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conuly
They've gotta go now.
One on the decline of messageboards
It took my husband and me eight months to conceive our first child. Much of that time was passed in bored agitation, like a long wait at a Verizon Wireless store. To pass the time, swap information, and quiet my mind, I turned to an online message board for women who are Trying to Conceive — TTC, one of the first message-board acronyms I learned. Then, rapidly, I learned the rest of the lingo known to the voluble and surprisingly large community of women who turn to the Internet to ask intensely personal questions: TWW (two-week wait), BFN (“big fat negative”) and OPK (ovulator prediction kit).
That was in 2004. The message board was corny, but also a revelation. The voices on it were provocative, frequently ingenious and charged with emotion (and emoticons). Practical tips (and scientific reports) were exchanged, and subject to critique. Friendships were struck — and some even materialized in three-dimensional places like bars. Women whose posts suggested distress were often treated to “good vibes” and virtual hugs. You knew you’d been hugged on a message board when your screen name was rendered in double and triple parentheses, like this: (((you))).
Not to get too misty, but the board format itself might deserve a nostalgic embrace. The Internet forum, that great old standby of Web 1.0., has become an endangered species.
Many boards are stagnant or in decline, if they even still exist. Several once-thriving boards on the women’s site iVillage have closed up shop. Big fiction-fan boards haven’t seen real action in years. Last month, a once-popular eight-old-year British board about mental health went dark with a note: “The Internet has changed significantly.”
These are serious signs of the digital times. Message boards were key components of Web 1.0 — the Web before broadband, online video, social networking, advanced traffic analysis and the drive to monetize transformed it.
If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web, the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit. How else do you get crowds of not especially lucrative demographics like flashlight buffs (candlepowerforums.com), feminists (bust.com) and jazz aficionados (forums.allaboutjazz.com)? By contrast, the Web 2.0 juggernauts like Facebook and YouTube are driven by metrics and supported by ads and data mining. They’re networks, and super-fast — but not communities, which are inefficient, emotive and comfortable. Facebook — with its clean lines and social expressways — is Robert Moses par excellence.
Like other intimate forums — for baseball fans (baseball-fever.com), say, or inmates’ loved ones (prisonttalk.com) — the fertility board I visited borrowed traditions of anonymity, sharing and familial squabbling from the recovery movement that had its heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. The boards were always long on community, and short on dough. Between 1997 and 2007, they seemed to crop up everywhere. Though people who posted on these boards digressed almost as often as they stayed on topic, the forums flew under quite specific banners: not only video games, books, music and sex, but also Spanish cars, plastic surgery, grieving, paintball and bodybuilding. Only the very biggest, like fanfiction.net, sold ads; many ended up passing a hat for PayPal donations.
But the forums were spontaneous, rowdy and often inspired Internet neighborhoods. For millions of users, they quickly became synonymous with “The Internet.” They were well-populated. Today the ranking general-interest boards, like Off Topic and Something Awful, have more than 100 million posts. (The biggest board in the world, Gaia Online, a Japanese board devoted to role-playing and anime, has nearly 2 billion posts.)
Still, for all their importance to individual Web users, the boards were almost invisible to anyone intent on profiting off Web traffic — and so they’ve been nearly written out of the history of the Internet. A riveting 1997 article by Katie Hafner in Wired told of the rise and decline of The Well, a venerable online community that began in 1985, as part of the bygone dial-up bulletin board system. Historians have since written shelves full of books on Web search and e-commerce, but very few about message boards. (A notable exception is William Cast’s 2005 book “Going South,” about Yahoo’s HealthSouth board, which became a forum for the company’s angry employees and eventually gave investors tips about the company’s direction.)
A message board is different from a chat room in that its entries are archived. The archive becomes a key component of discussions, with many posters internally linking to and footnoting archived entries. When, in 2004, someone started a thread on a site for digital-video buffs called MovieCodec with “i am so lonely will anyone speak to me,” the spontaneous replies by pseudonymous posters — some sympathetic, some teasing — came to form a master document that’s both existential and hilarious. Collaborative documents like that one — made famous at the time in articles in Wired and The New Yorker — are what the Web loses when forum villagers flee for the Facebook megalopolis (population 750 million).
Lori Leibovich, the founder of Kvetch, the message board of which the fertility board was a part, told me she thought message boards were becoming “almost quaint, which I find sort of sad.” She likened boards like Kvetch to “group therapy,” adding that “conversations ’stay in the room’ and you’re invested in the individuals in the group. Social networks are about broadcasting. More about your persona than it is about you as a person.”
Sure, funny and stirring things happen on Facebook and Twitter, but their protocols, which stress accountability and striving over anonymity and play, tend to make social exchanges routine. The likelihood of an “i am so lonely” tone poem is reduced. I feel sure I wouldn’t post “((hugs))” to Twitter, either. “((Hugs))” belong in softer lighting; they don’t quite belong in the undignified glare in the fluorescent social networks.
I recently returned to AltDotLife, a big message board for women. At the top of the page, one of them wrote: “Is there reason to be concerned about the health of the board?” The writer hit the problem on the head. “We had about 20K-24K posts per month in 2008-09,” she wrote, “and that number has gotten gradually lower so that in the past several months, it’s been more like 13K-15K. And here we are 2/3 of the way through June and we’re at only 8365.”
She had some notion of what was up, and asked others to chime in. A chorus responded, suggesting that Facebook had snapped up some former posters, while others had just moved on.
“I used to come to ADL as a main source of chit chat with friends … but now I tend to go to FB for that,” one wrote. “My guess is that as time went on and the archives got larger and larger, many people are researching old topics rather than starting new threads,” another wrote. “Every possible topic has already been discussed.”
The lively analysis continued for several more posts, until the group had thoroughly sized up the state of affairs. Then the discussion petered out.
Answer for Invasive Species: Put It on a Plate and Eat It
With its dark red and black stripes, spotted fins and long venomous black spikes, the lionfish seems better suited for horror films than consumption. But lionfish fritters and filets may be on American tables soon.
An invasive species, the lionfish is devastating reef fish populations along the Florida coast and into the Caribbean. Now, an increasing number of environmentalists, consumer groups and scientists are seriously testing a novel solution to control it and other aquatic invasive species — one that would also takes pressure off depleted ocean fish stocks: they want Americans to step up to their plates and start eating invasive critters in large numbers.
“Humans are the most ubiquitous predators on earth,” said Philip Kramer, director of the Caribbean program for the Nature Conservancy. “Instead of eating something like shark fin soup, why not eat a species that is causing harm, and with your meal make a positive contribution?”
Invasive species have become a vexing problem in the United States, with population explosions of Asian carp clogging the Mississippi River and European green crabs mobbing the coasts. With few natural predators in North America, such fast-breeding species have thrived in American waters, eating native creatures and out-competing them for food and habitats.
While most invasive species are not commonly regarded as edible food, that is mostly a matter of marketing, experts say. Imagine menus where Asian carp substitutes for the threatened Chilean sea bass, or lionfish replaces grouper, which is overfished.
“We think there could be a real market,” said Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch, whose 2011 Smart Seafood Guide recommends for the first time that diners seek out invasive species as a “safer, more sustainable” alternative to their more dwindling relatives, to encourage fisherman and markets to provide them.
“What these species need now is a better — sexier — profile, and more cooks who know how to use them,” she said. She has enlisted celebrity chefs to promote eating the creatures.
Scientists emphasize that human consumption is only part of what is needed to control invasive species and restore native fish populations, and that a comprehensive plan must include restoring fish predators to depleted habitats and erecting physical barriers to prevent further dissemination of the invaders.
“We are not going to be able to just eat our way out of the invasive species problem,” Dr. Kramer said. “On the other hand, there are places where this can be a very useful part of the strategy.”
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is now exploring where it might be helpful. Models suggest that commercial harvest of Asian carp in the Mississippi would most likely help control populations there, “as part of an integrated pest management program,” said Valerie Fellows, a spokeswoman.
In practice, it is still unclear whether commercial fishing pressure could be high enough to have a significant impact, she said. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent millions of dollars to erect electronic barriers to keep Asian carp from moving from the Illinois River into the Great Lakes.
There are risks to whetting America’s appetite. Marketing an invasive species could make it so popular that “individuals would raise or release the fish” where they did not already exist, Ms. Fellows said, potentially exacerbating the problem; tilapia were originally imported into Latin America for weed and bug control, but commercialization helped the species spread far more widely than intended.
Dr. Kramer is concerned that the marketing of lionfish might increase the number of traps on reefs, which could trap other fish as well. He said spearfishing was the sustainable way to catch lionfish, which are reef dwellers.
Cookbooks do not say much about how to filet an Asian carp, which has an unusual bony structure. And even if one developed a taste for, say, European green crab soup, there is nowhere to buy the main ingredient, though it is plentiful in the sea.
To increase culinary demand, Food and Water Watch has teamed up with the James Beard Foundation and Kerry Heffernan, the chef at the South Gate restaurant in New York City, to devise recipes using the creatures. At a recent tasting, there was Asian carp ceviche and braised lionfish filet in brown butter sauce.
Lionfish, it turns out, looks hideous but tastes great. The group had to hire fishermen to catch animals commonly regarded as pests. Mr. Heffernan said he would consider putting them on his menu and was looking forward to getting some molting European green crabs to try in soft-shell crab recipes.
Last summer, the Nature Conservancy sponsored a lionfish food fair in the Bahamas, featuring lionfish fritters and more. They offered fishermen $11 a pound — about the price of grouper — and got an abundant supply. Lionfish, native to the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, arrived in the Caribbean in the early 1990s and are spreading rapidly; voracious eaters, they even eat juveniles of native fish.
Lionfish, like grouper, can carry ciguatoxin, which causes vomiting and neurological symptoms, so they cannot be taken from water where the microbe that produces the toxin is found. The fish’s venomous spines must be removed before sale, although that is not a serious marketing obstacle.
Mitchell Davis, vice president of the Beard Foundation, said other species had moved from being pariah pests to must-have items on American plates, like dandelion greens for salads.
Hasidic Sleuth’s Beat: Mean Streets of Brooklyn
JOE LEVIN, a private investigator in Brooklyn, was waiting to meet a new client in the parking lot of a kosher supermarket in Borough Park one recent morning. Glancing in the side-view mirror of his chauffeured sport utility vehicle, Mr. Levin said he liked this particular spot because he knew the manager, the delivery man and the security guard, who lets him borrow footage from the lot’s surveillance equipment.
Most of the time, though, Mr. Levin does his own snooping. On his iPad, he scrolled through photographs of people he was being paid about $100 an hour to follow, including a rebellious Hasidic girl in a white miniskirt and a long-bearded rabbi lighting a cigarette on the sidewalk.
“He’s a bad guy,” Mr. Levin said, enlarging the rabbi’s image. “A very bad guy.”
Not your usual private eye, Mr. Levin is a practicing Orthodox Jew, a member of the Bobov Hasidic sect and the founder of T.O.T. Private Investigation and Consulting, a New York-based company that specializes in Orthodox-related cases worldwide. The company, whose focus is uncommon — and perhaps unique in the United States — hires forensic experts, former homicide detectives, photographers and even pilots, mostly on a per-case basis. Its services range from investigations into international banks and Israeli investment companies to local background checks for prospective Shidduchim, or Orthodox marital arrangements.
Since Mr. Levin started the business 12 years ago, his life has often resembled the plot of a TV crime drama. He has trailed unwitting subjects into synagogues and strip clubs, sat beside them on international flights and tracked them down in remote areas of Puerto Rico and Brazil.
While he usually wears the black frock coat and fedora of the Hasidim, when undercover he has donned stocking caps and Yankees jerseys to conceal his brown knit skullcap and tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by observant Jews.
His organization’s mission is encoded in the name T.O.T., an acronym for the Yiddish expression “Tuchis afn tish.”
“It means ‘Put your tuchis on the table,’ ” said Mr. Levin, a bearded, powerfully built man in his late 30s, who shaved off his side locks years ago out of personal preference. “In other words, ‘Show me the proof.’ And that’s what I do. I bring my proof to the people.”
Mr. Levin has provided key evidence in dozens of high-profile cases. In November, he found Yitzhak Shuchat, a Hasidic man from Crown Heights whom the police were seeking as a suspect in the 2008 beating of a police officer’s son, in a village outside Tel Aviv. Though Mr. Levin was hired by a member of a Hasidic volunteer crime patrol, he turned his information over to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which has requested Mr. Shuchat’s extradition.
Mr. Levin said that information he learned in April led to the indictment of Rabbi Samuel Kellner of Brooklyn on charges that he had bribed a witness in a child molestation case against Baruch Mordechai Lebovits of Borough Park in an effort to extort money from Mr. Lebovits.
Mr. Levin was hired by the family of Mr. Lebovits after he was sentenced last year to up to 32 years in prison on a sexual abuse conviction. Mr. Lebovits has been released on bail pending the outcome of Rabbi Kellner’s trial.
Mr. Levin is intentionally vague about his background. He acknowledges that he served in the Israeli Army before moving to New York in 1994, but beyond that, he has managed to keep much of his life, and his livelihood, invisible.
“For years I tried to have not just a low profile, but no profile,” he said. “People would say to me, ‘I haven’t heard of you,’ and I’d say: ‘That’s great! If you’ve heard of me, you must have been in trouble.’ ”
Still, last year he started a Web site and began talking to the news media, figuring that he might as well capitalize on the publicized cases that had helped spread his name. But his main motivation, he said, was a growing concern for the safety of the Orthodox. Financial crime is on the rise in Orthodox neighborhoods, fueled, in Mr. Levin’s view, by the recession, high birth rates and a lack of higher education that keeps young people from getting high-paying jobs.
In the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for instance, police statistics show that while the number of violent crimes has fallen in the past 10 years, episodes of grand larceny have increased by more than 40 percent.
Unlike the retired government agents and police officials who often start their own private investigation companies, Mr. Levin can penetrate insular Orthodox strongholds without raising suspicion.
“There are a lot of intricate rules and coded behaviors that people from outside these communities don’t understand,” said Shmarya Rosenberg, a former Chabad-Lubavitch Hasid and the author of the muckraking blog FailedMessiah.com, who has interviewed Mr. Levin for several articles. “You might think you blend in at the synagogue, for example, but to the Hasidim, it’s as if a monkey in a spacesuit has just descended from outer space.”
As an Orthodox Jew, Mr. Levin is also allowed to testify in rabbinical court, where matters like divorces and business disputes are settled according to Jewish law. Rabbis who oversee these trials often refuse to look at the explicit evidence Mr. Levin collects, like photographs of a husband committing adultery. They will, however, take his personal testimony.
All the same, non-Jews come in handy on the Sabbath, when Mr. Levin is not able to work. “Saturday is a very busy day for mischief inside the Hasidic world,” he said, adding that he mainly hires off-duty police officers to cover for him until the sun goes down. “Everyone thinks we’re sleeping. But in reality we’re wide awake.”
Mr. Levin outsources jobs that are beyond his expertise. Some Orthodox people come to him with marital problems because, he said, they do not know that therapists and marriage counselors exist. He recalled one client from Long Island who suspected her husband of infidelity. “I asked if she still loved her husband, and she said yes,” he recalled. “So I told her, ‘Don’t hire me.’ Because if I come back with the evidence, it’s too late for the marriage counselor.”
When investigating Internet-related crimes like identity theft and e-mail harassment, he turns to a small cadre of computer forensics specialists.
In fact, the only time Mr. Levin sits at a computer is to post news stories of interest to Jews on his blog each morning. (Subjects of recent posts have included the Colombian singer Shakira’s visit to the Western Wall and the Twitter scandal of Anthony D. Weiner, the former representative.) Mr. Levin spends most of his day driving around Brooklyn to consult new clients, meet with lawyers and potential sources, and deal with unexpected twists in his cases.
On a recent job in Borough Park, he stared through the tinted windows of his S.U.V. at a nervous-looking Hasidic man on the sidewalk. Days earlier, the man had claimed to possess a videotape of a rabbi having sex with two underage girls.
Mr. Levin, who was dressed in a beige topcoat, Burberry sunglasses and a Nike baseball cap, expressed skepticism. “I’m not believing this baloney,” he said as his driver snapped photographs of the man through the windshield. “Look at how he’s pacing, and smoking cigarettes one after one. He’s not reliable, this guy.”
A few hours later, Mr. Levin met with the man and several others in an empty synagogue. It turned out that the videotape was actually held by a man who was not there, and who might hand it over in exchange for money, a prostitute and a new iPhone.
Back in the car, Mr. Levin said that because the holder of the tape was black, he would send a black off-duty police officer to try to recover it. “An Orthodox guy knocking on his door would not be a good start,” he said.
Though some members of the Orthodox faith say they have faced harassment or intimidation for committing even mildly subversive acts, Mr. Levin plays down the risks of spying and telling within the community. In rabbinical court, he said, the subjects of his investigations have become enraged. “They scream at me,” he said. “But that’s normal. Gradually they calm down.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Rosenberg of FailedMessiah said Mr. Levin faced a difficult choice when investigating big, newsworthy scandals. “You don’t want to draw bad publicity to the Orthodox faith,” he said, “but you also don’t want to see the crime continue.”
As a religious man, Mr. Levin says the crimes he sees pain him deeply.
“When I wake up in the morning, I pray to God and I want to believe that there are good people in the world,” he said. “But when I go to work every day and I see what I see, it’s a very big challenge for me.”
Mr. Levin’s wife of 13 years, Ruthie Levin, 33, said he often has trouble sleeping.
“Last night he was up every hour,” she said recently, sitting beside him outside their home. She added that the pressure of a new case involving two powerful rabbis was causing him stress.
Asked whether Mr. Levin had ever used his investigative skills in their relationship, she raised her eyebrows.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Before we met, he knew all the boys I’d ever dated. He knew everything about me.”
How did he come to know these things? “I’d been looking into it,” Mr. Levin said, cracking a smile. “Let’s put it like that.”
And lastly, an old article on cousin marriages
The comments are mostly hilarious, and I'll post some after.
WHEN Kimberly Spring-Winters told her mother she was in love, she didn’t expect a positive response — and she didn’t get one.
“It’s wrong, it’s taboo, nobody does that,” she recalled her mother saying.
But shortly after the conversation, Ms. Spring-Winters, 29, decided to marry the man she loved: her first cousin.
Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her “cusband,” proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends, and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not concerned about genetic defects, Ms. Spring-Winters said, and their fertility doctor told them he saw no problem with having children.
The couple — she is a second-grade teacher and he builds furniture — held their wedding last summer on a lake near this tiny town in central Pennsylvania. But their official marriage took place a month earlier in Maryland, at Annapolis City Hall, because marriage between first cousins is illegal in Pennsylvania — and in 24 other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — under laws enacted mostly in the 19th century.
While many people have a story about a secret cousin crush or kiss, most Americans find the idea of cousins marrying and having children disturbing or even repulsive. The cartoonish image of hillbilly cousins giving birth to cross-eyed, deformed and mentally disabled children has endured in the national psyche. But even in the United States — one of the few countries in the world where such unions are illegal — marriage between first cousins may be slowly emerging from the shadows.
Although it is still a long way from being widely accepted, in recent years cousin marriage has been drawing increased attention, as researchers study the potential health risks to children of cousins. And the couples themselves have begun to connect online, largely through a Web site called Cousincouples.com, which bills itself as “the world’s primary resource for romantic relationships among cousins,” and is trying to build support for overturning laws prohibiting cousin marriage.
For the most part, scientists studying the phenomenon worldwide are finding evidence that the risk of birth defects and mortality is less significant than previously thought. A widely disseminated study published in The Journal of Genetic Counseling in 2002 said that the risk of serious genetic defects like spina bifida and cystic fibrosis in the children of first cousins indeed exists but that it is rather small, 1.7 to 2.8 percentage points higher than for children of unrelated parents, who face a 3 to 4 percent risk — or about the equivalent of that in children of women giving birth in their early 40s. The study also said the risk of mortality for children of first cousins was 4.4 percentage points higher.
More-recent studies suggest that the risks may be even lower. In September, Alan Bittles, a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Murdoch University in Australia and one of the authors of the 2002 study, published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reported that the mortality rate was closer to 3.5 percentage points higher. He said he expected ongoing research to find the risk of defects to be lower than previously assumed as well.
“It’s never as simple as people make it out to be,” said Dr. Bittles, noting that very early studies did not account for factors like access to prenatal health care, and did not distinguish between couples like Ms. Spring-Winters and her husband, the first cousins in a family to marry, and those who are part of groups in which the practice is common over generations and has led to high rates of genetic disorders. “But the widely accepted scare stories — even within academia — and the belief that cousin marriage is inevitably harmful have declined in the face of some of the data we’ve been producing,” he said.
Dr. Bittles, who is working on an update of the 2002 study, and other researchers argue that laws against marriage between cousins were rooted in myth and moral objections, and that they amounted to genetic discrimination akin to eugenics or forced sterilization. People with severe disorders like Huntington’s disease, who have a 50 percent chance of passing it on to their offspring, are not barred from marrying because of the risk of genetic defects, he said, so cousins should not be, either.
Historically, marriage between cousins has been seen as desirable in many parts of the world, and even today, slightly more than 10 percent of marriages worldwide are between people who are second cousins or closer, Dr. Bittles said. In the United States, the percentage is thought to be much smaller, although it is difficult to estimate, since such marriages have long been an underground phenomenon, because of laws forbidding them and because of the lingering incest-related stigma.
Martin Ottenheimer, who wrote “Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage,” a 1996 book that was the first detailed examination of the issue in the United States, compared marriage between cousins to same-sex marriage. “People say, ‘If we permit this, what are we permitting? We’re down the slippery slope toward chaos. Then we’ll permit people to marry dogs,’ ” he said in an interview. “The stigma has stuck for so long.”
But others who have revisited the 2002 study warn that potential risks should not be downplayed.
Diane B. Paul, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a research associate in zoology at Harvard, was an author of a paper published last year in the journal PLoS Biology that described the difficulty of generalizing about the potential for birth defects or increased mortality in the children of cousins. Each couple’s risk depends on the individuals’ particular genetic makeup, she said, which means “it’s very difficult to determine.” And even the small average risk of defects reported in the 2002 study, she added, represents nearly double the risk to children of unrelated parents.
That kind of uncertainty doesn’t sit well with many people, including some legislators. Despite the efforts of some in Minnesota and New Hampshire to overturn state laws against cousin marriage after the 2002 study was published, it remains illegal there. And as of 2005, it is against the law in Texas as well.
The Texas ban was part of a law targeting polygamy, and the state representative who proposed it, Harvey Hilderbran, a Republican, said he would not have introduced a bill simply to prohibit marriage between cousins. Still, he said in an interview: “Cousins don’t get married just like siblings don’t get married. And when it happens you have a bad result. It’s just not the accepted normal thing.”
ALTHOUGH their mothers are sisters who are friendly and live only a half-hour apart, Ms. Spring-Winters and Mr. Winters barely knew each other growing up, because he spent most of his childhood with his paternal grandfather in a town about a half-hour away. The two connected a few years ago, when she was student teaching. Her aunt — who is now also her mother-in-law — suggested that on nights when the weather was bad, she stay with Mr. Winters, who lived closer than she did to her teaching assignment. She began to spend time with him, and the two grew close.
“I worried that people thought I was just resorting to my cousin because I couldn’t find anyone else,” Ms. Spring-Winters said.
As a religious Methodist, she said, she also worried that marrying her cousin would be wrong in the eyes of her church. But as it turned out, the Methodist Church has no official position on marriage between cousins, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which requires cousins to obtain dispensation before marrying. And after talking to a relative who is a Baptist minister, Ms. Spring-Winters said, she discovered that the Bible does not say anything explicitly negative about cousin marriage, although it does list examples of sexual impurity, including relations with “close relatives,” like sisters, stepchildren, grandchildren, aunts and stepsisters; and those between mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters.
“If the Bible said no, we wouldn’t have done it,” she said.
They are somewhat open about being cousins, and have told some friends, Ms. Spring-Winters said, but they don’t tell everyone.
Hanging in their home are photographs of each of them at different stages of their lives, from infancy to adulthood, paired in frames, along with pictures of their shared maternal grandparents and Mr. Winters’s 13-year-old son from a previous marriage. One picture of the couple embracing is in a frame with the word “cousins” written over the top and, along the bottom, “the most important thing in life is family.”
Ms. Spring-Winters’s mother, Eileen Spring, said that the photograph makes her uncomfortable, and that she has asked her daughter not to display it so prominently.
Mrs. Spring, a school nurse, has tried to make peace with herself about the relationship, she said, but it has been a struggle. She has been afraid to tell people about it, and when she has, she said, they have been shocked. Even in a small town in Pennsylvania, she said, it would be easier for her to tell people her daughter was a lesbian.
“I knew what people would be saying,” she said. “Nowadays anything goes, but they still don’t like cousins.”
She is worried about her future grandchildren, she added, partly because diabetes runs in the family, but also because she fears they will be treated as outcasts or ridiculed by their peers.
But when she found out her daughter wanted to marry her cousin, she said, “Even though I was torn, that little voice kept saying, ‘O.K., Eileen, you taught her to be her own person.’ ”
For other married cousins, though, family relations have deteriorated irrevocably.
One couple living in upstate New York, who spoke on the condition that their full names not be published, knew each other well while they were growing up. They spent holidays together and were regular pen pals. When they were teenagers, they began to acknowledge their romantic feelings, and 16 years ago, when Bob was 20 and his cousin was 18, they married.
“I must have asked her to marry me about a million times,” Bob said, but his cousin kept saying that it was wrong and that the family would not approve.
She was right.
They now have two daughters, 13 and 14, who are in good health, he said, but her parents — his aunt and uncle — refuse to speak to them. Their daughters have never met their maternal grandmother, and they met their maternal grandfather only once, at a funeral.
The couple, who live on a military base, have advised their daughters not to tell friends that their parents are cousins.
“We don’t typically tell folks,” Bob said. “We told our daughters, ‘It’s not something to be ashamed of, but if you tell your friends, your friends may trust you today, you may be good friends, however, roll the clock forward, people are fickle, and preteens and teens can be downright cruel.’ ”
But many cousin couples say they believe the happiness they’ve found together far outweighs the risk of offending other people.
Two first cousins, Kathy Rohrer, 52, and Dale Hollenbach, 70, hardly knew each other until a couple of years ago. After Mr. Hollenbach’s wife died in 2007, Ms. Rohrer wrote him a condolence letter, and he visited her at her home near Atlanta. She was married, but was in the process of divorcing, and over the next few months they spent time together.
“I was on a cloud nine,” Mr. Hollenbach said. “It’s like Kathy said, we didn’t know each other before, and then you meet somebody and it’s love at first sight.”
She was excited but nervous, she said, adding, “He was so much fun to be with, I just kept wishing he wasn’t my cousin.”
Then she found the Cousincouples.com site and said she realized “it wasn’t as strange as I originally thought.”
Last June, they had a small wedding in Georgia, where marriage between cousins is legal, with a horse-drawn carriage transporting them to and from the chapel. They said they both have adult children who were uncomfortable with the fact that they are cousins, but generally, family members have come around.
“What I tell everyone is that you don’t choose who you fall in love with,” said the new Mrs. Hollenbach. “You can deny your feelings, but that leads to being a miserable person who goes through life trying to find a partner just like your cousin. Which will never happen.”
~~~~~
And now, for the comments!
Just because some random Dr. says the "risk isnt great when first cousins have kids" doesnt mean that Dr. is correct.
The same goes for random NYTimes commenters who don't bother to give their credentials, probably because they don't have any.
Any doctor who says he can predict no genetic problems is irresponsible. I knew several southerners who were products of family marriages and one suffered all his life from colonic disturbance caused by his spinal defect.
You knew several, and only ONE had a spinal defect? And was that spinal defect genetic in origin? Don't bother to tell us!
They have three children, two are completely fine, one has Wilson's disease.
Well, cousin marriage probably didn't help, but given that 1% of the population is a carrier of this trait this could've easily happened anyway.
My problem with cousins marrying is because many children know their cousins. I would not have wanted to think that my cousin might have been thinking about me in a romantic way when I was 14. I realize that some of these people didn't know their cousins as young children, but you can't make laws based on that.
No, you also can't make laws based upon "Oh, if they knew each other as kids it'd be gross and icky!"
I mean, you can, but you really shouldn't. Would you ban next-door neighbors from marrying on the same reasoning?
My one and only first cousin, a very troubled man, is beset by mental illness, which afflicts my sister as well. My mother and my maternal uncle and grandmother had it, too.
My cousin never fathered children, and my sister had her tubes tied in her twenties, so the disease has disappeared from the family tree.
I shudder to think what might have happened if my cousin and sister had been attracted to each other romantically, married, and had kids together. The states that permit first-cousin marriage with genetic counseling are wise indeed.
What would've happened if they'd both met people in the waiting room to see their shrink, and fallen in love with some stranger with the same condition? It's not just cousins who may share genetic diseases, after all. (That's what really gets me, the whole illogic of it all.)
If this kind of marriage continues for generations, then it would be a huge problem. Ask the Ashkenazi's or the Amish. In medical school, most of the rare recessive genetic diseases are described in these groups of people. The science is clear. If everyone did this, it would be a huge problem.
Sure, it's unlikely that people will be marrying close relatives en masse. I still think that sanctioning this is irresponsible.
1. In groups like the Amish and, heck, Ashkenazi Jews, there's historically been more compelling reasons for marrying within the group than just "Oh, hey, I like my cousin!" And notice that that went on for generations and generations.
2. And if everybody were gay, they wouldn't have any kids and the human race would die out. (And then I guess it wouldn't matter if they'd married their cousins or not.) Absurd argument, especially as it's not going to happen.
One on the decline of messageboards
It took my husband and me eight months to conceive our first child. Much of that time was passed in bored agitation, like a long wait at a Verizon Wireless store. To pass the time, swap information, and quiet my mind, I turned to an online message board for women who are Trying to Conceive — TTC, one of the first message-board acronyms I learned. Then, rapidly, I learned the rest of the lingo known to the voluble and surprisingly large community of women who turn to the Internet to ask intensely personal questions: TWW (two-week wait), BFN (“big fat negative”) and OPK (ovulator prediction kit).
That was in 2004. The message board was corny, but also a revelation. The voices on it were provocative, frequently ingenious and charged with emotion (and emoticons). Practical tips (and scientific reports) were exchanged, and subject to critique. Friendships were struck — and some even materialized in three-dimensional places like bars. Women whose posts suggested distress were often treated to “good vibes” and virtual hugs. You knew you’d been hugged on a message board when your screen name was rendered in double and triple parentheses, like this: (((you))).
Not to get too misty, but the board format itself might deserve a nostalgic embrace. The Internet forum, that great old standby of Web 1.0., has become an endangered species.
Many boards are stagnant or in decline, if they even still exist. Several once-thriving boards on the women’s site iVillage have closed up shop. Big fiction-fan boards haven’t seen real action in years. Last month, a once-popular eight-old-year British board about mental health went dark with a note: “The Internet has changed significantly.”
These are serious signs of the digital times. Message boards were key components of Web 1.0 — the Web before broadband, online video, social networking, advanced traffic analysis and the drive to monetize transformed it.
If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web, the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit. How else do you get crowds of not especially lucrative demographics like flashlight buffs (candlepowerforums.com), feminists (bust.com) and jazz aficionados (forums.allaboutjazz.com)? By contrast, the Web 2.0 juggernauts like Facebook and YouTube are driven by metrics and supported by ads and data mining. They’re networks, and super-fast — but not communities, which are inefficient, emotive and comfortable. Facebook — with its clean lines and social expressways — is Robert Moses par excellence.
Like other intimate forums — for baseball fans (baseball-fever.com), say, or inmates’ loved ones (prisonttalk.com) — the fertility board I visited borrowed traditions of anonymity, sharing and familial squabbling from the recovery movement that had its heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. The boards were always long on community, and short on dough. Between 1997 and 2007, they seemed to crop up everywhere. Though people who posted on these boards digressed almost as often as they stayed on topic, the forums flew under quite specific banners: not only video games, books, music and sex, but also Spanish cars, plastic surgery, grieving, paintball and bodybuilding. Only the very biggest, like fanfiction.net, sold ads; many ended up passing a hat for PayPal donations.
But the forums were spontaneous, rowdy and often inspired Internet neighborhoods. For millions of users, they quickly became synonymous with “The Internet.” They were well-populated. Today the ranking general-interest boards, like Off Topic and Something Awful, have more than 100 million posts. (The biggest board in the world, Gaia Online, a Japanese board devoted to role-playing and anime, has nearly 2 billion posts.)
Still, for all their importance to individual Web users, the boards were almost invisible to anyone intent on profiting off Web traffic — and so they’ve been nearly written out of the history of the Internet. A riveting 1997 article by Katie Hafner in Wired told of the rise and decline of The Well, a venerable online community that began in 1985, as part of the bygone dial-up bulletin board system. Historians have since written shelves full of books on Web search and e-commerce, but very few about message boards. (A notable exception is William Cast’s 2005 book “Going South,” about Yahoo’s HealthSouth board, which became a forum for the company’s angry employees and eventually gave investors tips about the company’s direction.)
A message board is different from a chat room in that its entries are archived. The archive becomes a key component of discussions, with many posters internally linking to and footnoting archived entries. When, in 2004, someone started a thread on a site for digital-video buffs called MovieCodec with “i am so lonely will anyone speak to me,” the spontaneous replies by pseudonymous posters — some sympathetic, some teasing — came to form a master document that’s both existential and hilarious. Collaborative documents like that one — made famous at the time in articles in Wired and The New Yorker — are what the Web loses when forum villagers flee for the Facebook megalopolis (population 750 million).
Lori Leibovich, the founder of Kvetch, the message board of which the fertility board was a part, told me she thought message boards were becoming “almost quaint, which I find sort of sad.” She likened boards like Kvetch to “group therapy,” adding that “conversations ’stay in the room’ and you’re invested in the individuals in the group. Social networks are about broadcasting. More about your persona than it is about you as a person.”
Sure, funny and stirring things happen on Facebook and Twitter, but their protocols, which stress accountability and striving over anonymity and play, tend to make social exchanges routine. The likelihood of an “i am so lonely” tone poem is reduced. I feel sure I wouldn’t post “((hugs))” to Twitter, either. “((Hugs))” belong in softer lighting; they don’t quite belong in the undignified glare in the fluorescent social networks.
I recently returned to AltDotLife, a big message board for women. At the top of the page, one of them wrote: “Is there reason to be concerned about the health of the board?” The writer hit the problem on the head. “We had about 20K-24K posts per month in 2008-09,” she wrote, “and that number has gotten gradually lower so that in the past several months, it’s been more like 13K-15K. And here we are 2/3 of the way through June and we’re at only 8365.”
She had some notion of what was up, and asked others to chime in. A chorus responded, suggesting that Facebook had snapped up some former posters, while others had just moved on.
“I used to come to ADL as a main source of chit chat with friends … but now I tend to go to FB for that,” one wrote. “My guess is that as time went on and the archives got larger and larger, many people are researching old topics rather than starting new threads,” another wrote. “Every possible topic has already been discussed.”
The lively analysis continued for several more posts, until the group had thoroughly sized up the state of affairs. Then the discussion petered out.
Answer for Invasive Species: Put It on a Plate and Eat It
With its dark red and black stripes, spotted fins and long venomous black spikes, the lionfish seems better suited for horror films than consumption. But lionfish fritters and filets may be on American tables soon.
An invasive species, the lionfish is devastating reef fish populations along the Florida coast and into the Caribbean. Now, an increasing number of environmentalists, consumer groups and scientists are seriously testing a novel solution to control it and other aquatic invasive species — one that would also takes pressure off depleted ocean fish stocks: they want Americans to step up to their plates and start eating invasive critters in large numbers.
“Humans are the most ubiquitous predators on earth,” said Philip Kramer, director of the Caribbean program for the Nature Conservancy. “Instead of eating something like shark fin soup, why not eat a species that is causing harm, and with your meal make a positive contribution?”
Invasive species have become a vexing problem in the United States, with population explosions of Asian carp clogging the Mississippi River and European green crabs mobbing the coasts. With few natural predators in North America, such fast-breeding species have thrived in American waters, eating native creatures and out-competing them for food and habitats.
While most invasive species are not commonly regarded as edible food, that is mostly a matter of marketing, experts say. Imagine menus where Asian carp substitutes for the threatened Chilean sea bass, or lionfish replaces grouper, which is overfished.
“We think there could be a real market,” said Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch, whose 2011 Smart Seafood Guide recommends for the first time that diners seek out invasive species as a “safer, more sustainable” alternative to their more dwindling relatives, to encourage fisherman and markets to provide them.
“What these species need now is a better — sexier — profile, and more cooks who know how to use them,” she said. She has enlisted celebrity chefs to promote eating the creatures.
Scientists emphasize that human consumption is only part of what is needed to control invasive species and restore native fish populations, and that a comprehensive plan must include restoring fish predators to depleted habitats and erecting physical barriers to prevent further dissemination of the invaders.
“We are not going to be able to just eat our way out of the invasive species problem,” Dr. Kramer said. “On the other hand, there are places where this can be a very useful part of the strategy.”
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is now exploring where it might be helpful. Models suggest that commercial harvest of Asian carp in the Mississippi would most likely help control populations there, “as part of an integrated pest management program,” said Valerie Fellows, a spokeswoman.
In practice, it is still unclear whether commercial fishing pressure could be high enough to have a significant impact, she said. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent millions of dollars to erect electronic barriers to keep Asian carp from moving from the Illinois River into the Great Lakes.
There are risks to whetting America’s appetite. Marketing an invasive species could make it so popular that “individuals would raise or release the fish” where they did not already exist, Ms. Fellows said, potentially exacerbating the problem; tilapia were originally imported into Latin America for weed and bug control, but commercialization helped the species spread far more widely than intended.
Dr. Kramer is concerned that the marketing of lionfish might increase the number of traps on reefs, which could trap other fish as well. He said spearfishing was the sustainable way to catch lionfish, which are reef dwellers.
Cookbooks do not say much about how to filet an Asian carp, which has an unusual bony structure. And even if one developed a taste for, say, European green crab soup, there is nowhere to buy the main ingredient, though it is plentiful in the sea.
To increase culinary demand, Food and Water Watch has teamed up with the James Beard Foundation and Kerry Heffernan, the chef at the South Gate restaurant in New York City, to devise recipes using the creatures. At a recent tasting, there was Asian carp ceviche and braised lionfish filet in brown butter sauce.
Lionfish, it turns out, looks hideous but tastes great. The group had to hire fishermen to catch animals commonly regarded as pests. Mr. Heffernan said he would consider putting them on his menu and was looking forward to getting some molting European green crabs to try in soft-shell crab recipes.
Last summer, the Nature Conservancy sponsored a lionfish food fair in the Bahamas, featuring lionfish fritters and more. They offered fishermen $11 a pound — about the price of grouper — and got an abundant supply. Lionfish, native to the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, arrived in the Caribbean in the early 1990s and are spreading rapidly; voracious eaters, they even eat juveniles of native fish.
Lionfish, like grouper, can carry ciguatoxin, which causes vomiting and neurological symptoms, so they cannot be taken from water where the microbe that produces the toxin is found. The fish’s venomous spines must be removed before sale, although that is not a serious marketing obstacle.
Mitchell Davis, vice president of the Beard Foundation, said other species had moved from being pariah pests to must-have items on American plates, like dandelion greens for salads.
Hasidic Sleuth’s Beat: Mean Streets of Brooklyn
JOE LEVIN, a private investigator in Brooklyn, was waiting to meet a new client in the parking lot of a kosher supermarket in Borough Park one recent morning. Glancing in the side-view mirror of his chauffeured sport utility vehicle, Mr. Levin said he liked this particular spot because he knew the manager, the delivery man and the security guard, who lets him borrow footage from the lot’s surveillance equipment.
Most of the time, though, Mr. Levin does his own snooping. On his iPad, he scrolled through photographs of people he was being paid about $100 an hour to follow, including a rebellious Hasidic girl in a white miniskirt and a long-bearded rabbi lighting a cigarette on the sidewalk.
“He’s a bad guy,” Mr. Levin said, enlarging the rabbi’s image. “A very bad guy.”
Not your usual private eye, Mr. Levin is a practicing Orthodox Jew, a member of the Bobov Hasidic sect and the founder of T.O.T. Private Investigation and Consulting, a New York-based company that specializes in Orthodox-related cases worldwide. The company, whose focus is uncommon — and perhaps unique in the United States — hires forensic experts, former homicide detectives, photographers and even pilots, mostly on a per-case basis. Its services range from investigations into international banks and Israeli investment companies to local background checks for prospective Shidduchim, or Orthodox marital arrangements.
Since Mr. Levin started the business 12 years ago, his life has often resembled the plot of a TV crime drama. He has trailed unwitting subjects into synagogues and strip clubs, sat beside them on international flights and tracked them down in remote areas of Puerto Rico and Brazil.
While he usually wears the black frock coat and fedora of the Hasidim, when undercover he has donned stocking caps and Yankees jerseys to conceal his brown knit skullcap and tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by observant Jews.
His organization’s mission is encoded in the name T.O.T., an acronym for the Yiddish expression “Tuchis afn tish.”
“It means ‘Put your tuchis on the table,’ ” said Mr. Levin, a bearded, powerfully built man in his late 30s, who shaved off his side locks years ago out of personal preference. “In other words, ‘Show me the proof.’ And that’s what I do. I bring my proof to the people.”
Mr. Levin has provided key evidence in dozens of high-profile cases. In November, he found Yitzhak Shuchat, a Hasidic man from Crown Heights whom the police were seeking as a suspect in the 2008 beating of a police officer’s son, in a village outside Tel Aviv. Though Mr. Levin was hired by a member of a Hasidic volunteer crime patrol, he turned his information over to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which has requested Mr. Shuchat’s extradition.
Mr. Levin said that information he learned in April led to the indictment of Rabbi Samuel Kellner of Brooklyn on charges that he had bribed a witness in a child molestation case against Baruch Mordechai Lebovits of Borough Park in an effort to extort money from Mr. Lebovits.
Mr. Levin was hired by the family of Mr. Lebovits after he was sentenced last year to up to 32 years in prison on a sexual abuse conviction. Mr. Lebovits has been released on bail pending the outcome of Rabbi Kellner’s trial.
Mr. Levin is intentionally vague about his background. He acknowledges that he served in the Israeli Army before moving to New York in 1994, but beyond that, he has managed to keep much of his life, and his livelihood, invisible.
“For years I tried to have not just a low profile, but no profile,” he said. “People would say to me, ‘I haven’t heard of you,’ and I’d say: ‘That’s great! If you’ve heard of me, you must have been in trouble.’ ”
Still, last year he started a Web site and began talking to the news media, figuring that he might as well capitalize on the publicized cases that had helped spread his name. But his main motivation, he said, was a growing concern for the safety of the Orthodox. Financial crime is on the rise in Orthodox neighborhoods, fueled, in Mr. Levin’s view, by the recession, high birth rates and a lack of higher education that keeps young people from getting high-paying jobs.
In the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for instance, police statistics show that while the number of violent crimes has fallen in the past 10 years, episodes of grand larceny have increased by more than 40 percent.
Unlike the retired government agents and police officials who often start their own private investigation companies, Mr. Levin can penetrate insular Orthodox strongholds without raising suspicion.
“There are a lot of intricate rules and coded behaviors that people from outside these communities don’t understand,” said Shmarya Rosenberg, a former Chabad-Lubavitch Hasid and the author of the muckraking blog FailedMessiah.com, who has interviewed Mr. Levin for several articles. “You might think you blend in at the synagogue, for example, but to the Hasidim, it’s as if a monkey in a spacesuit has just descended from outer space.”
As an Orthodox Jew, Mr. Levin is also allowed to testify in rabbinical court, where matters like divorces and business disputes are settled according to Jewish law. Rabbis who oversee these trials often refuse to look at the explicit evidence Mr. Levin collects, like photographs of a husband committing adultery. They will, however, take his personal testimony.
All the same, non-Jews come in handy on the Sabbath, when Mr. Levin is not able to work. “Saturday is a very busy day for mischief inside the Hasidic world,” he said, adding that he mainly hires off-duty police officers to cover for him until the sun goes down. “Everyone thinks we’re sleeping. But in reality we’re wide awake.”
Mr. Levin outsources jobs that are beyond his expertise. Some Orthodox people come to him with marital problems because, he said, they do not know that therapists and marriage counselors exist. He recalled one client from Long Island who suspected her husband of infidelity. “I asked if she still loved her husband, and she said yes,” he recalled. “So I told her, ‘Don’t hire me.’ Because if I come back with the evidence, it’s too late for the marriage counselor.”
When investigating Internet-related crimes like identity theft and e-mail harassment, he turns to a small cadre of computer forensics specialists.
In fact, the only time Mr. Levin sits at a computer is to post news stories of interest to Jews on his blog each morning. (Subjects of recent posts have included the Colombian singer Shakira’s visit to the Western Wall and the Twitter scandal of Anthony D. Weiner, the former representative.) Mr. Levin spends most of his day driving around Brooklyn to consult new clients, meet with lawyers and potential sources, and deal with unexpected twists in his cases.
On a recent job in Borough Park, he stared through the tinted windows of his S.U.V. at a nervous-looking Hasidic man on the sidewalk. Days earlier, the man had claimed to possess a videotape of a rabbi having sex with two underage girls.
Mr. Levin, who was dressed in a beige topcoat, Burberry sunglasses and a Nike baseball cap, expressed skepticism. “I’m not believing this baloney,” he said as his driver snapped photographs of the man through the windshield. “Look at how he’s pacing, and smoking cigarettes one after one. He’s not reliable, this guy.”
A few hours later, Mr. Levin met with the man and several others in an empty synagogue. It turned out that the videotape was actually held by a man who was not there, and who might hand it over in exchange for money, a prostitute and a new iPhone.
Back in the car, Mr. Levin said that because the holder of the tape was black, he would send a black off-duty police officer to try to recover it. “An Orthodox guy knocking on his door would not be a good start,” he said.
Though some members of the Orthodox faith say they have faced harassment or intimidation for committing even mildly subversive acts, Mr. Levin plays down the risks of spying and telling within the community. In rabbinical court, he said, the subjects of his investigations have become enraged. “They scream at me,” he said. “But that’s normal. Gradually they calm down.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Rosenberg of FailedMessiah said Mr. Levin faced a difficult choice when investigating big, newsworthy scandals. “You don’t want to draw bad publicity to the Orthodox faith,” he said, “but you also don’t want to see the crime continue.”
As a religious man, Mr. Levin says the crimes he sees pain him deeply.
“When I wake up in the morning, I pray to God and I want to believe that there are good people in the world,” he said. “But when I go to work every day and I see what I see, it’s a very big challenge for me.”
Mr. Levin’s wife of 13 years, Ruthie Levin, 33, said he often has trouble sleeping.
“Last night he was up every hour,” she said recently, sitting beside him outside their home. She added that the pressure of a new case involving two powerful rabbis was causing him stress.
Asked whether Mr. Levin had ever used his investigative skills in their relationship, she raised her eyebrows.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Before we met, he knew all the boys I’d ever dated. He knew everything about me.”
How did he come to know these things? “I’d been looking into it,” Mr. Levin said, cracking a smile. “Let’s put it like that.”
And lastly, an old article on cousin marriages
The comments are mostly hilarious, and I'll post some after.
WHEN Kimberly Spring-Winters told her mother she was in love, she didn’t expect a positive response — and she didn’t get one.
“It’s wrong, it’s taboo, nobody does that,” she recalled her mother saying.
But shortly after the conversation, Ms. Spring-Winters, 29, decided to marry the man she loved: her first cousin.
Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her “cusband,” proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends, and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not concerned about genetic defects, Ms. Spring-Winters said, and their fertility doctor told them he saw no problem with having children.
The couple — she is a second-grade teacher and he builds furniture — held their wedding last summer on a lake near this tiny town in central Pennsylvania. But their official marriage took place a month earlier in Maryland, at Annapolis City Hall, because marriage between first cousins is illegal in Pennsylvania — and in 24 other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — under laws enacted mostly in the 19th century.
While many people have a story about a secret cousin crush or kiss, most Americans find the idea of cousins marrying and having children disturbing or even repulsive. The cartoonish image of hillbilly cousins giving birth to cross-eyed, deformed and mentally disabled children has endured in the national psyche. But even in the United States — one of the few countries in the world where such unions are illegal — marriage between first cousins may be slowly emerging from the shadows.
Although it is still a long way from being widely accepted, in recent years cousin marriage has been drawing increased attention, as researchers study the potential health risks to children of cousins. And the couples themselves have begun to connect online, largely through a Web site called Cousincouples.com, which bills itself as “the world’s primary resource for romantic relationships among cousins,” and is trying to build support for overturning laws prohibiting cousin marriage.
For the most part, scientists studying the phenomenon worldwide are finding evidence that the risk of birth defects and mortality is less significant than previously thought. A widely disseminated study published in The Journal of Genetic Counseling in 2002 said that the risk of serious genetic defects like spina bifida and cystic fibrosis in the children of first cousins indeed exists but that it is rather small, 1.7 to 2.8 percentage points higher than for children of unrelated parents, who face a 3 to 4 percent risk — or about the equivalent of that in children of women giving birth in their early 40s. The study also said the risk of mortality for children of first cousins was 4.4 percentage points higher.
More-recent studies suggest that the risks may be even lower. In September, Alan Bittles, a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Murdoch University in Australia and one of the authors of the 2002 study, published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reported that the mortality rate was closer to 3.5 percentage points higher. He said he expected ongoing research to find the risk of defects to be lower than previously assumed as well.
“It’s never as simple as people make it out to be,” said Dr. Bittles, noting that very early studies did not account for factors like access to prenatal health care, and did not distinguish between couples like Ms. Spring-Winters and her husband, the first cousins in a family to marry, and those who are part of groups in which the practice is common over generations and has led to high rates of genetic disorders. “But the widely accepted scare stories — even within academia — and the belief that cousin marriage is inevitably harmful have declined in the face of some of the data we’ve been producing,” he said.
Dr. Bittles, who is working on an update of the 2002 study, and other researchers argue that laws against marriage between cousins were rooted in myth and moral objections, and that they amounted to genetic discrimination akin to eugenics or forced sterilization. People with severe disorders like Huntington’s disease, who have a 50 percent chance of passing it on to their offspring, are not barred from marrying because of the risk of genetic defects, he said, so cousins should not be, either.
Historically, marriage between cousins has been seen as desirable in many parts of the world, and even today, slightly more than 10 percent of marriages worldwide are between people who are second cousins or closer, Dr. Bittles said. In the United States, the percentage is thought to be much smaller, although it is difficult to estimate, since such marriages have long been an underground phenomenon, because of laws forbidding them and because of the lingering incest-related stigma.
Martin Ottenheimer, who wrote “Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage,” a 1996 book that was the first detailed examination of the issue in the United States, compared marriage between cousins to same-sex marriage. “People say, ‘If we permit this, what are we permitting? We’re down the slippery slope toward chaos. Then we’ll permit people to marry dogs,’ ” he said in an interview. “The stigma has stuck for so long.”
But others who have revisited the 2002 study warn that potential risks should not be downplayed.
Diane B. Paul, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a research associate in zoology at Harvard, was an author of a paper published last year in the journal PLoS Biology that described the difficulty of generalizing about the potential for birth defects or increased mortality in the children of cousins. Each couple’s risk depends on the individuals’ particular genetic makeup, she said, which means “it’s very difficult to determine.” And even the small average risk of defects reported in the 2002 study, she added, represents nearly double the risk to children of unrelated parents.
That kind of uncertainty doesn’t sit well with many people, including some legislators. Despite the efforts of some in Minnesota and New Hampshire to overturn state laws against cousin marriage after the 2002 study was published, it remains illegal there. And as of 2005, it is against the law in Texas as well.
The Texas ban was part of a law targeting polygamy, and the state representative who proposed it, Harvey Hilderbran, a Republican, said he would not have introduced a bill simply to prohibit marriage between cousins. Still, he said in an interview: “Cousins don’t get married just like siblings don’t get married. And when it happens you have a bad result. It’s just not the accepted normal thing.”
ALTHOUGH their mothers are sisters who are friendly and live only a half-hour apart, Ms. Spring-Winters and Mr. Winters barely knew each other growing up, because he spent most of his childhood with his paternal grandfather in a town about a half-hour away. The two connected a few years ago, when she was student teaching. Her aunt — who is now also her mother-in-law — suggested that on nights when the weather was bad, she stay with Mr. Winters, who lived closer than she did to her teaching assignment. She began to spend time with him, and the two grew close.
“I worried that people thought I was just resorting to my cousin because I couldn’t find anyone else,” Ms. Spring-Winters said.
As a religious Methodist, she said, she also worried that marrying her cousin would be wrong in the eyes of her church. But as it turned out, the Methodist Church has no official position on marriage between cousins, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which requires cousins to obtain dispensation before marrying. And after talking to a relative who is a Baptist minister, Ms. Spring-Winters said, she discovered that the Bible does not say anything explicitly negative about cousin marriage, although it does list examples of sexual impurity, including relations with “close relatives,” like sisters, stepchildren, grandchildren, aunts and stepsisters; and those between mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters.
“If the Bible said no, we wouldn’t have done it,” she said.
They are somewhat open about being cousins, and have told some friends, Ms. Spring-Winters said, but they don’t tell everyone.
Hanging in their home are photographs of each of them at different stages of their lives, from infancy to adulthood, paired in frames, along with pictures of their shared maternal grandparents and Mr. Winters’s 13-year-old son from a previous marriage. One picture of the couple embracing is in a frame with the word “cousins” written over the top and, along the bottom, “the most important thing in life is family.”
Ms. Spring-Winters’s mother, Eileen Spring, said that the photograph makes her uncomfortable, and that she has asked her daughter not to display it so prominently.
Mrs. Spring, a school nurse, has tried to make peace with herself about the relationship, she said, but it has been a struggle. She has been afraid to tell people about it, and when she has, she said, they have been shocked. Even in a small town in Pennsylvania, she said, it would be easier for her to tell people her daughter was a lesbian.
“I knew what people would be saying,” she said. “Nowadays anything goes, but they still don’t like cousins.”
She is worried about her future grandchildren, she added, partly because diabetes runs in the family, but also because she fears they will be treated as outcasts or ridiculed by their peers.
But when she found out her daughter wanted to marry her cousin, she said, “Even though I was torn, that little voice kept saying, ‘O.K., Eileen, you taught her to be her own person.’ ”
For other married cousins, though, family relations have deteriorated irrevocably.
One couple living in upstate New York, who spoke on the condition that their full names not be published, knew each other well while they were growing up. They spent holidays together and were regular pen pals. When they were teenagers, they began to acknowledge their romantic feelings, and 16 years ago, when Bob was 20 and his cousin was 18, they married.
“I must have asked her to marry me about a million times,” Bob said, but his cousin kept saying that it was wrong and that the family would not approve.
She was right.
They now have two daughters, 13 and 14, who are in good health, he said, but her parents — his aunt and uncle — refuse to speak to them. Their daughters have never met their maternal grandmother, and they met their maternal grandfather only once, at a funeral.
The couple, who live on a military base, have advised their daughters not to tell friends that their parents are cousins.
“We don’t typically tell folks,” Bob said. “We told our daughters, ‘It’s not something to be ashamed of, but if you tell your friends, your friends may trust you today, you may be good friends, however, roll the clock forward, people are fickle, and preteens and teens can be downright cruel.’ ”
But many cousin couples say they believe the happiness they’ve found together far outweighs the risk of offending other people.
Two first cousins, Kathy Rohrer, 52, and Dale Hollenbach, 70, hardly knew each other until a couple of years ago. After Mr. Hollenbach’s wife died in 2007, Ms. Rohrer wrote him a condolence letter, and he visited her at her home near Atlanta. She was married, but was in the process of divorcing, and over the next few months they spent time together.
“I was on a cloud nine,” Mr. Hollenbach said. “It’s like Kathy said, we didn’t know each other before, and then you meet somebody and it’s love at first sight.”
She was excited but nervous, she said, adding, “He was so much fun to be with, I just kept wishing he wasn’t my cousin.”
Then she found the Cousincouples.com site and said she realized “it wasn’t as strange as I originally thought.”
Last June, they had a small wedding in Georgia, where marriage between cousins is legal, with a horse-drawn carriage transporting them to and from the chapel. They said they both have adult children who were uncomfortable with the fact that they are cousins, but generally, family members have come around.
“What I tell everyone is that you don’t choose who you fall in love with,” said the new Mrs. Hollenbach. “You can deny your feelings, but that leads to being a miserable person who goes through life trying to find a partner just like your cousin. Which will never happen.”
And now, for the comments!
Just because some random Dr. says the "risk isnt great when first cousins have kids" doesnt mean that Dr. is correct.
The same goes for random NYTimes commenters who don't bother to give their credentials, probably because they don't have any.
Any doctor who says he can predict no genetic problems is irresponsible. I knew several southerners who were products of family marriages and one suffered all his life from colonic disturbance caused by his spinal defect.
You knew several, and only ONE had a spinal defect? And was that spinal defect genetic in origin? Don't bother to tell us!
They have three children, two are completely fine, one has Wilson's disease.
Well, cousin marriage probably didn't help, but given that 1% of the population is a carrier of this trait this could've easily happened anyway.
My problem with cousins marrying is because many children know their cousins. I would not have wanted to think that my cousin might have been thinking about me in a romantic way when I was 14. I realize that some of these people didn't know their cousins as young children, but you can't make laws based on that.
No, you also can't make laws based upon "Oh, if they knew each other as kids it'd be gross and icky!"
I mean, you can, but you really shouldn't. Would you ban next-door neighbors from marrying on the same reasoning?
My one and only first cousin, a very troubled man, is beset by mental illness, which afflicts my sister as well. My mother and my maternal uncle and grandmother had it, too.
My cousin never fathered children, and my sister had her tubes tied in her twenties, so the disease has disappeared from the family tree.
I shudder to think what might have happened if my cousin and sister had been attracted to each other romantically, married, and had kids together. The states that permit first-cousin marriage with genetic counseling are wise indeed.
What would've happened if they'd both met people in the waiting room to see their shrink, and fallen in love with some stranger with the same condition? It's not just cousins who may share genetic diseases, after all. (That's what really gets me, the whole illogic of it all.)
If this kind of marriage continues for generations, then it would be a huge problem. Ask the Ashkenazi's or the Amish. In medical school, most of the rare recessive genetic diseases are described in these groups of people. The science is clear. If everyone did this, it would be a huge problem.
Sure, it's unlikely that people will be marrying close relatives en masse. I still think that sanctioning this is irresponsible.
1. In groups like the Amish and, heck, Ashkenazi Jews, there's historically been more compelling reasons for marrying within the group than just "Oh, hey, I like my cousin!" And notice that that went on for generations and generations.
2. And if everybody were gay, they wouldn't have any kids and the human race would die out. (And then I guess it wouldn't matter if they'd married their cousins or not.) Absurd argument, especially as it's not going to happen.
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-13 06:51 pm (UTC)*shrugs*
I would generally advise people to strongly consider who they breed with. If there is a very significant genetic risk that you know you carry, don't double-down on it when breeding. But who you breed with and who you love and share a life with aren't the same things anyway. And we also don't make it illegal to marry someone you share a huge genetic risk with, even though I'd consider it a bad idea.
Also, disallowing marriage does nothing to disallow breeding. In case people didn't figure that one out.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-13 06:59 pm (UTC)That's one way to deal with 'em!
But yeah, it's all guesswork. We have better ways of identifying likely problems than just "oh, cousins, ick" - so why not use THOSE if it's oh so important?
Also, disallowing marriage does nothing to disallow breeding. In case people didn't figure that one out.
LALALALALALA!
no subject
Date: 2011-07-13 07:04 pm (UTC)I do think that incest should generally be illegal, but my reason has nothing to do with breeding, and only holds for close-family. It has to do with consent. I think relationships that have intrinsic power imbalances where true consent is virtually impossible to establish should not be allowed to become sexual - so no teacher-student while the student is a student, no therapist-client, no immediate family members (although I'd be okay with people who were separated until adulthood and then met each other later, as it'd avoid the inherent power issues). Obviously no children in any situations, but even adult siblings can have power dynamics that make it such that one person may not truly be consenting, and the risk of lack of consent is too worrisome in my opinion. I might be okay with special waivers if the situation were carefully analyzed to prove consent.
So, I do support anti-incest laws. But you just can't justify them on genetic grounds because the science doesn't and the consistency of our laws doesn't, and we really don't want to make our laws consistent with that as it'd do all sorts of incredibly awful things to liberty.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-14 12:36 am (UTC)Heh--we got our marriage license this week and Grey was surprised to find there was no blood test required anymore. (He's showing his age there.)
no subject
Date: 2011-07-14 01:00 am (UTC)