Since I’m banned from Powerline, I’m putting a comment here about Hinderaker’s piece, “Who is adapting to whom?” which concerns the U.K. NHS recent endorsement of first-cousin marriage.
He sees it as an attempt to placate the many, many immigrants from , ah…less enlightened countries which the British government has been copiously importing.
Now here’s an intelligent, well-educated gent who comments on society and historical events for a living. Yet he seems to have no memory.
My title is from Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” (1842). The young protagonist has a beautiful, very young cousin, named Amy, and he notices she’s lookin’a bit peaked. He loves her and begs her to tell him what’s making her unhappy (although he suspects):
“Tell me, Cousin! All the current /Of my being sets to thee!”
She blushes and whispers: “…I have hid my feelings/Fearing they should do me wrong,” and then he “(Stooping):”Dost thou love me, cousin?”/(Weeping): “I have loved thee long!”
Famously, they didn’t get to tie the knot but only because in this case, 5eir family was a bit impoverished, so it was more economically advantageous for little Amy to be wed to some new money. But my point is:
First-cousin marriage was considered ideal among the aristocracy in 18th and 19th century England, the literature is full of it. Tennyson was the Laureate for 42 years. What the NHS pronouncement hints at, the aristocratic families were quite explicit about: keep the money and wealth in the family, and do not dilute rank.
As a native of Appalachia, I have always been sensitive to the America-bashing sneers about incestuous marriages from Brits and Europeans . Marriage to close relatives is, historically, MUCH more their thing than ours. It’s just one more insult we meekly tolerate from these supercilious has-beens.
(Okay, I admit one of my fave books as a child was Louisa May Alcott’s book “Eight Cousins”, in which the entire drama is which of the heroine Rose’s seven male cousins she will eventually marry. Of course,—spoiler alert!— this being an Alcott book, Rose gets the bookish bespectacled Max rather than the dashing impetuous Charlie, with whom every reader has fallen in love. But the assumptions in that book just reflect the prevailing attitudes and customs of the Anglosphere. )
The U.K. NHS pronouncement does no more than return to British cultural roots. I’m just surprised the author of this piece doesn’t even give that a mention.
That’s all. Carry on. As Trump would say:”Thank you for your attention to this matter”.
