The marriage debate

Peter Wood takes on the American Anthropological Association's statement that:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.

One of the contributions to the notion that heterosexual marriage is only one of many different, equally valuable, forms of marriage, we have:

Last April, John Borneman, an anthropologist at Princeton, and Laurie Kain Hart, an anthropologist at Haverford College, published an essay in the Washington Post purporting to find in the history of anthropology a mandate for gay marriage: "Does marriage have to be heterosexual? The human record tells us otherwise." As proof, they cite a well-known East African case, in which a woman pays the brideprice of another woman and officially claims her as a "wife." The trouble is that this "marriage" is only a legal fiction, not a lesbian coupling. Borneman and Hart clearly knew that, but buried the explanation in an opaque observation that "This role of wife is above all social, and not contingent on her sexual relations."

As I mention here, I happened to hear an interview between Dr. Borneman and Dennis Prager. Near the end of the interview, Dr. Borneman offered what he considered to be a generalized anthropological definition of marriage. In essence, the only common factor in all the institutions he classed as "marriage" was "the transfer of a dependency relationship from one family group to another."

I sent Dr. Borneman an e-mail pointing out that under this definition, "marriage" would also include such institutions as fostering and legal adoption. In his reply, he agreed, and called my e-mail one of the more intelligent ones he'd received on the topic. (Flattery will get you everywhere.)

Of course, such a broad definition has some drawbacks. For one thing, if your definition of a thing is so broad that anything can be covered by it, then it becomes meaningless. If any "dependency relationship" between two or more people is now a "marriage", then the only people who are not married to each other are hermits, and possibly, sworn enemies.

In particular, since the law allows same-sex adoption or fostering, same-sex "marriage" is already legal in every state of the union, and we can move on to other topics.