5 ms·

Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/202509290531

by gjm11 2mo ago

Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/should-the-uk-government-ban-first-cousin-marriage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is. A few further remarks. --1-- Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal. You have the right to try to fix a broken tile on your roof by climbing out of your window without any sort of safety equipment, even though you might fall and need medical treatment, even in countries where the government will pay some or all of your hospital bills. You have the right to eat too much or too little, or to drink a lot of alcohol or smoke a lot of cigarettes, even though in the long run these things will be bad for your health, which as well as possibly requiring expensive medical care will also make you a less economically productive member of society. You have the right (in most places, including the UK and the US) to agitate for fascism or communism, even though if your agitation succeeds the resulting government will probably be very bad on net. --2-- "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]". --3-- The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Indeed, the people who might need extra care as a result of first-cousin marriage are not the people who enter into those marriages, but some of their children. If your preference is for such children not to receive NHS healthcare, you're punishing the children for the actions of their parents. I think this is generally considered bad policy.

modo_mario 2mo ago
Regarding point 1 I refer to point 3 and regarding point 3 i refer to point 1.
- gjm11 2mo ago
  I don't think I understand; would you care to be more explicit?
  - nailer 2mo ago
    Not the person you're asking but it's fairly obvious: > 1. things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources > 3. The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Increasing pressure on communities' resources is that community paying for people that engage in incest.
    - gjm11 2mo ago
      You are (and perhaps the other person also is) mixing up three questions. 1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal? In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have costs, one of which is that it increases the number of children born with genetic problems that make their lives worse and (if the government pays for medical treatment to mitigate them) costs money. So the answer to the first question is yes, and so far as I can tell no one disagrees. If some pairs of first cousins marry, and their children have genetic problems, then some of the costs are paid by those children. In a country with socialized healthcare like the UK, the default is that some other costs -- those of helping the children to have longer and/or better lives -- are paid by the government, and hence by everyone's taxes. You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that. You might want to identify some community that they belong to and somehow make them pay, but that's pretty difficult to do; the UK isn't set up to levy different taxes on (say) Muslims or people whose ancestors lived in Bangladesh or whatever, and on the whole that seems obviously a good thing. You might want to argue that in any case the nation shouldn't be paying, and that the NHS should refuse to treat whatever problems those children might have. In that case it will be the children who suffer; I personally am not a fan of making children suffer for their parents' bad decisions, but some people are. So the second question is certainly one that we could argue about. But the blogpost we are discussing never touches on that question. What the blogpost is about is the third question. Answering that is a matter of weighing the costs of X against the costs of making X illegal (loss of personal freedoms every time anything is made illegal; making some communities feel persecuted; loss of whatever benefits, if any, communities in which first-cousin marriage is practised get from it; making X happen illegally rather than legally, as opposed to making X not happen). That again is something that could reasonably be argued about, and the blogpost does argue about it. But, I repeat, it's an entirely separate question from the second one. So I continue to assert that the article wasn't about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". It didn't discuss that question at all. It discussed the entirely separate question of what measures if any should be taken to make there be fewer "people that do".
nailer 2mo ago
> https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/should-the-uk-government-ban-first-cousin-marriage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is. Thanks, I wasn't able to find an archive. I'm sure you noticed the quotes were accurate and I thank you for the support. > Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal. Nobody said they were. The argument was that cousin marriage should be illegal since it which doubles the rate of birth defects as the genomics article mentions. > "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]". But the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal is very far from "some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost", as I'm sure you're aware. > The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do" Yes, it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects. > the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): I'm sure you're as thankful for the right wing press for raising awareness of the matter, and likewise am disappointed about the left wing press for ignoring it.
- gjm11 2mo ago
  > Nobody said they were. No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal, and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the community's resources. And I am pointing out that in general the bar for making things illegal is, and should be, higher than that. > the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal That is not what happened. Someone wrote a blogpost saying "here's a thing that isn't illegal; some people are saying it should be illegal; here are some arguments for and against". That differs from "proposing that incest not be illegal" in the following three ways: (1) "proposing that X not be illegal" gives the strong impression that X is currently illegal, whereas in fact the thing in question is currently legal; (2) the relevant proposition is not "that incest not be illegal" but "that first-cousin marriage not be illegal"; first-cousin marriage is not incest in UK law, nor in many other jurisdictions' law, and no one[1] is even slightly proposing that incest in general should be legalized; (3) the blog post does not take the position that first-cousin marriage should definitely be legal. It does quote some other people and organizations that think it shouldn't be made illegal. [1] Well, I bet someone somewhere is. "All universal generalizations are false". But no such proposal is made or discussed in the blog post in question. I do agree that it seems likely that the author of the blogpost thinks that it wouldn't be a good idea to illegalize first-cousin marriage; but there is an important distinction between "putting up a blog post that seems on the whole not favourable to doing X" and "proposing that X not be done". > Yes it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects. It probably does. (Though you might recall, having now read the article, that it points out an expert's opinion that most of the increase in birth-defect risks in these communities comes not from the existence of first-cousin marriages in particular but from the general practice of marriages between somewhat-related people, which banning first-cousin marriages would not change.) But that's an entirely separate matter from whether the blogpost was about whether the NHS should pay for the resulting birth defects. Suppose the UK bans first-cousin marriages, and some people have children with their first cousins anyway, and some of the resulting children have birth defects. Should the NHS treat those children? I say: of course it should. Perhaps you would prefer to let the children suffer or die without whatever help the healthcare system could have offered them. But the blogpost doesn't address that at all. It isn't even slightly about who the NHS should treat. > I'm sure you're as thankful [...] Nope. The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me, and in any case its presence or absence surely makes zero difference to whether first-cousin marriages actually get made illegal or not, and to whether any given pair of first cousins actually get into one or not. I doubt the right-wing media feeding frenzy did either very much good or very much harm directly, but I bet it helped to stoke the widespread hate and fear of immigrants which seems like it might lead to the next government being run by Reform, who I firmly expect to be incompetent buffoons who will do a great deal of harm to the UK whether or not their positions on social wedge-issues like immigration, transgender people, etc., have any merit. As for the left-wing press, there isn't much of a left-wing press in this country; I suppose there's the Guardian and the Mirror but both are pretty milquetoast (which on the whole I am glad of; I think the more extreme forms of leftism are mostly misguided).

by gjm11 2mo ago

modo_mario 2mo ago

Regarding point 1 I refer to point 3 and regarding point 3 i refer to point 1.

gjm11 2mo ago
I don't think I understand; would you care to be more explicit?
- nailer 2mo ago
  Not the person you're asking but it's fairly obvious: > 1. things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources > 3. The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Increasing pressure on communities' resources is that community paying for people that engage in incest.
  - gjm11 2mo ago
    You are (and perhaps the other person also is) mixing up three questions. 1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal? In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have costs, one of which is that it increases the number of children born with genetic problems that make their lives worse and (if the government pays for medical treatment to mitigate them) costs money. So the answer to the first question is yes, and so far as I can tell no one disagrees. If some pairs of first cousins marry, and their children have genetic problems, then some of the costs are paid by those children. In a country with socialized healthcare like the UK, the default is that some other costs -- those of helping the children to have longer and/or better lives -- are paid by the government, and hence by everyone's taxes. You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that. You might want to identify some community that they belong to and somehow make them pay, but that's pretty difficult to do; the UK isn't set up to levy different taxes on (say) Muslims or people whose ancestors lived in Bangladesh or whatever, and on the whole that seems obviously a good thing. You might want to argue that in any case the nation shouldn't be paying, and that the NHS should refuse to treat whatever problems those children might have. In that case it will be the children who suffer; I personally am not a fan of making children suffer for their parents' bad decisions, but some people are. So the second question is certainly one that we could argue about. But the blogpost we are discussing never touches on that question. What the blogpost is about is the third question. Answering that is a matter of weighing the costs of X against the costs of making X illegal (loss of personal freedoms every time anything is made illegal; making some communities feel persecuted; loss of whatever benefits, if any, communities in which first-cousin marriage is practised get from it; making X happen illegally rather than legally, as opposed to making X not happen). That again is something that could reasonably be argued about, and the blogpost does argue about it. But, I repeat, it's an entirely separate question from the second one. So I continue to assert that the article wasn't about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". It didn't discuss that question at all. It discussed the entirely separate question of what measures if any should be taken to make there be fewer "people that do".

nailer 2mo ago

> https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/should-the-uk-government-ban-first-cousin-marriage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is. Thanks, I wasn't able to find an archive. I'm sure you noticed the quotes were accurate and I thank you for the support. > Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal. Nobody said they were. The argument was that cousin marriage should be illegal since it which doubles the rate of birth defects as the genomics article mentions. > "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]". But the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal is very far from "some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost", as I'm sure you're aware. > The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do" Yes, it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects. > the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): I'm sure you're as thankful for the right wing press for raising awareness of the matter, and likewise am disappointed about the left wing press for ignoring it.

gjm11 2mo ago
> Nobody said they were. No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal, and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the community's resources. And I am pointing out that in general the bar for making things illegal is, and should be, higher than that. > the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal That is not what happened. Someone wrote a blogpost saying "here's a thing that isn't illegal; some people are saying it should be illegal; here are some arguments for and against". That differs from "proposing that incest not be illegal" in the following three ways: (1) "proposing that X not be illegal" gives the strong impression that X is currently illegal, whereas in fact the thing in question is currently legal; (2) the relevant proposition is not "that incest not be illegal" but "that first-cousin marriage not be illegal"; first-cousin marriage is not incest in UK law, nor in many other jurisdictions' law, and no one[1] is even slightly proposing that incest in general should be legalized; (3) the blog post does not take the position that first-cousin marriage should definitely be legal. It does quote some other people and organizations that think it shouldn't be made illegal. [1] Well, I bet someone somewhere is. "All universal generalizations are false". But no such proposal is made or discussed in the blog post in question. I do agree that it seems likely that the author of the blogpost thinks that it wouldn't be a good idea to illegalize first-cousin marriage; but there is an important distinction between "putting up a blog post that seems on the whole not favourable to doing X" and "proposing that X not be done". > Yes it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects. It probably does. (Though you might recall, having now read the article, that it points out an expert's opinion that most of the increase in birth-defect risks in these communities comes not from the existence of first-cousin marriages in particular but from the general practice of marriages between somewhat-related people, which banning first-cousin marriages would not change.) But that's an entirely separate matter from whether the blogpost was about whether the NHS should pay for the resulting birth defects. Suppose the UK bans first-cousin marriages, and some people have children with their first cousins anyway, and some of the resulting children have birth defects. Should the NHS treat those children? I say: of course it should. Perhaps you would prefer to let the children suffer or die without whatever help the healthcare system could have offered them. But the blogpost doesn't address that at all. It isn't even slightly about who the NHS should treat. > I'm sure you're as thankful [...] Nope. The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me, and in any case its presence or absence surely makes zero difference to whether first-cousin marriages actually get made illegal or not, and to whether any given pair of first cousins actually get into one or not. I doubt the right-wing media feeding frenzy did either very much good or very much harm directly, but I bet it helped to stoke the widespread hate and fear of immigrants which seems like it might lead to the next government being run by Reform, who I firmly expect to be incompetent buffoons who will do a great deal of harm to the UK whether or not their positions on social wedge-issues like immigration, transgender people, etc., have any merit. As for the left-wing press, there isn't much of a left-wing press in this country; I suppose there's the Guardian and the Mirror but both are pretty milquetoast (which on the whole I am glad of; I think the more extreme forms of leftism are mostly misguided).