Apr 16, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

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.”

Modern marriage only 200 years old
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.

Churches supported gay unions
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 ...