First Cousin Marriage Is Legal in England. I Can't Understand How.

Описание: Charles II of Spain couldn't chew his own food.

His jaw was so malformed—the famous Habsburg jaw, generations of cousin marriages made flesh—that his teeth didn't meet. He couldn't close his mouth properly. He drooled constantly. When he died in 1700 at thirty-eight years old, childless and decrepit, his autopsy revealed a body that had essentially destroyed itself from within. A heart the size of a peppercorn. A single blackened testicle. Intestines so rotten the physicians described them as gangrenous. His skull was filled with water. Not metaphorically. Literally filled with fluid where brain matter should have been.

Charles was the end product of generations of strategic marriage. His parents were uncle and niece. His grandparents were first cousins. If you trace his family tree back, it doesn't branch—it loops. The same ancestors appear in multiple positions. Charles had fewer distinct great-great-great-grandparents than a person with unrelated parents would have great-grandparents.

You know this story. It's the "family tree is a circle" meme. Habsburg inbreeding. Historical curiosity. Something that happened centuries ago to foolish aristocrats who didn't understand genetics.

Here's what you probably don't know.

The legal framework that created Charles II—first cousin marriage—is completely legal in England right now. It's legal in Australia. And it's legal in the majority of the United States. Not legal in some dusty historical loophole sense. Legal as in you could file the paperwork tomorrow morning.

Charles died in 1700. The law that permitted his existence hasn't changed.