On 7 Apr 2015 at 14:19, Irene de Villiers wrote: > > On Apr 7, 2015, at 11:01 AM, Deacon Stephen Hayes wrote: > > And ir was partly as a result of Darwin's ideas that the eugenics > > movement arose, which led to the banning on cousin marriage in the > > USA that you mention. > > On the contrary, both Charles Darwin and George Darwin supported cousin > marriage. I didn't say that Darwin himself deprecated it, but rather that the eugenics movement arose partly as a result of the spread of his ideas. As far as I am aware there has never been a legal prohibition against any kind of cousin marriage in South Africa, and it was the eugenics movement in the USA (which later spread to Nazi Germany) that deprecated it. I am also not aware of any rules in the UK that forbid cousin marriage. The Church of England's "Book of Common Prayer{" has a table of kindred and affinity who may not, according to the church's rules, marry each other. It begins by saying that a man may not marry his grandmother and a woman may not marry her grandfather, and this was largely in accordance with the law of the land, in England at least. I'm not sure about Scotland. There was a discrepancy a few decades ago when the secular government passed a law allowing a man to marry his deceased wife's sister, which the table of kindred and affinity did not allow. The secular law may now allow a man to marry his grandfather. . But at no point was there any law against cousin marriage. The deprecation of cousin marriage is found mainly in the USA. There are some societies that favour cousin marriage. On of the interesting things about this is that most of them favour cross-cousin marriage, and relatively few favour parallel cousin marriage. Anthropological studies tend to show that the reasons for this are mostly economic, based on the systems of inheritance in those societies. One interesting example is the Hereros of Namibia, who have both patrilineal and matrilineal systems of inheritance. The orozu is based on patrilineal descent, and eanda on matrilineal descent, with different herds of cattle belonging to each. My own church (the Orthodox Church) prohibits cousin marriages in its canon law -- you can find the details here: http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2013/03/prohibited-marriages-in-orthodox- church.html Short URL: http://tinyurl.com/q2yhx9n This does not seem to have affected South African law, which is surprising in a way, because South African law is based on Roman-Dutch Law, and that is ultimately based on the Institutes of Justinian, which also affected Orthodox canon law. -- Dr Stephen Hayes Freelance writer, editor, missiologist and teacher PO Box 7648, Pretoria, 0001 South Africa Tel: 012-333-6727 or 083-342-3563 Fax: 086-548-2525 Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com

https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-worship/worship/book-of-common-prayer/table-of-kindred-and-affinity.aspx -----Original Message-----