The primary reason incestuous marriage isn’t a priority is that family members already have legal rights by virtue of being family. Marriage is neccessary to establish kinship through law, but these people already have kinship through blood. They aren’t lacking something. What they have is stronger than marriage.

Incest is illegal to prevent people from taking advantage of their dependents. Incest rarely takes the form of two cousins falling into forbidden love like Romeo and Juliet. More often, incest takes the form of sexual abuse or rape which results in emotional trauma more then 2.8% of the time. Please don’t write for the D again this is trash.

This is absolutely not trash. Just because the power for abuse exists does not mean that incest should be illegal. It is irresponsible to argue for marriage equality without understanding the logical implications of such an argument.

So gay marriage is a crack in the sanctity of marriage, potentially allowing for it to be blown wide open by incestual and polygamous marriage? Is that what you are saying, that if marriage is allowed for any 2 (or more) people who are in ‘Love’ then it will undermine the entire institution?

probably. except that it’s a numbers game and polygamous and incestual couples are both fewer in number than homosexual couples and therefore possess less resources/sway/ability to enact change. the squeaky wheel gets the grease (in this case, legal matrimony) and luckily for the institution of marriage so far only same-sex couples have been loud enough.

sure, theoretically you can make similar arguments for almost any pairing by drawing from arguments made by proponents of same-sex marriage, but very few people are going to do so and taking the side of the minority is nothing more than intellectual masturbation (as is this comment).

An adult should be free to share love, sex, residence, and marriage with ANY consenting adults.

There is no rational reason to deny close relatives relationships rights that is consistently applied to other relationships and situations. Where there are still laws against consensual incest, they remain due to inertia and prejudice.

You know people who have been involved in such relationships, whether you know it or not. Youthful experimentation between close relatives close in age is not uncommon, and there are more people than you’d think out there who are in lifelong healthy, happy relationships with a close relative. It isn’t for everyone, but we’re not all going to want to have each other’s love lives, now are we? If someone thinks YOUR love life is disgusting, should you be thrown in prison or denied the right to marry?

Some people who say it is wrong seem to have no problem with complete strangers having sex. So get over it, all of you who want your personal disgust to dictate the lives of others.

Legalizing something like incest could actually help people report and minimize abuse, depending on the laws surrounding it and the support structures put in place.

Up until that last sentence, @Finn, that was a rational argument, though not the point of this article… and then you lost me.

I think this is a fantastic article!

I have been advocating this for quite some time now, but I rarely discuss it with people because of the very same reason you mentioned in the beginning of this article.

You seem to lack an understanding of the genetics / biology at issue here. You speak of incestuous marriages increasing the rates of genetic mutations – which is completely wrong. It does increase the risk of disease incurred through genetic mutations, but that’s an entirely different concept.

There are two types of mutations (for the sake of simplicity – it’s actually much more complicated), dominant and recessive. Dominant mutations are expressed in the phenotype of the organism even with only one copy of the gene, and if negative, cause a detrimental effect. Recessive mutations are only expressed if you get a copy of the mutation from both parents (we have 2 of each gene, and that’s the big advantage). Dominant mutations aren’t magically dominant – they are dominant because they are gain of function mutations. For example, darker pigments tend to be dominant over lighter pigments in hair and eyes. It’s not that you have only brown pigment, it’s that the brown is visible and the lighter color is not. A recessive mutation is a loss of function mutation. It just means the gene is broken and does not work (probably doing nothing, or doing what it’s supposed to do but not as well). This means that if you get one good one from your mom and one bad one from your dad, you’re ok, because you still have functional proteins that do the work (maybe not quite as well, but usually the difference is irrelevant).

Loss of function mutations (recessive) are overwhelmingly more common than gain of function mutations (dominant). Think of it this way. If you drop a piece of electronics on the floor (i.e. randomly break it) it can either stop working or not work as well, or it can become something new that has a new and different function. The latter doesn’t often happen. The same is true with genes. Mutations occur randomly. Thus, they usually just break a complex, functional protein into something useless but harmless. Of course if you have 2 bad copies from both parents, then you’re in trouble, as the function is probably necessary (or maybe not if it’s something like eye or hair color that is not harmful).

We all have a massive quantity of recessive mutations in our genomes – probably thousands. Our genes are just full of them. Dominant mutations (e.g. Huntington’s disease) are relatively extremely rare, for the reasons explained above. The reason we are ok is that in most cases, we don’t get 2 recessive mutations in the same gene from both parents. We all have lots and lots of genes that are working solo because their partner from the other parent is not functional.

Thus, if a brother and sister marry, while the child will have the same number (on average) of mutations that any other child would have, they will be, far more often, in the same genes, as the mutations don’t so often occur in our own germ lines, but rather are passed down from generation to generation. Since they are in the same genes, now those recessive mutations are expressed, which leads to many more health problems for the children. The closer the relationship, the more recessive mutations will double up, causing them to be expressed and cause problems. The best thing you can do genetically is marry someone very genetically different from yourself. It will minimize the odds of recessive mutations being expressed in the child.

The question of whether the government should have a say in what happens is another matter, but without question it’s biologically a very bad idea to reproduce incestuously. It is not good for the child. I doubt your figures. I think incest is not reported often, which makes studies very hard to do, but basic genetic theory makes it unquestionably a very bad idea.

Thank you for your article. You have done a great job to bring up several issues surrounding inces (certainly demonstrated by the comments!) I would like to add to the previous statements about genetics. You stated, “First, even if genetic mutations were a serious issue…..” As was mentioned, many of the genetic conditions related to consanguinity (having children with someone you are related to) are inherited because the two parents share a mutation, called autosomal recessive inheritance. The conditions that are associated with these mutations are not only rare, but very debilitating and serious. They often involve metabolic disease that can lead to severe disease and often death in childhood. This is because there is no advantage to keep these mutations in the “gene pool,” unlike Sickle Cell Anemia, for which the mutation confers resistance to malaria. Secondly, you stated “Screening is the single most effective solution to genetic problems.” This could be argued, but you subsequently said “…it becomes extremely difficult to pinpoint an exact cause.” These statements contradict each other, which speaks to their validity. Screening is a useful tool for genetic disease when it is common enough in the population that screening is beneficial – it must correctly identify affected individuals and have an associated intervention to warrant the burden of cost and efforts of implementation. In regard to your second statement, it is indeed difficult to identify the cause of many genetic disorders, but these would not be the type of diseases that qualify for screening. With rare conditions due to shared genes as described above, no screening would be feasible as the diseases would be extremely rare. Yet most of these children manifest disease after their birth, in infancy or early childhood, and struggle to obtain a diagnosis for some time. My point is not to whether consanguinity should be allowed – I believe it will happen regardless – but that akin couples who are planning children undergo counseling to understand the risks. There would likely not be a family history of severe disease. I agree the concept of birth defects represents a slippery slope, and truly we all take risks in pursuing children. But individuals who share genes should receive genetic counseling to understand the risks that would not be identified by screening, might be difficult to diagnose, and absolutely can incur severe disease. Keep up the good work!