In my opinion, what you are referring to is not what I would consider the proper role of Law and government via statism.

What happened to Ethics and Morals?

We have a Ninth Amendment and a government based on Natural Rights and Individual Liberty.

Consider this analogy from one moral perspective; why should we care what the Canaanites are doing, if we don't have to practice their religious beliefs or customs?

How do you decide who is "eligible" to marry? If you can make a law making it illegal for 1st cousins to marry why can't you also make a law making it illegal for same sex to marry?

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Its better to have fussed and crabbed then never to have fussed at all - Lucy

What about the other perspective? Why should someone of a particular religious belief want to marry outside of their religious belief; if they are going to claim to be religious?

Not at all, a Lib reads it as saying "Freedom FROM Religion".

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There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.
~Archibald MacLeish

You can,it has been done.
Why is it illegal for 1st cousins,or for that matter brother and sister,to marry?

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I respect your right to have your own opinion,but I do not necessarily respect your opinion.

You mean like one established via statism and its official weights and measures?

It brings up an interesting Constitutional question. Where would any authority come from for any laws concerning Religion if enacted by our federal Congress?

Doesn't the First Amendment specifically deny and disparage that power to our federal congress?

How does that view account for "common law" marriage? Why would any authority exist to deny or disparage any private act registered with the public sector, to ensure the full faith and credit of that act, anywhere in the Union?

You may have an argument from an official weights and measures of known health risks perspective.

You say that as if someone just pulled these gems out of.. errr thin air and everyone agreed that they were good ideas and wrote them down. There were vicious almost pugalistic debates about each amendment. It's not that it got boiled down to the simplest logical verbage, they were compromises. In order to fully understand the consitution, you MUST read the minutes of the congress, the federalist papers, and the anti-federalist papers... for a start. God did not hand down these edicts complete on stone tablets.

The thing is... Marriage didn't enter the domain of government until after the civil war, as a means of controlling mixed race unions. What most don't understand is, no matter what permission the gov't mandates, it removes part of your individual sovereignty. If that wasn't bad enough, for every license you obtian from the gov't, you have agreed to enter into a contract with the state. Now, the state has a third party interest in your personal affairs, again, reducing your sovereignty.

The gov't has no business being in the marraige permitting business at all. It's just that simple. Sometime, if I have time, I'll go into the intricasies of contract law, why your name is spelled in all caps on gov't forms and the like. Or, you can watch Micheal Badnariks Constitutional Law series for a primer. This subject is covered in the first couple of hours if I remember correctly.

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Italy long ago eliminated marriage from the law in order to eliminate The Church from civil affairs, and recognized only civil unions.

Thus, an Italian could get a civil union and the divorce, and do so irrespective of The Church or any church or religion. In fact, an Italian could be married to one woman, and in a civil union with another, having obtained a civil divorce followed by a civil union, while failing to obtain an annullment of the marriage from the Holy See.

And this in the place where Western Christianity originates.

And also the place where the Church mixing in government resulted in evil.

Why should the law restrict marriage between your first cousin or your sister, or father or mother, for that matter?

Marriage has nothing to do with procreation from the standpoint of the law.

In fact, I believe that a mother has born the child of her daughter, because her fertile daughter couldn't carry a child to term.

And prohibiting close genetic relatives from procreating based on eugenics isn't either an assurance of eliminating genetic dominance of bad genes, nor required to prevent bad genes.

The groups that suffer from the genetic problems aren't doing so because of too much intermarriage of first cousins or even brother and sister, but merely the genetic advantage of the gene that is harmful when present twice, but beneficial when present once. Tay Sacks is caused by two copies of a gene that alone protects against the family of diseases that include Malaria. For the groups in northern Africa, southern Asia, prohibiting procreation between close relatives lowered the risk of two copies and thus early death, and also increased the odds that you would have one copy of the gene.

The rules of thumb that people over time came up with without knowing the mechanism got incorporated into traditional laws and then into religious law, without anyone thinking or knowing why those laws exist. Many religious groups have food laws which almost certainly had some root in disease. The Jewish food laws are a mystery in that the disease that they were developed to prevent is unknown, and their is no religious tradition for the laws. At least the Catholic fish on friday tradition we know to derive from the church developing a tradition of fasting as a means to unify converts who came from different religious traditions. The fasting was more ritual than real, and tied to such things as "good friday" which while tied to Passover, in the tradition of the Christian church had no connection to the Jewish tradition.

As civil law needs to be based on reason, that pretty much rules out basing it on religion where the reasoning is so often lost to antiquity, primarily because all religions are built on other religions.