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Tuesday, April 26, 2005

I'm my own brother-in-law

Posted by: Hammer / 11:02 AM

From D via the Washington Post:
Love comes in at the eye, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote, and so it was for Donald Andrews: One look, and he knew that he was in love, intensely in love.

"I just could not stop looking at her," Andrews, 39, recalled, sitting in the late-day shade of a cafe umbrella he set up in the yard of his mobile home. "I just kept thinking: 'I'm going to get her. Someday, I'm going to get her and marry her.' "

He also knew, even as a mere lad of 14, that this never would be just any romance, because the object of that rapturous gaze happened to be his cousin Eleanor. And not a distant cousin, located somewhere in the far branches of the family tree. Their mothers were sisters. They knew their attraction -- she had felt it, too -- was taboo, and they kept it more or less a secret. That is, until last month, when they decided it was time to marry.

Turned away from the Blair County Courthouse because Pennsylvania law prohibits first-cousin marriages, Donald W. Andrews Sr. and Eleanor Amrhein, 37, crossed into Maryland to wed. Before they could think about a honeymoon, the newlyweds became the butt of jokes on the late-night talk shows. ...

The incidence of consanguineous marriages has fallen in much of the industrialized world but remains common in some parts of Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Maryland is one of 20 states that permit it, as does the District. (Six more allow such marriages only under certain conditions.)

24 states say "eww" to cousin marriages. 26 states allow it, in one form or another, but mobile homes and G'n'R do rags are almost always involved:

If I remember my Chet Atkins correctly, my wife's mother would be my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law's son-in-law would be my brother-in-law. I'd be my mother-in-law's son-in-law, so I'd be my own brother-in-law. And that's why cousins shouldn't marry.

Hard to imagine that our country can be so evenly split on whether a certain form of marriage is proper, yet the institution of marriage still survives.

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