A Protestant Approach to First Cousin Marriage Bans
March 14, 2025
A member of Delaware’s state assembly, Madinah Wilson-Anton, a Muslim progressive, has proposed a bill recognizing first-cousin marriage. “It’s an issue for my community,” Wilson-Anton told an interviewer, “and I was elected to be the voice for my community.” A quarter of her district was born overseas. She relies on the love-is-love language from the same-sex marriage debate (“I don’t feel like the government should be in the business of telling people who they should marry.”) to justify first-cousin marriage.
American law is more ambivalent about consanguinity, or first-cousin marriage, than American practice. Americans during the colonial and founding periods allowed first-cousin marriage. Today, 25 states ban it. More than 20 states banned it between 1858, when Kansas became the first to adopt a ban, and the mid-1920s. Texas banned it in 2005, and Tennessee in 2024. Nineteen states currently allow it; the rest recognize some first cousin marriages either among the sterile or among marriages contracted out of state. Though permissible in states where over half of the American population lives, few marry first cousins—only .2% of American marriages are between first cousins, according to a 2015 study.
