Apparently a lot of people here actually care. It’s so insane that people still want to regulate who others can fall in love with/marry.
I wish we’d just end all the benefits that come with marriage. I don’t actually know why it’s still encouraged by the government. It made sense for religions to push for people to get married but why should our government be designed in a way where it matters so much and there’s so many incentives to marry?
Off the top of my head, I can recall some of the reasons people made for same-sex marriage is that hospitals wouldn’t allow gay couples to see each other in emergency rooms because their marriage wasn’t recognized. Another one, not sure how it works, is what happens when your spouse dies. I don’t think their property would automatically go to their spouse unless it was explicitly spelled out in their will.
Why should it be illegal to have a relationship with someone you’re only related to by law? I mean yeah, naturally this will rarely ever happen and it’s kinda weird to think about, but something being weird is hardly a reason to ban it.
It’s actually extremely common, some guys will even be with hundreds of step sisters! Of course I get this knowledge from porn, but that’s not my point.
Why should it be illegal to have a relationship with someone you’re only related to by law?
Logically only the same reason you couldn’t have a relationship with first cousins. Inbreeding isn’t exactly a problem for first cousins, they’re genetically different enough for it to not have much of an affect until multiple generations of it (plus same-sex people, sterile people, people who just won’t have kids), so the only plausible argument for it is “marriages between family members are more likely to be from grooming/manipulation/abuse”. Which I don’t think is flawless reasoning to make it illegal, same thing could be said about many other perfectly legal types of relationships. But it is a reason.
That’s a fair point actually. Sometimes I forget how fucked up some people are. A ban would not necessarily help tho, because you can reverse or overturn an adoption under certain circumstances. So you could still groom all you want and then try to convince your adoptive child to leave the family and marry into it again (or maybe even force them somehow).
I think probing for grooming/wellbeing of the child might be a better way to handle this overall.
Most of the world actually has legal marriage between first cousins. In many places it’s not even taboo. And on top of that, the chances of genetic issues with it are actually pretty small. It’s multiple generations of first cousins having kids where it becomes a problem.
Apparently this taboo got started as thing by the Catholic Church during the medieval ages as some kind of property inheritance thing. I can’t remember the details. I remember watching a whole video that argued this anti-cousin marriage thing is where the West got it hyper individualism from, compared to the rest of the world, but I can’t find it now.
But really, do we want the government to pass laws restricting who we can and cannot marry?
I can’t help but notice the overlap with LGBT rights. I’m pretty sure I’d prefer them to not pass this law.
Like, from a legal and philosophical perspective, why is it OK for the government to restrict this? Why wouldn’t that same argument apply to gay men getting married?
This isn’t about “acceptance” in the social sense. I’m not saying you have to accept cousin fuckers in your community.
I’m more worried about the legal framework. If it is legal to outlaw this, why is it illegal to outlaw gay marriage? Like, that doesn’t seem ideologically consistent.
Well, we also can’t let communities discriminate like that…you say you’re “not saying you have to accept [them] in your community regardless of legal status” but I’m assuming you don’t feel loke people should be able to chase other types of minorities out of town if they don’t approve. That’s kinda the whole point of law - to set the rules for how we treat each other. I haven’t thought enough about this particular topic to know how I feel about it. I see the state’s interest in reducing incestuous births, and I’m definitely not ok with the state making reproductive choices for people more generally.
What’s really disgusting is that I bet the entire reason they’re even debating this is because they don’t want to allow any exemption from their abortion ban.
The bill as amended by Rep. Gino Bulso, R-Brentwood, would prohibit first-cousin marriage unless the parties to the marriage contract received counseling from a genetic counselor licensed by the board of medical examiners. Bulso argued during a House floor session on Thursday the bill – as written – could violate the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court decision, which made same-sex marriage legal across the country.
Bulso, while explaining his reasoning, said the bill was introduced as a public health-related matter, adding the law needed to be passed to prevent cousins from getting married and conceiving a child that could have an increased risk for birth defects. Bulso argued two men who are first cousins could get married without the risk of conceiving a child with birth defects.
This is just another bigoted conservative with an agenda. He’s using this no-brainer anti-cousin-fucking law to push anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Gino Bulso was a lawyer for just shy of 40 years before joining the Tennessee House of Reps in 2022. He knows this isn’t a reasonable argument and he doesn’t care. He’s just trying to attack Obergefell v. Hodges. He’s basically saying “See what the gays are making me vote against?! I don’t want to allow cousin-fucking but Obergefell v. Hodges says we have to! Trust me, I’m a lawyer!”
Edit: JFC nothing brings out the weirdos as quickly as an article about a ban on cousin-fucking.
Or - mind blowing possibility - maybe you’re bigoted against cousin marriage like the people you hate are bigoted against gay marriage.
The risk of genetic defects is extremely small. People don’t like it because it’s icky, which is not logically consistent. People used to think interracial marriage was icky.
Yeah, I don’t get it, personally. I’m really not a fan of governments telling people who they can fall in love with. You’d think there’s more important issues to deal with.
I mean, I know people who’s parents are cousins. It’s literally a non-issue I couldn’t give less of a fuck since they all seem happy. It’s none of my, or the government’s, business.
That said, it is weird, the lack of logic that goes on around this issue. It’s simply wrong because it’s wrong so it’s therefore good for the government to make laws prohibiting it.
He’s a Tennessee Republican so I’m sure he’s terrible. But you don’t think there is a legal argument of a law being overly broad that restricts the rights of same sex couples where the legislative history shows it was based on increased risk of genetic mutations in pregnancy?
Maybe (probably) he’s saying it to beat on LGBTQ people, but a broken clock and all that.
Maybe (probably) he’s saying it to beat on LGBTQ people, but a broken clock and all that.
I am not willing to give republicans the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their invocations of Obergefell v. Hodges to defend cousin-fucking. If you’d like to that’s your prerogative. But doing so is completely unearned on their part and suggests naivety on yours.
“Is there a public health issue with a male marrying a male first cousin? Obviously, I think the answer is no,” Bulso said, adding the enhanced risk for birth defects would also not be present for women who marry their first cousin. “A female and a female cannot conceive a child.”
Guy has a valid point about the justification given for the bill, not to mention that not every couple that gets married will be having biological children between them. Not just limited to gay couples, infertile people and people who choose not to have kids get married too.
I’m good with socially discouraging cousins who grew up together getting married, but legal restrictions based on flawed logic is not a good idea.
What about extended family members that you’ve never met in your entire life? Obviously procreation is still insanely gross here and we should outlaw it, but like you said not all relations between a heterosexual couple lead to children.
If your family doesn’t have a history of consanguination then first cousins marrying every few generations is no big deal, genetically. You share about 5% of your genes with any random first cousin, compared to 2.5% with any random stranger. You should still seek generic counseling, you never know what secrets you might find
Honestly, it’s not that big a deal unless it happens for multiple generations. There is enough genetic difference between first cousins for it to not count as inbreeding.
I would recommend against it if there is a significant risk of genetic diseases being passed down, but that’s true even for any two random people.
Honestly, if it’s consensual I don’t care just let women have control of their own bodies and keep their damn religion out of government. They can have cousin-fucking just leave minorities and LGBTQ+ alone.
“My daddy fucked the shit out of mah sister momma, just like his daddy cousin did to his momma! And ba GAWD I’m gonna fuck my cousin!!” - Jim Bob Smith Senator.
To prevent abuse, and to limit the chances of children being born with serious medical problems they will have to suffer with for the rest of their life.
If those states allow first cousin marrying then yeah, that’s cousin fucker states.
Most of the world doesn’t live in the states man, did you think naming other states was going to offend people? You guys and all your weird hillbilly sex stuff need to get your shit together man. It’s embarrassing to see.
It’s legal in most of the world, including most of Europe. I don’t think legality is necessarily the greatest guide for how often it actually happens or social attitudes towards it.
There’s a map in there too of prevalence though and United States isn’t anywhere close to the most prevelant, it’s extremely rare. What’s going on down in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium though?
Ya know, there’s definitely some towns where I’m from that have shallow gene pools, not gonna lie. But I live in Alberta, we’re sometimes the Texas of Canada, and sometimes the Alabama.
Yeah. Pretty much everything south of Calgary and north of Edmonton is Alabama. I’ve lived in every city in the province, and worked in a lot of the towns. It’s pretty crazy in some of the towns here man.
That chart technically includes second degree cousins and any closer relations. So if you don’t count second degree cousins it might be less. But yeah there’s a tradition of parellel cousin marriage especially in parts of the middle east, north Africa, and south Asia.
Dunno about Belgium but Italy, Spain and Portugal have quite communal family structures, at least by European standards. Not necessarily in the living together sense but in the you’ll definitely see the whole extended shebang every other holiday sense.
It’s not just England. Marrying cousins was considered common practice among royalty and nobles in the past, not “normal” for everyday people.
They would inbreed to try to keep blood “pure”, or to keep the family in power, or to sell off their family for power. People knew a long time ago this was bad and caused health problems, but the rich kept doing it because theyre egoistical maniacs.
We don’t have monarchs and royalty anymore, we can do away with inbreeding completely. The fact some conservatives still defend it is ridiculous.
wsmv.com
Hot