Eager
boy
meets
shy
girl.
Boy
proves
himself
worthy.
Boy
and
girl
fall
in
love,
get
married
and
have
children.
They
all
live
happily
ever
after.
It’s
folklore
that
appeals
to
many
Americans
—
one
that
the
media
facilitate
and
many
politicians
moralize,
according
to
many
anthropologists.
They
say
this
timeless
tale
has
one
significant
problem:
In
a
great
many
civilizations,
at
least
until
the
present
era,
marriages
were
arranged
in
the
interests
of
kinship
networks,
not
at
the
whim
of
lovers.
And,
throughout
history,
they
have
taken
on
a
wide
variety
of
forms,
including
same-sex
partnerships.
President
Bush
similarly
portrayed
the
union
between
male
and
female
as
the
only
proper
form
of
marriage,
calling
it
“one
of
the
most
fundamental,
enduring
institutions
of
our
civilization”
in
his
State
of
the
Union
Address.
By
doing
so,
these
anthropologists
say,
he
ignored
a
primary
lesson
of
human
culture
and
further
perpetuated
the
Western
marriage
myth.
In
a
statement
released
last
month,
the
11,000-member
American
Anthropological
Association
gave
Bush
failing
marks
on
his
understanding
of
world
societies
and
criticized
his
proposed
ban
on
same-sex
marriage.
“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,”
the
association’s
executive
board
said.
“Rather,
anthropological
research
supports
the
conclusion
that
a
vast
array
of
family
types,
including
families
built
upon
same-sex
partnerships,
can
contribute
to
stable
and
humane
societies.”
Scholars
of
both
texts
and
worldwide
cultures
agree
that
it
is
nearly
impossible
to
formulate
a
precise
and
generally
acceptable
way
to
define
the
flexible
nature
of
marriage,
according
to
the
AAA.
In
his
recent
book,
“The
Trouble
with
Nature:
Sex
in
Science
and
Popular
Culture,”
George
Mason
University
anthropologist
Roger
Lancaster
argues
that
the
notion
of
one-man,
one-woman
marriage
crept
into
the
collective
consciousness
of
American
society
only
within
the
past
200
years
—
a
result
of
both
the
industrial
revolution,
and
the
media’s
influence.
“Leaders
often
make
global
pronouncements
about
‘marriage,’
as
though
it
were
a
self-evident
institution,”
Lancaster
said.
“Depending
on
its
cultural
context,
marital
unions
can
involve
a
host
of
different
persons
in
a
number
of
possible
combinations.
People
are
inventive
and
creative
about
the
way
they
create
kinship
networks.”
Marriage,
as
Americans
envision
it
today,
didn’t
exist
during
the
time
of
the
Old
Testament,
or
even
as
the
Apostles
spread
the
word
of
Christianity
across
the
Middle
East
and
Europe.
Rather,
marriage
has
consistently
adjusted
to
religious,
political
and
economic
changes,
anthropologists
said.
Throughout
the
pre-Christian
world,
most
civilizations
practiced
polygamy,
until
the
Romans
systematized
marriage
by
establishing
an
age
of
consent
and
specifying
unions
across
socio-economic
classes,
according
to
Lancaster.
The
Roman
Catholic
Church
soon
spread
the
vision
of
monogamy,
but
it
took
hundreds
of
years
to
become
the
universal
axiom,
he
added.
Even
then,
families
arranged
marriages,
usually
as
a
business
transaction
with
the
bride
accompanying
a
piece
of
land
to
farm,
or
a
livestock
inheritance.
A
polemical
historian,
the
late
John
Boswell,
concluded
that
in
pre-modern
Europe
“marriage
usually
began
as
a
property
arrangement,
was
in
its
middle
mostly
about
raising
children,
and
ended
about
love.
“Few
couples
in
fact,
married
‘for
love,’
but
many
grew
to
love
each
other
in
time
as
they
jointly
managed
their
household,
reared
their
offspring
and
shared
life
experiences,”
he
wrote.
Boswell
was
gay
himself,
as
is
Lancaster,
who
has
contributed
several
opinion
columns
to
this
newspaper.
Other
academics
didn’t
consider
Boswell
controversial
for
his
inferences
on
early
marriage,
but
for
his
assertions
that
liturgical
ceremonies
in
the
Catholic
and
Eastern
Orthodox
churches
sanctioned
gay
unions.
For
a
period
of
more
than
1,000
years,
between
A.D.
500
and
1500,
these
churches
in
Europe
performed
the
Adelphopoiesis,
or
“the
making
of
brothers,”
he
determined
in
his
1994
book,
“Same-Sex
Unions
in
Premodern
Europe.”
Even
though
these
rituals
celebrated
a
life-long
union
between
two
men,
historians
disagree
on
the
nature
of
the
relationship.
Some
state
they
did
carry
with
them
a
homoerotic
connotation,
while
others
contend
they
were
friendship,
or
“blood-brother”
accords.
Joseph
Palacios,
a
Georgetown
professor
of
sociology,
who
is
gay,
said
the
more
salient
proof
of
same-sex
unions
in
pre-modern
Europe
lies
within
the
vows
of
religious
orders.
When
priests
joined
a
monastery
or
nuns
entered
a
convent
they
organized
their
lives
around
each
other
in
a
common
“marriage”
to
Jesus
Christ.
“The
vows
of
poverty,
chastity
and
obedience
are
technically
equivalent
to
marriage
vows,
and
to
me,
these
single-sex
orders
provide
the
larger
evidence
of
the
sanctioning
of
same-sex
unions,”
Palacios
said.
“They
also
procured
children
in
the
sense
of
establishing
schools,
orphanages
and
hospitals,
which
mirrored
or
paralleled
the
intent
of
marriage.”
The
American
Anthropological
Association
created
its
statement
denouncing
Bush
at
the
suggestion
of
Dan
Segal,
another
anthropologist
who
points
to
the
application
of
marriage
to
same-sex
couples
in
both
a
classical
and
modern
context.
Centuries
after
the
Greeks
and
early
Christians
sanctified
same-sex
unions,
Native
Americans
still
practice
a
widespread
same-sex
tradition
known
as
the
berdache,
in
which
two
spirit
males
—
men
who
are
not
tied
to
one
gender
—
marry,
provided
they
undergo
a
social
and
spiritual
transformation,
Lancaster
said.
One
spouse
might
identify
as
female,
but
both
remain
biologically
male.
Many
modern
societies
don’t
even
draw
a
distinction
between
homosexual
and
heterosexual
in
their
pairings,
Lancaster
said,
choosing
a
more
free
association
regarding
sexual
or
kinship
ties.
The
Nuer
of
Sudan,
as
well
as
other
African
societies,
institutionalized
female
same-sex
marriages
to
preserve
the
lineage
of
one
woman’s
family.
These
same-sex
unions
also
exist
in
the
form
of
cohabitation
after
an
occasional
“ghost
marriage”
of
a
...
