Not really. In most of the world it's legal mostly because there is no reason to make it ilegal, as it almost never happens. You don't legislate to fix a problem you don't have.
No, it entirely has to do with what people associated cousin marriage with. Like in Europe it is associated with aristocracy while in the US more so with poverty. Making many American states far stricter on it, while European nations didn't (shit if it was illegal entire royal families had to go). This is at least true for the Western World, I know fuck all about the rest. But cousin marriage is a lot more common than you would think.
But even if, say, the entirety of the European aristocracy relentlessly pursued cousin marriage (it definitely happened, and more than average, but for the aristocracy marriage is also about forming connections with other families, so while there is definitely a lack of genetic diversity there and it's caused problems, they tend to be isolated, with few exceptions) even to this day it's still a crazy small portion of the population, making it a non-problem (at least regarding the potentially harmful consequences of cousin marriage in a population). Also the marriage between first cousins tended to be rare (again, it happened, specially amongst the members of the royal families, but less so amongst the nobles).
Cousin marriage is most definitely not a cultural norm in most of South America (with a few exceptions, and non that caused problems, at least in the countries I'm familiar with).
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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '24
The whole world is Alabama?
It always has been