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Broadening
the Marriage
and Family Debate
Call
for Papers
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 on marriage
as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological
research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types,
including families built on same-sex partnerships, can contribute
to stable and humane societies.
The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association
strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage
to heterosexual couples.
- AAA Statement on Marriage
and the Family, February 26, 2004
From legal definitions of "marriage" to the varied and creative
ways real people are forming meaningful relationships, "family"
is a dominant feature in America, and often a contested one.
Some have pointed out that the meaning of "marriage" and "family"
is a particularly charged political question in the US at this
moment precisely because these institutions are in the midst of
rapid change. There are now more unmarried households than married
ones, and a variety of partnerships and kinship arrangements have
displaced any one, fixed model of domestic life.
Focus has most recently turned to the issue of gay and lesbian
marriage. Following the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's
recent decision that the state must extend civil marriage to same-sex
couples, and in the wake of the San Francisco mayor permitting
gay couples to marry, President Bush called for a constitutional
amendment to limit marriage to unions between one man and one
woman. "After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence
and millennia of human experience," the President stated, "a few
judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most
fundamental institution of civilization," or heterosexual, monogamous
marriage. Editorials quickly responded that Bush was again spurring
cultural wars in America.
AAA has been quick to respond to current debates on "marriage"
in the US by issuing a statement based on scientific evidence
and initiating a series of commentaries on marriage and family
in Anthropology News. This is evidently an area of public
discussion that anthropologists have much to contribute.
Anthropology
News Commentaries / Other
Perspectives /
Anthropologists in the News / Legal
Issues / Public Statements
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