriages in the world, and there is a detectable number of disabled children resulting from this.
As for 2nd cousin marriages, they were well within the norm until industrialization started changing the population dynamic from rural argricultural societies to a mainly urbanized standard, barely much more than 100 years ago in the Western world and much more recently in many other regions on just about every continent.
Don't forget that in the popular classic, Gone With the Wind, Scarlett's love interest, Ashley Wilkes is married to his first cousin, Melanie Hamilton. In the novel, it is mentioned several times by other characters that the Wilkes and the Hamiltons had intermarried for generations and is inferred that Melanie's delicate health was at least partially caused by inbreeding. It's also noted in a conversation between a neighbor who's fond of breeding horses and Gerald O'Hara that it would have done the Wilkes' family bloodline some good had Ashley chosen to marry one of her four red-haired daughters or Scarlett.
So far as royalty is concerned, Louis the Fourteenth of France (the Sun King) was married to his *double* first cousin. (Brother-and-sister pairs of both the Bourbon and Spanish family line had married and produced Louis and his wife, Maria Theresa.)
Then you have the case of poor Charles of Spain, Maria Theresa's half-brother, who was the end product of generations of intermarriage that culminated in the marriage of his father and his niece (who was also his aunt, among other things. So confusing, when a family tree doesn't branch as it should!)
At any rate, it's still not unusual for families to intermarry--especially in more insular religious communities such as the Amish and the Hutterites, although it's not as much incestuous in nature so much as most in the groups such as the Amish are descended from a few hundred original members who emigrated to the New World. Although first cousin marriages are illegal in most states, second and third cousin marriages weren't and aren't overly unusual in some communities. Heck, a good chunk of the people I grew up around "back home" are related via blood or marriage albeit not generally via close cousin intermarriage/interbreeding, which isn't unusual in somewhat rural areas where many family names are represented by local street and road appellations. *shrugs*
Getting back to the O.P.'s original post...The O.P. must needs remember that the church had co-sanguinity laws, so no one was marrying a sibling or a parent (or at least not without serious consequences)! There are charts from the period that provide extensive detail as to what degree of co-sanguinity was acceptable.....and what was not.
As a matter of fact, the basis of Henry the Eighth of England's (he of the six wives fame) divorce case was his assertion that, according to Biblical and the Church's doctrine of the time, Katherine of Aragon was his sister---in law, if not by actual blood.
How was she his sister, you ask? Because Katherine was the widow of Henry's older brother Arthur, when Henry married and bedded Katherine, he was considered to have committed a sin. Katherine and Henry had had a special dispensation given by the Pope for their marriage, but desperate for a legitimate male heir, Henry tried to backpedal on what Rome had once legitimized per his (and his father's) request.
Last edited by Formerly Known As Twenty; 09-29-2020 at 02:18 PM..
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