Anthropology

Jihua shengyu haochu duo (Family planning has many advantages); Family Planning Leadership Office of Jilin Province, ca. 1975. Via NIH"s National Library of Medicine.

Fearlessly proclaim the truth about marriage and protect the rights of dissenters

National Review's Ryan T. Anderson has fully caught the genuine People's Daily tone in this dek text, though I think "resolutely" might have worked better than "fearlessly" here.

The truth about marriage?

the truth that marriage unites a man and a woman as husband and wife so that children will have both a mother and a father. Marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and woman are distinct and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father.

So look: for one thing, most children will have both a father and a mother regardless of whether their parents are married or not, because of the biological fact that reproduction depends on an egg and a sperm cell, and a father and a mother who take an interest in them because that's the way egg and sperm suppliers tend to feel, but the anthropological truth, as has been understood for decades, is that gender is a social construct, that adoptive parents are just as good as biological ones, and that two parents are generally better providers than one but their respective genders aren't especially important factors.

The truth about marriage is that society doesn't force a single woman with young children—a widow, or somebody who's been abandoned by her boyfriend, or somebody who's chosen to rear a child by herself—to marry, hasn't done it for millennia; and there's no plausible reason why it should force her not to marry either, if she and some man want to get married, or if it's she and another woman instead. Any more than it should force a sterile person not to get married, or one who just doesn't want children.

The truth is that people have all kinds of reasons for wanting to get married, and a lot of them have to do with children in most cases, but far from all, and there's nothing in anthropology or biology or social science that can justify taking this stupid argument seriously. It's theology, and it's second-rate.

Like you guys didn't know that, sorry, but I sometimes I need to vent, and when they start talking about "the anthropological truth" is one of those times. Because it's precisely through the discipline of anthropology that we have learned, over the past century, how unnatural that picture is, of a human society universally divided into one-dad one-mom nuclear families.

Starting from the study of primate anthropology, where we learn the range of family arrangements practiced by our great ape cousins, from the strict ancient-Hebrew–style polygyny of the gorilla to the make-love-not-war pansexual promiscuity of the bonobo, with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, offering a whole panoply of different mating styles, in which consortship, a male-female couple going off on a sort of honeymoon together, something like a Christian marriage as defined by Republicans, is one of the options, though not the most frequent, practiced mostly by low-ranking males; and going on from there to cultural anthropology, and the discovery that there is no sexual settlement so strange that you can't find some community of humans somewhere practicing it, including every imaginable kind of same-sex practice; to the anthropologically informed view of history over the longue durée, a picture of the evolution of two overlapping institutions

• marriage, the formalization of sexual reproduction into a mode of social control of men over women and the concentration of property and inheritance, and
• being in love, the conventionalization of the concept of sexual-social happiness into something everybody can aim at

into a single institution in which love triumphs over patriarchy and the Gothically gloomy pseudo-Christian family nest of hatred, secrets, and perpetual discomfort disappears into the mists of the past.

I knew anthropology, as the saying goes. Anthropology was a good friend of mine. And you, Ryan, are no anthropologist.

Also at the Corner, Jay Nordlinger:

Anyone who thinks that churches won’t be compelled to perform gay marriages is smoking the hash that we have long sought to legalize. There is no opting out of the new America. Get with the program, Gramps.

It is just possible that they really believe old Father Fred is going to be forced by the Obaman thought police to say the sacramental words at Todd and Nigel's big gay wedding.

And Kathryn Jean offers:

Free Speech -- for a Limited Time Only

By Kathryn Jean Lopez — June 27, 2015

One Pennsylvania paper shut free speech on marriage down, then gave it an expiration date. 

On Harrisburg's PennLive/The Patriot-News, which has announced that it will no longer accept op-eds or letters to the editor opposing same-sex marriage, or rather (it took them some hours to work out the bolded bit, which got Kathryn Jean, Patheos, and the Daily Crawler confused), they

will very strictly limit op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage. 

These unions are now the law of the land. And we would not entertain criticisms that these unions are morally wrong or unnatural any more than we would entertain letters or op-Eds that are racist, anti-Semitic or sexist.

We will, however, for a limited time, accept letters and op-Eds on the high court's decision and its legal merits.

I wish these free-speech advocates at the National Review would stop censoring my comments learn that the First Amendment applies to the government, not to television networks and publishers.

There was lots more, but NRO's dreadful Shockwave-killing website and my poor old computer are not getting along this morning, at all, and this is enough.