Consanguineous marriage

“ We stated several facts pointing in this direction, and found reason to believe that consanguineous marriages are much more injurious in savage regions, where the struggle for existence is often very severe, than they have proved to be in546 civilized society. ”

“ Accordingly it is clear from what has been said that consanguinity is by natural law an impediment to marriage in regard to certain persons, by Divine law in respect of some, and by human law in respect of others. ”

“ Or let us assume that the husband sues for divorce on the plea that his wife does not love him. If she admits the plea, the state must grant the divorce; for love only is the ground of a legal marriage, and where there is no love the relation is merely a concubinage. What reasons could a woman have, indeed, to continue to live with a man whom she confessedly did not love? These reasons could only be of an external character, and the man can not allow himself to be made their tool. ”

“ Taking the table of degrees within which marriage is prohibited on account of consanguinity, the rule has been thus extended to affinity, so that wherever relationship to a man himself would be a bar to marriage, relationship to his deceased wife will be the same bar, and vice versa on the husband’s decease. ”

“ The very fact that any plan was devised to afford a legal and decent mode of entering into the marriage contract, certainly implies that the moral sense of the community revolted at general concubinage. ”

“ It is the fact that concubinage has its unwritten acknowledgment and protecting customs. There is marriage that is only a name; there is concubinage that gives the woman more rights than one who is married. ”

“ Under such circumstances it is difficult to understand how a marriage could exist at all. However, such marriages do exist in great numbers, and by far the majority of them do not end up in the divorce courts, as one might expect. Despite the bitter complainings, the struggle for power, the fear of love, and the dread of sex on the wife’s part, I have found that there is usually a well-hidden but genuine bond of love between the couple. ”

“ This is a strange coincidence, Constance. I have been face to face with this same issue for the past fortnight. My daughter has begun divorce proceedings against her husband in order to marry again. They simply were tired of each other; that is the true, flippant reason they are separating. Each is to marry someone else. Her light view of the marriage relation has almost broken my heart. And what is to blame? The low standard of society in respect to the sacredness of the marriage tie. ”

“ And passing strange is it, too, that so many, wise and far-seeing in less weighty concerns, do not appear to see in the evergrowing power of divorce a menace not only to the sacredness of the marriage institution, but even to the fair social fabric reared upon matrimony as its corner-stone. ”

“ The peach bloom on Marcia's cheek deepened as she bent over the daisy chain she was idly making.
"Doubtful ones! The dissolution of marriage may itself be an open question. But, for all churchmen, the remarriage of divorced persons—and trebly, when it is asked for by the person whose sin caused the divorce!—is an absolutely closed one!" ”

“ In our view, indeed, the taboo is not less irrational, as a means of putting an end to the marriage, than the retrieved robe or skin. But we forget how recent in civilization is the sanctity of the marriage-tie. Even among Christian nations divorce was practised during the Middle Ages for very slight reasons, despite the authority of popes and priests. In Eastern countries the husband has always had little check on his liberty of putting away a wife for any cause, or no cause at all ”

“ Those who have been condemned as principals, or principal and accomplice, in the homicide of the spouse of any of the parties cannot conclude marriage between themselves.
The government for sufficient cause will, on petition of a party, grant a dispensation permitting marriage between collaterals by legitimate consanguinity within the fourth degree. ”

“ Consanguinity "prohibits all marriages in the direct ascending or descending line in infinitum, and in the collateral line to the fourth degree or fourth generation." Affinity "establishes a bond of relationship between each of the married parties and the blood relations of the other, and forbids marriage between them to the fourth degree. ”

“ Is it possible for a responsible man of a serious turn of mind and a true Christian to care for the love of his wife? ... If the husband seeking divorce, or the wife seeking separation, alleges the refusal of the conjugal right, then, of course, there is a legitimate reason for a rupture, for the service for which the marriage is granted has not been carried out. ”

“ Anybody who advocates divorce by mutual consent is sure to be lynched more or less fatally, and especially lynched by the very people who are making a mockery of matrimony in their own lives.
“One marriage in twelve in the United States ends in divorce. You'll not find anybody who dares to say that that is not a crying scandal. Yet you and I know that home life in America is as pure and honorable as in any other country. ”

“ But yet to say divorce was granted for relief of wives, rather than for husbands, is but weakly conjectured, and is manifest the extreme shift of a huddled exposition ... Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for woman, and that a husband may be injured as insufferably in marriage as a wife. ”

“ There were two lower grades of civil marriage, but each gave a man supreme control of his wife, without the dignity of consecration. Whatever cruelty and suffering might result from this one-sided relation,—and the possibilities were enormous,—a woman was expected to love the husband chosen by her friends, for himself alone, and a bridegroom’s presents were limited by custom, so that she might not be tempted to love him for what he could give her. ”

“ Free love is fornication committed with one’s concubine, that is, with a woman who is not a public harlot but who has contracted with one man for habitual sexual intercourse as if they were man and wife. According to reports, this is quite common in Europe, where lawful marriage is very often preceded by free unions. The trial marriage advocated by some in this country, in which paramours agree to live together as husband and wife for a certain term of years or at pleasure, also falls under the category of concubinage. ”

“ If a second Marriage exposes Children by a Former, to the Oppression of a latter Husband, and Utterly disables the Mother to rescue them from it; whence does that Inability arise, but from those Laws which give the Husband so exorbitant a Power over the Wife, that she cannot exert herself in those Duties which God has commanded her to do, unless it be at the Will and Pleasure of her Husband? ”

“ Our excellent forefathers, whose morals seem so8 greatly to have outshone our own, were all born in civil matrimony and brought up in homes where not infrequently the concubine lived by the same hearth as the wife, and where the latter was liable to be repudiated for reasons as trivial as those for which she might herself obtain divorce. ”

“ Seven causes for justifiable divorce are laid down in the classics of Confucius, which are the basis of legal morals in Japan as in China, or as those of Justinian are with us. The wife may be divorced:
1. If she be disobedient to her parents-in-law. (After marriage, in her husband's home, his parents become hers in a far more significant sense than among us.)
2. If she be barren. (If the husband loves his childless wife, he keeps and supports her.) ”

“ On the other hand, it seems certain that as the thought of family duties disappears more and more from marriage, as it comes more and more to be legalised concubinage, in which legal formalities are employed only to guarantee the wife's self-respect and assure her social position, the whole condition of home-life will be- changed. It is not improbable that in many cases husband and wife, who are not very sure of themselves, will refrain from complicating their relations by having children. ”

“ If they pervert marriage in false practices, the love of God, conjugal love, and the love of infants, the three holiest and noblest inspirations of life, perish together. No woman then should ever marry without a full knowledge of her duties to her husband, particularly in the sexual respect; for without granting this privilege to her husband in full and free accord, there cannot be maintained a happy married life. ”

“ If one of the faithful hath a concubine, if she be a bond-servant, let him leave off that way, and marry in a legal manner: if she be a free woman, let him marry her in a lawful manner; if he does not, let him be rejected. ”

“ Yet God says that by the marriage they are brother and sister, so that they cannot marry.
The God of Nature has said from the beginning that man and wife are one flesh, and He has repeated it in the Christian dispensation. There is such a union of bloods by marriage that cannot be separated. Sanguinity is established by consanguinity, or the "uniting together of two bloods," so that the woman imparts her sanguinity to the man, and the man his to the woman——they become one flesh. ”

“ Their severity regarding the grounds of separation can only be appreciated at its real value by keeping in mind, as already suggested, that the sword of the judge often cut the marriage tie on account of adultery or other crimes; and that some of the reformers, notably Luther, Brenz, and Melanchthon, were inclined in certain cases to tolerate concubinage or even bigamy, in preference to full divorce. ”

“ There cannot be the slightest doubt that the difficulty, the confusion, the inconsistency, and the flagrant indecency which surround divorce and the methods of securing it are due solely and entirely to the subtle persistence of traditions based, on the one hand, on the Canon law doctrines of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of sexual intercourse outside marriage, and, on the other hand, on the primitive idea of marriage as a contract which economically subordinates the wife to the husband and renders her person, or at all events her guardianship, his property. ”

“ Each is the story of an unhappy marriage, but there is no attempt whatever to throw contempt on existing institutions, or to propound any theory, unless it be the idea—no heresy or novelty in England at least—that marriage, concluded without love on either side, is fraught with special dangers to the wife, whose happiness is bound up with her affections. ”

“ John, editor of the Prose Works of Milton, remarks in reference to the marriage law as it now stands in England:—
"Having been invented and established by men, it is calculated to bear with extreme severity on women, who are daily subjected to wrongs and hardships which they would not endure, were the relief of divorce open to them. Those who take a different view descant upon the encouragement which would, they say, be given to immorality were divorce made easy. ”

“ But there are other ways of dissolving a marriage; and under some conditions the woman has a chance. Exchange of wives, when [230] both are childless, is "permitted only after the death of their parents, and, of course, with the consent of the chiefs." A couple without children may separate by mutual consent; and "when a woman is treated with cruelty by her husband, she may put herself under the protection of another man, with the intention of becoming his wife. ”

“ Then, is she not injured by the legislative removal of the sanctity of marriage, by which the man is less bound to her—thinks less of the bond—the vinculum matrimoniæ being, in his mind, one of straw, to her one of iron. ”

“ And she may be thankful that she will be able to marry as soon as the divorce is absolute. In some States the person against whom a divorce is granted, is forbidden to marry altogether, or for a period of years as a punishment. To forbid marriage altogether, in such cases, appears to me another premium on immorality. ”

“ The undoubted iniquity of our existing marriage laws is always spoken of as an injustice to the woman and the changes in the direction of greater freedom which are advocated as a relief to the wife bound to a bad or otherwise unendurable husband. ”

“ Were it otherwise, were the affinity established by marriage dissolved by the death of a wife, there would exist, on the ground of relationship, no bar to his marriage with her daughter, or with her mother ”

“ Consanguinity and Affinity.—The law considers it against public policy and morality, and contrary to the well-being of the parties, that persons closely related by blood or marriage should intermarry. Marriages are therefore prohibited between all ascendants and descendants, legitimate or illegitimate.
[Pg 241] A man is also prohibited from marrying his stepmother, wife’s mother, stepdaughter, daughter-in-law, son’s daughter-in-law, daughter’s daughter-in-law, stepson’s daughter, stepdaughter’s daughter, niece by blood, niece by affinity, or nephew’s wife. ”

“ But, however this may be, even if there is an exception in the case of such sin, to the general law against putting away, there is no exception whatever to the general law against re-marriage in each other’s lifetime. “Whosoever shall put away his wife” (“except it be for fornication,” belongs only to these words, most clearly not to those that follow) , “and shall marry another, committeth adultery ”

“ Women who marry without giving a thought to the result of the marriage, to the good or the harm it might bring to the children of that marriage, deserve to suffer. Marry the man, if you really love him and can help him by being his wife; but let there be no children if there is anything in the union that might hurt them." She rose and crossed to the girl who was standing staring into a corner of the room, with a world of horror in her eyes. She moved back as the old woman, came towards her, holding out her hands as though to ward off some evil thing she saw in the shadows. ”