Posted on 04/05/2005 11:43:17 AM PDT by soundandvision
Well, if Uncle Dad says it's ok....
Given the above quote from the article, it's a sure bet that the current SCOTUS would find a right to first-cousin marriage somewhere in the 'living' Constitution, as mediated by laws and traditions of the international community. BARF!
The Tutors didn't have hemophilia. Henry VIII's children died childless in other ways. Although two of Henry's wives did lose their heads due to extreme lobotomies, that's beside the point.
Does a right to marry have to be embodied in the Constitution?
It's hard to find records for some branches of the family due to war. I believe Rene of Anjou, Jean d'Arc's political sponsor, was one of his grandfathers or great grandfathers. Rene was also ancestral to Isabella of Spain (and related in various ways to her husband Ferdinand).
Well, the Supremes would have to use the Constitution as, at minimum, a launching pad in finding that state laws restricting or prohibiting such marriages are UNConstitutional. Sheesh! ;)
Now you got to keep separate things like blood kin and marryin'. Of course they's still your brother or sister. I know, I lived there 3 years. Nicest people in the world.
Bloody Mary was from the Spanish line, but Edward VI and Elizabeth I were not from inbred lines.
Darwinian hangover.
Now, if a family keeps doing this over and over and over, that is a problem.
But, once or twice isn't going to result in a significantly higher chance of genetic problems.
Maybe it was the ridiculously long, forced acronym.
"I've never heard of anyone marrying "into" the Amish, but many Amish do marry "out". Their children and grandchildren might well be agreeable to the Amish lifestyle.
There are a couple of recessives that are causing the Amish some problems these days."
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I remember that Showtime TV documentary "The Devil's Playground" about the "Rumspringa" custom wherin both boys and girls are given some time at age sixteen to go out and whoop it up, then decide whether or not to come back to the fold. Most come back for the fiendishly clever reason that they (at sixteen, and with an eighth-grade education) really have nowhere they can go in the modern world. I always wondered if there wasn't an original ulterior motive to this custom once upon a time. Presumably, one-hundred twenty-five and + years ago the amish lifestyle could not have been much different from their neighbors and a lot of the boys might have come back with fiances. Perhaps even in the modern era it is/was tacitly encouraged for a girl to come back preggers and suffer no opprobrium? In order to add to the gene pool? Does anyone know enough about them to comment on the possibility?
On the IMDB.com review of the show, several posters in the User Comments section took note of the fact that one of the amish girls shown in the film looked suspiciously raven-haired and olive-skinned. Do the amish adopt, I wonder?
The one unforgivable thing that came across in the documentary was how deliberately the amish culture stifles the intellect. The kids in the film had even less interest in reading, mental pursuits and curiosity about the big, wide world than your average ghetto/trailer park/barrio/rez offspring.
"My cousin and I use to go at it like gang busters when we were teens. I totally blocked it all out until just now. Ha Ha. It gets worse, I'm from Mississippi and she is from Alabama. Man I am such a horrible stereo type! In my defense she was extremely hot."
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You should write it up as both memoir and screenplay. I can see it as the next "art-house porn" type of indie flick. Or at least Lifetime movie of the week. Does anyone remember Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster gettin' it on as brother and sister in "The Hotel New Hampshire?"
"I'm against this MORALLY, but GENETICALLY, there is little wrong w/what dog people call "line-breeding". That's inbreeding at a further distance - cousins, etc.
I think to bolster the moral argument, people have been claiming now for ages that cousins, siblings, etc, reproducing is detrimental genetically. That generally is false. But obviously it's made its way into the "common wisdom" by being repeated enough.
The truth is, it goes both ways. You can compound BOTH GOOD and bad by this kind of breeding. In the end it's probably not much different from "out-crossing" - bad and good go into it."
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I'm a dog-person myself and have done some reading on that. "Compound both good and bad" is about what it adds up to. You just don't get something for nothing in this selective breeding game. It is absolutely ridiculous how sick and screwed-up some pooch strains have become. Of course with doggies you don't have to be all sentimental about what to keep and what to throw out. I'm with the far-northern tribes who practiced the ruthlessly simple "save the best, snuff the rest" method when it came to breeding their hunting and sledge-mutts.
Sort of natural selection in reverse. That's kind of new thought!
There's a Mennonite history website that covers that problem pretty well ~ in the 1500s a bunch of German Mennonites and other Anabaptists had gone South into what is now Bosnia and converted Gypsies to their brand of Christianity.
Obviously this caused problems for the locals ~ both the Orthodox, the Roman Catholics AND the Moslems.
Eventually the missionaries and the folks they'd converted had to pull out and return to Germany. For the most part these folks were early immigrants to America, although a lot of them went to Russia to farm wheat in Khazan. Those people too ended up in America.
Remember the "hex signs" so many Amish in Pennsylvnia put up on their barns? It's a related phenomenon.
You also have to differentiate between the Old Order Amish and other "lookalike" Mennonites. The Old Order don't, to my understanding, accept converts.
The group I mention here frequently, the (COTFB) Apostolic Charismatic Church of the First Born (aka as Faith Tabernacle and Faith Assembly in Eastern states), frequently dress like Mennonites in Mennonite communities, e.g. near York, PA, or down in Florida (where so many Mennonite farmers retire).
The COTFB just dresses like them, but theologically they are far different and have no ties to the Mennonites. Their origins are in Scandinavia and the old Whaling industry anyway. They accept converts.
For two reasons:
1. limited choices on the frontier.
2. Back in those days there was an effort to concentrate wealth and land among allied families. If I were allowed to do any of your geneologies, probably close to 98% of you had at least 2nd cousins marrying. And close to 60% with first cousings marrying.
Sounds strange now, but those were the customs then.<><><>
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