DOMA and Prop 8. Both History.

[Jester]

I am explaining that I think you should mix theory and practice when you come up with arguments in a discussion like this.

Fair enough.

If a as a government you know that say (and I am just estimating some numbers here) every year 5 couples of cousins want to get married out of love and 3000 couples have cousin marriages arranged by their parents while the cousins have actually not seen each other more than 1 week in their whole life and many of the marriages end up in abuse, largely because of the power position of the husband who marries a girl who doesn't speak the language and is not allowed to go to language classes etc. etc. etc., you can decide to act on this.

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.

It is very easy just to use your liberal mindset in a discussion like this and just turn away your face.

And it's very easy to be a liberal right up until something you don't like happens. The hard part is what happens after.

Personally I have slightly less rigid ideas about this compared to my government, but I clearly see the issue and think something needs to be done. My biggest issue here is that in almost every problem involving immigrants the anti-muslim politicians just want to ban everything all of the time so the discussion becomes a bit of a foul one usually.

And so your suggestion is what?

-Jester