| Why You Probably Shouldn’t Marry Your Cousin A Slightly Humorous Cause and Effect Essay by Hillary Nadeau Freshman English 101 Wed, Nites So, you think you found the perfect person that you want to spend the rest of your life with. You think this person is just the most intelligent, genuine, caring, affectionate and loving human being on the face of this planet. You think this person is physically perfect with cascading blonde hair and a butt that won’t quit. You’re thrilled you met her and you’ve been together for almost a year, you love her more than anything and you’re more than ready to pop the question. So you drive to her parents’ house and knock on the door preparing to formally ask her father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Your heart’s pounding, your palms are sweaty and you’ve got that funny nervous tick happening in your upper lip. The door opens and you blurt out your intended proposal only to find yourself standing face to face with your father’s half sisters cousin. Congratulations, welcome to incest. Incest is a very taboo subject that many people try to avoid bringing up in a conversation as often as possible. In fact, if you were at dinner with friends and you brought up incest, your friends would probably desert you because they’d think you were either a pervert or you got into some trouble on your Uncle Steve’s wedding night. The problem is, incest is all around us. Just turn on the news, read the paper or better yet trace throughout the roots of history and you will find it, clear as day. In the early years, incest happened because it was not called incest then, it was called the way of life. Cain had to marry one of his sisters because who else was he going to marry? If you are religious, as I am, you buy into that story about God creating just one man and one woman, having some problems with trust issues and leaving them to populate the earth. We apparently all came from one man and one woman if we traced ourselves all the way down the family tree. Of course it would be impossible to manually connect ourselves with billions of people as far as the paper work is concerned- it would take a whole life time or more to compile all the information if it was immediately accessible. As we get a few thousand years ahead of Adam and Eve’s time, many people realized that there were enough people in this world so their marriage options were not always involving family members. Cousin marriages were popular but brother and sister marriages largely frowned upon. In the Old Testament we are told incest is the worst when it’s consummated by people related to each other within the fourth degree of consanguinity. It also states that it’s just as bad to fully consummate incest, as it is to engage in incomplete acts. In The New Testament we are told sexual relations with ANY close relatives will not be accepted in the eyes of god. Laws were then made to forbid illicit marriages. Basically the laws that were made were civil laws that in laymen’s terms mean, if you’re going to marry your cousin you’d better have a good reason why. Currently twenty-six states allow first cousins to get married! Some states like Arizona only allow you to marry your cousin if you cannot bear any children. Others enforce that cousin couples get genetic testing before heading to the alter. Most states though, do not have any restrictions on cousins getting married. Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina are just a few of the states that give cousins the right to marry, no questions asked. I have a few questions though. I wonder how people could subject themselves to public scrutiny along with the fact that their own families most likely will not support their marriage. I also wonder how they will pay for all the medical bills that their union, should they have kids, will incur. Babies created from parents engaged in incest are twice as likely to have birth defects compared to the four percent risk in babies conceived in the usual way. Marrying inside your own race increases the chances of birth defect as does marrying into your hometown. Imagine the increases of birth defects when you marry into your own family to an Irish-catholic just like you, born and raised in your hometown. Babies conceived with ancestral parents could be susceptible to many genetic disorders along with birth defects. The disorders often include: Multiple Sclerosis, Cystic Fibrosis, Cancer, Asthma, Albinism, Autism, ADD and Down syndrome. I find it rather selfish that people can just overlook the effect their intermarriage can and will have on their offspring. Every time that child has an asthma attack, will they feel guilty? Every time their child can’t concentrate or calm down because of their attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder will they look at their spouse and regret what they did? These are the questions that I have for the people that insist on marrying into their own families. Perhaps it’s the way I was raised or my parent’s values pushed onto me, but I think intermarriage relations are just incredibly wrong. Many countries though have lax opinions on marrying into your own family. For example, many people are already decedents of so called “cousin marriages.” Before civil laws banned them it was preferable to marry your cousin instead of some stranger. In many different countries that is their attitude toward incest. They have the notion, “Why a stranger?” Are we the ones who are backwards when socially conscious countries like Europe accepts marrying your cousin and it’s legal all throughout Canada? So fine, your standing a the mercy of your father’s first cousin once removed who used to give you nouggies when you were ten years old and you just proposed to marry his daughter. One of two scenarios will happen. Either you’ll heed my advice and realize marrying your first or second cousin once removed is still marrying into the family and not a great idea on the cold and flu scale. Not to mention you will be shunned at every single family function and probably getting the tar beat out of you by your father’s first cousin once removed for even suggesting such a heinous proposal. Or you can go ahead and marry her creating an all out family war, while you and the misses get married in Maryland and have tons of genetically mutated babies whom when they get older are constantly sick and absent from school eventually costing you nearly half a million dollars in medical bills. The Choice is yours but don’t say I didn’t warn you. |