Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming
….states where you can marry your first cousin, but not your gay partner.
CORRECTION: As John Thacker points out in the comments, I didn't read the linked map correctly. Thes states in the headline don't allow gay marriage or first cousin marriage. Instead, they recognize marriages of first cousins performed in other states, but not the marriages of homosexuals performed in other states. The list of states where you can marry your first cousin but not your gay partner is actually even longer. It includes all of the states in bright red at the linked map except for Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.
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Yee haw, sounds like my kinda places! LOL
Lou
http://www.anon-vpn.se.tc
Quite frankly, as long as we're still going to have state-sponsored marriage... I don't really see why there should be a prohibition on either one (first cousin marriage or gay marriage).
Technically in Indiana you can't marry your first cousin until after 65.
I got to hear all about it in Family Law, the statute is IC 31-11-1-2.
Well of course we want to marry our cousins...
I like how they think.
You can't marry your first cousin in West Virginia.
"You can't marry your first cousin in West Virginia."
Because you're too closely related, or not closely enough?
Zing!
"If you go to a family reunion to pick up chicks, you just might be a redneck."
- Jeff Foxworthy
So. To marry your first cousin you have to be either an American peckerwood or a member of the English nobility.
Or you'd have to be:
Johann Sebastien Bach
Werner von Braun
Charles Darwin
Albert Einstein
Rudy Giuliani
Jessie James
Mary and Joseph
Aemilia Lanyer
Jerry Lee Lewis
Sir John A. MacDonald
Prophet Muhammad
Edgar Allen Poe
Christopher Robin
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Greta Scacchi
Queen Victoria
H.G. Wells
Reading comprehension fail there, Radley. Those are states where you can't marry your first cousin, but the states will recognize your marriage to your first cousin if you get it in another state.
North Carolina, incidentally, allows first cousin marriage but not double first cousin marriage. What's a double first cousin? First cousin on both sides-- imagine that two brothers marry two sisters. Their kids are first cousins on both sides, hence have as much shared genetic material as brothers and sisters, hence can't marry.
Yeah, you beat me to it. I don't know if he read the article too quickly, or had trouble reading the map.
Remind me again: why do "gay marriage" laws never allow you to marry your parents/siblings/offspring if they happen to be the same sex as you? I mean, it's not like you're in any danger of having kids any more screwed up than yourself...
Aren't the genetic effects of marrying a first cousin pretty much a myth?
Gay marriage is guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence.
Not quite. Things do get interesting if the practice is allowed to continue over generations. You end up with Pakistan.
Of course if continued generation after generation it becomes detrimental (look at the British royal family), but there are more likely to be genetic defects as a result of the mother being 38 years old at the time of birth than there are from the parents being first cousins.
Disclaimer: I have some hot cousins.
Care to share their phone numbers?
There's a bunch of states that allow first cousin marriage but not gay marriage. What's listed there, and is pretty obviously spelt out in the post, are the states that don't allow first cousin marriages but recognize them elsewhere.
Note that there are also a bunch of states that don't recognize first cousin marriages performed in another state.
One might think that pointing that out would be a double-edged sword in the gay marriage Full Faith and Credit Clause argument. A bunch of states already don't extend Full Faith and Credit to first cousin marriages, apparently. I'm not sure if that's come up in court.
Apparently, the answer is it has come up in court. States are not required by Full Faith and Credit to recognize first cousin marriages performed in other states or abroad, though they may if they wish.
A state is free to not recognize marriages that go against the public policy of that state. States have always been free not to recognize cousin marriages from other states.
I don't see any reason why they are not also free to not recognize gay marriages.
EKWAL PROTECSHUN CLAWS!!!!!!!1!!!!!!
In Wyoming its a matter of survival...you would freeze to death trying to find a woman not related to you in the winter.
Reading comprehension fail there, Radley.
Nah. His loudly trumpeted misreading doesn't fail to show he's the Right Kind Of White People.
Nope, because he could have easily listed the actual states that allow first cousin marriage but not gay marriage, like California, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, etc.
Radley is from Indiana.
My gay partner is also my first cousin.
Well, I'm not worried about you having messed up kids...
...unless you adopt, because it sounds like you two have issues.
+lulz for the name.
Bernie, would you email me? I think I might be in the same boat as you soon and really need some advice from someone who's been through this... Thanks.
I support first cousins having the right to marry.
This has something to do with Zoidberg's trial, right?
The Mother Jones post is wrong about Texas. In Texas, one cannot marry one's first cousin. See Tex. Fam. Code 2.004(b)(6)(F) (requiring applicant for marriage license to affirm that the other applicant is not "a son or daughter of a parent's brother or sister, of the whole or half blood or by adoption"); Tex. Fam. Code 2.004(d) (making it a criminal offense to provide false information on this subject). Texas also makes it a felony for first cousins to be sexually involved with one another. Tex. Penal Code 25.02(6).
nobody has the right to marry period. I mean, you can sign some government papers that have the word "marriage" in them, but that's it. It sets up an arangement where either party can leave anytime for any reason they want to - so it's more like government-recognized fuckbuddies. Except that sex isn't even necessarily part of the deal.
This system is usually used to extort money from men, regardless of their behavior in said system. When it doesn't, it favors whichever of the two is a lawyer or has some nice political connections. There are no explicit rules as to what this "marriage" is even supposed to mean - which helps make it easier for people to use the system as a form of extortion. It's almost impossible to have enforced an agreement which any reasonable person would call an actual marriage.
Let's focused on getting marriage PERIOD legalized and enforceable.
Could someone please explain why a state recognizing a marriage between 1st cousins of the opposite sex has anything to do with whether or not that state should recognize a "marriage" between two persons of the same sex?
I think it is comparison to a situation where real harm can kinda happen if repeated enough (look up Qatar) vs. no bad consequences being specifically possible.
Gay marriage in no way leads to a measurable increase in down syndrome and similar defects.
It's just an offensive insult. It's obviously meant to imply only stupid rednecks who would inbreed would be against gay marriage. But as others have pointed out, cousin marriage isn't really even all that uncommon, and the case for banning it for genetic reasons is totally weak.
When inbreeding goes too far you might get King Charles II of Spain.
By definition, Inbreeding always goes too far.
Hey, I'm with John Stossel on the subject of cousin marriage.
I don't understand the argument here. Marrying your cousin is worse than marrying someone of your gender? By the time you get to first cousin, the chance of genetic defects has already gone down so little it's almost the same as the general population. (Don't remember the exact number.) You can't really use the "think of the children argument!" here. It's just the ick factor, nothing more. In which case, you're just substituting one "oh my god, that person is SICK" moral judgment for another one.
Besides, if a brother and sister want to screw, who should stop them? It's their bodies. They can do with them what they want, right?