Now the news is out that Graham Platner’s replacement, Troy Jackson, has a significant other (they’re not married) who is his second cousin and the mother of his two children:

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson is in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart — who is also his second cousin, according to a new report.

Jackson, 58, and Lana Pelletier share two adult sons and the same great-grandparents, according to Thursday’s report by independent journalist Steve Robinson, who notes that such relationships are both legal under state law and not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region, near the Canadian border.

While Jackson, a onetime logger and the former president of the Maine State Senate, has described Pelletier as his wife in the past, locals tell Robinson the couple has never been legally married.

Where to begin?

It used to be that people living in what used to quaintly be called “sin” – that is, in quasi-marriage outside of wedlock – were not especially politically viable. Those days are long gone, so that’s not the issue here. The issue is what I’d call the “ick factor” of being sexually involved with one’s second cousin.

But it’s not illegal anywhere in the US, nor is there much evidence that it’s harmful in the genetic sense unless there’s a known specific hereditary disease carried by both cousins. Here’s why:

he chance that a baby is born with a birth defect or disability is between 2-3%. So, if a hundred people have babies, we would expect that 2 or 3 to be born with some sort of problem. Which of course means that 97 or 98 are fine.

At 3.5%, the risk is slightly higher for second cousins. Still, 96 or 97 out of a hundred babies are born without any major problems.What this all means is that while there is increased risk, it doesn’t really qualify as a “high chance.” Even first cousins at 5% aren’t that big of a risk.

Keep in mind though that these are average numbers. Like people who are not related, your actual risk depends on the genes you and your spouse have.

Note that the article about Jackson mentions that such marriages are “not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region, near the Canadian border.” Well, it’s confession time: not only are such marriages “not uncommon” on the paternal side of my own family, but first cousin marriages were also “not uncommon” among that crew. In fact, they were very common.

And they didn’t live anywhere near the north of Maine, either. They lived in Belarus.

I didn’t know very much about my own heritage until I did some genealogical research on my family about seven years ago. I found out a great many fascinating things (see this for a previous post of mine on finding a long-lost maternal relation). One of those things was that my father’s family, even at the level of my grandfather’s generation – not one of whom I ever met, including my grandfather – tended to marry their first cousins. In fact, I found that the same three surnames occurred over and over and over, so much so that the families were intertwined in a way that made it difficult for my newly-found second cousins and I to determine just how closely we were related. Were we second cousins? Double second cousins? Double first-cousins once-removed?

We finally gave up on figuring it out, but got a great many chuckles about all of us being the product of some sort of vast network of first-cousin marriage. I finally figured out something about that, though: since the families were also very large (my paternal grandfather was one of between ten and sixteen children, the first born in the 1840s and my grandfather born in the late 1860s), and this was a typical family size back then, they probably had something like over a hundred first cousins.

That’s a mighty big pool from which to choose. If they lived in the same or neighboring villages and cities, it would be a pretty convenient pool, too. Why not marry a cousin and keep it in the family?

There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of insanity or any especially dramatic genetic diseases, as far as I can tell. Oddness yes, and eccentricity. But I’m not sure that wouldn’t have been the case even without the cousin marriage. There’s a marked tendency to be good at math, and that’s about it. We don’t look like each other, either. And below the level of my grandparents, I knew very few of these relatives, but found a whole host of them – really nice people, by the way – through genetic testing. We tried to piece together what had estranged the families, and decided it had to do with a business they were in together that precipitated a falling-out.

In recent years, there’s not been a whiff of cousin marriage or even second-cousin marriage in the group. But I guess that what I think of Jackson’s arrangement – I’m basically indifferent to it and certainly not especially shocked by it – has at least something to do with this family history of mine.

However, I can’t stand Jackson’s politics. But that’s a separate issue.