New York Court Rules Marriage Valid Between Uncle and Niece

Luke 17:28-30 “Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built” but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.

The New York Court of Appeals has ruled that a marriage between an uncle and niece is not a violation of restrictions against incestuous marriage.

The court ruled that “parent-child and brother-sister marriages . . . are grounded in the almost universal horror with which such marriages are viewed . . . there is no comparably strong objection to uncle-niece marriages.”

The case focused on a Vietnamese citizen who married her uncle in what the government said was an illegal marriage in an attempt to not be deported.  A judge in 2000 ruled the marriage invalid and ordered deportation.

The husband in the case was the half-brother of the girl’s mother.

“This really was an all-or-nothing issue for them,” lawyer Michael Marscalkowski commented. “If this would have been denied, she would have been deported and sent back to Vietnam.”

The lawyer argued that because they were only half-siblings, they only had at maximum 1/8th of the DNA like cousins, who are allowed to legally marry.

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