Florida and the Fight Against First-Cousin Marriages

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had just signed a new law, one banning Sharia law from Florida courts and empowering state officials to designate certain groups as domestic terrorist organizations, when he pivoted to a different grievance: one involving family trees, immigration, and what he called a creeping cultural threat to American life.“Florida doesn’t ban cousin marriage. That’s a hanging curveball for us to do,” Mr. DeSantis said at the April 6 signing ceremony on the University of South Florida’s Tampa campus.“We need to do that. Other states have done it. I don’t know why we wouldn’t, but obviously that feeds into some of the stealth jihad that we see when you’re allowing things like that. It’s things that are coming in from other cultures that are not consistent with the United States culture, and certainly our culture here in Florida.”The remarks landed like a grenade: the governor had just signed the most expansive anti-Sharia legislation in the country while simultaneously conceding that Florida’s own statutes contain a gap that, by his logic, enables the very cultural intrusion he was railing against.Florida is one of roughly 16 states — alongside California, New York, New Jersey, and Georgia among others — where first cousin marriage is fully legal. At least 25 states prohibit it outright, eight of them treating it as a criminal offense, while a handful of others permit it only under limited conditions such as advanced age or proof of infertility. Tennessee and Connecticut are among the most recent states to enact bans, underscoring the direction most of the country is moving, and the pressure on Florida to follow. How a Health Bill Became a Culture War Flash PointHouse Bill 733 was first filed in December by state Representative Anne Gerwig, a Republican from Greenacres, as a wide-ranging Department of Health measure. Tucked into it was a provision that would have prohibited marriage between first cousins, with any such unions entered into after July 1, 2026, going unrecognized for any purpose in the state.The state Senate unanimously approved the full bill in March, yet it died after returning to the House. Floor disputes centered on unrelated issues — medical marijuana, neonatal nutrition, and best practices for dental hygienists. The cousin marriage provision itself was apparently uncontroversial; everything around it proved fatal.Mr. DeSantis telegraphed his frustration on X in late March: “For some reason, the ban on cousin marriages was dropped during the legislative process. Stay tuned.”State Representative Dean Black said he expects another vote down the line, noting that “there are plenty of people here, and there are plenty of people you can find to be your lifelong partner without looking to your first cousin.”With this being Mr. DeSantis’s final legislative session — he is term-limited and leaves office at year’s end — his options have narrowed considerably. A special session convened on April 28 to redraw congressional districts moved forward without the cousin-marriage provision.“There were no bills filed on these policies before the start of this special session; consequently, we won’t be taking up those issues,” House Speaker Daniel Perez said. A budget special session is still expected, though no date has been confirmed, leaving open the possibility of attaching a cousin marriage prohibition to a future special session call — something Mr. DeSantis has not ruled out.Critics, however, argue that linking a public health question to terrorism and immigration does more to inflame than to inform. Civil liberties advocates contend the right to choose a spouse falls within personal freedom that government should not police. At the same time, legal scholars have raised due-process concerns about the constitutional right to marry established in Loving v. Virginia.Muslim advocacy groups — led by CAIR Florida, which held a press conference the day after the signing — and Democratic lawmakers who opposed HB 1471 warned the measure would fuel Islamophobia and chill constitutionally protected speech, charges the governor dismissed. HB 1471, the legislation Mr. DeSantis signed that same day, bans Sharia law from Florida courts and grants state officials the power to designate domestic terrorist organizations. A federal judge had already blocked an earlier DeSantis executive order designating CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations, calling it a First Amendment violation. However, cousin marriage is not exclusively a Muslim practice — it has been documented across cultures and faiths for centuries — and the science makes no distinction based on religion.The debate also points to a structural gap: federal law recognizes cousin marriages performed abroad as valid for visa and green card purposes, provided they were legal where they occurred — meaning what individual states ban within their own borders has no bearing on what Washington will honor for immigration purposes.Under the Foreign Affairs Manual’s governing provision — 9 FAM 102.8-1 — consular officers may request a legal advisory opinion when they suspect biological relations between spouses. Still, that step is discretionary and unevenly applied.The result is a patchwork in which a state can ban cousin marriage outright while the federal government continues to recognize the same union for immigration purposes — a tension that neither Congress nor the State Department has moved to resolve.The public health data — and what it actually showsRates of cousin and close-relative marriage vary widely across the Middle East and South Asia — roughly 20 to 33 percent in Egypt, 25 to 50 percent in Saudi Arabia, and 60 to 65 percent in Pakistan. Children of first cousins face a four to six percent risk of serious genetic disorder — roughly double the baseline — with elevated rates of cystic fibrosis, thalassemia, sickle cell anemia, congenital deafness, heart disorders, and intellectual disabilities.The World Health Organization notes that marriages between close relatives nearly double the risk of neonatal and childhood death. Those figures compound further in communities where such marriages span multiple generations.Political strategist John Thomas, Managing Director of Nestpoint Associates, tells the Sun there is “a legitimate public-health and immigration-policy argument for greater scrutiny.”He also asserted that Mr. DeSantis is “correctly highlighting a public-health issue that affects integration and fiscal responsibility” — “not ‘targeting’ a religion but applying the same evidence-based standards we would to any high-risk practice.”Professor Emerita of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Diane Paul, whose research spans the history of genetics and eugenics policy, takes a more restrained view.“In respect to US immigration policy, a cousin marriage must be valid in the location where the marriage occurred and also in the US state where the couple lives or proposes to live,” she tells the Sun, highlighting that “there is no warrant for federal or state-level bans on recognizing foreign cousin marriages.”Yet Boise State University Professor of political science Scott Yenor tells the Sun the consequences run deeper still.“First-cousin marriage fosters excessive kin loyalty and tribalism, undermines republican self-government,” Mr. Yenor says, adding that it “correlates with nepotism, weaker public institutions, low generalized trust, unstable banking, compromised militaries, and rule-of-law erosion.”For Mr. Yenor, the public health argument is almost secondary: the more serious threat is civic, and the window to act in Florida is closing fast.“Every state, including Florida, should ban first-cousin marriage to foster exogamous norms, limit tribalism, and align law with the Western inheritance,” he adds. “Immigration threatens to change the facts on the ground.”

Florida and the Fight Against First-Cousin Marriages

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