DOMA and Prop 8. Both History.

[eppie]

Yes. But you can decide to act on it in a way that increases liberty, or decreases it. You can improve immigration laws, so there is no longer a very strong incentive for family "chains" to migrate via inter-family marriages. You can improve integration via access to education, and to legal remedies. You can set up shelters and support groups, so that people in a bad situation have outside options.

Banning cousin marriage would not help much. Families would still be in control, and they could still find other people - more distant cousins, family friends, or just cousins they lie about - to marry their daughters to. The incentive is to get an extra passport. The problem is that migrants have poor support networks outside of their own migrant communities, and so can be coerced. That's not a problem with cousin marriage, that's a problem with immigration and integration policy.

-Jester

I fully agree with this in general.
The issue with this example is of course (I mentioned this earlier) that we were actually generally against marriage between cousins but because it never happened anyway there was no reason to ban it.
Now that we have a part of the population for who this is more normal (and the fact that science taught us the risks when reproducing) this has become a political issue. Mainly pushed by the far right of course, and although, as you correctly state banning decreases liberty, it is for sure easier and quicker.

(I never thought I ended up defending Geert Wilders.....I think it is even a step further than defending Bieber )