Some of the blogs make a great deal of Blankenhorn’s lack of qualifications or his less-than-fluid cross-exam. But the greater truth is that a great deal of DB’s assertions were cut, severely.

What’s more, he doesn’t seem to realize that some of his assertions are positive in light of other arguments on the table. For example, no gay marriage in all of human history? Could be an example of the lack of political power of gays and lesbians in history …

I don’t believe that gay marriage will have the kind of social impact that some of the Left imagine (or even hope).

First, I don’t think nongays will look to gays to model their own relationships. If anything, it will be the other way around, because gays are raised by nongays, with rare exception.

My nieces and newphews understand that we’re the same, but different than their parents. They get it.

Yes, there is a new logical form, which is one of two, so it looks like 50%.

But, in reality there are 165,000 gay and lesbian couples in the last census. Even if it were to come to triple that in the next counting, that’s just not the kind of critical mass to “change everything”, on face.

There are probably more athiests married, right? Probably more nongay “swingers”, by number. Probably more married without children nongay couples. Probably more third marriages. Probably more late-in-life remarriages… Whatever comparison you’d like.

Going back to how I started, I’ll bet that it is the economic ascendancy of women that will change “patriarchy” more than anything gays or lesbians do. There was just an article in the news about so many women making more than their husbands, now, and how that has redefined roles. It may not be visible, but it probably has great sociological impact.

Sorry, I’m a different know-it-all.

Amicus:

Thank you for pointing to the transcript. Crikey, why was this guy one of the few witnesses for the defense? Didn’t they have anything better in their arsenal? I can see why people are comparing it to Dover, because there’s that same flavor of not having actually thought through how to express their views non-religiously.

I’m rather persuaded by the view that nongays could continue in patriarchy, if they wanted to think about it that way for themselves, even if gays and lesbians started to marry.

Of course some people will, but they will have to block themselves off more and more from the larger society. Right now, they can tell themselves “we’re the beleaguered oppressed minority” and “the majority really agrees with us” *at the same time*: conventional, yet rebellious. When SSM is legal and they can walk around seeing people being publically married who they can’t even pretend are supporting their gender norms, then they would have to settle for just being rebellious and counter-cultural. But these are emotionally very conventional and authoritarian people, so being counter-cultural makes them deeply unhappy.

Referencing National Geographic February 2010 article, Polygamy in America: One Man, Five Wives, 46 Children (and 239 grandchildren). “Only men deemed ‘godly’ are permitted to enter into plural marriage by the church leader; those later judged unworthy can have their wives and children reassigned to other men”.

Sanctity of marriage? One-man-one-woman?

And with reference to Doctor Science’s comment that “And of course in societies with inheritable property, marriage is crucial in determining how that property is distributed”. I guess “property” sometimes includes wives. You are correct in your statement, of course, though it ignores the other rights and legal benefits that result from the artificial construct called ‘marriage’.

Follow-on:
The summaries of Day12 all have to be re-written. The transcripts are far richer than the liveblogs (when you read them, you’ll see why all the endless back-and-forth “clarification” couldn’t possibly summarized on-the-fly).

One of the problems with Blankenhorn’s work is that either he is not trained as a systematic thinker or his approach of shading a body of work leads him astray.

He admits there is no definition, but by the fifth chapter, he’s off to the races on a definition. Then we quibble about the word “definition”, I guess, to make that transition possible. Enter “structure” and “purpose” and “dimension” and “way of living” and a long list.

He makes a grand case for biology and sets up a ‘natural institution’, but he also finally admits marriage is ultimately an imposition by law, i.e. marriage is what we say it is.

He asserts that universality of form suggests a fundamental character but then quickly adds that fundamental isn’t fully descriptive.

He never teases out these notions out, theoretically, well or fully. He has a four or five paragraph section on “universal and particular”, which might cover some of the stuff I noted above, yet it doesn’t really measure up. It’s the intellectual equivalent of verbal hypnotism.

Dr.S, few things.

Blankenhorn dismisses Coontz’s work out of hand: “..a clear example of glossing over marriage’s history in a way that is superficial and unsatisfying”. An opinion completely unargued. Again with the weighting/importance problem, he later has a one-liner, suggesting that “corporate kin groups are important…but ultimately they are more additive than foundational”.

Blankenhorn presents a whole series of definitions that confirm his notion, rather than any that disconfirm it, i.e. why my data-mining suspicions were aroused. However, he does seem to quote some powerful authorities, like the British Anthropological Assoc Field Manual, as best I recall, who have the most famous definition in history, he reports. Malinowski. I find your mention of seeking what is uniquely human about the endeavor at least as convincing as his standard of finding what is common.

We part ways the patriarchy, thing, I think. I’m rather persuaded by the view that nongays could continue in patriarchy, if they wanted to think about it that way for themselves, even if gays and lesbians started to marry.

At the end of the day, I suspect, at this early stage, that Blankenhorn’s is an earnest attempt that fails analytic rigour.

Let me put it in these terms, though.

He condescends, I find, to Andrew Sullivan, when describing him as tearing up.

Let me return the condescension, as a matter of instruction.

David tears up over the abandoned children, just not so much the gay ones. He wants them to be cherished. To do that, he ardently believes that people have to think about something larger than themselves, when having kids.

We agree.

Other than that, there is no there. there.

Is that you Barry Young!?

My “in-laws” comment is paraphrased from Marriage, a History, by Stephanie Coontz. Most textbook anthropological definitions of marriage are both vague and sex-focused; most are also IMHO wrong. Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, the salient fact about marriage is that it is something animals don’t do — and animals are notoriously capable of having sex and bringing up their children without any legal structures. In-laws — what anthropologists call “affine relationships” — are uniquely human.

Timothy Kincaid:

Thanks for the link to that discussion. I consider Chapman’s analysis perfectly middle-of-the-road both anthropologically and historically.

Stanton IMHO unintentionally reveals his true issue with SSM: it undermines patriarchy. And in that sense he is quite correct: traditional marriage — the kind where women are property, or subservient, or at least have many fewer legal rights than men — *is* threatened by SSM. If two men (each with a complete set of legal rights) can marry, then marriage must be the union of two legally equal people — which means that women are legally equal to men. SSM is *obviously* and legally egalitarian, so it is a true threat to traditional, inegalitarian marriage.

Chapman: Anthropologists recognize that same-sex marriage is one of the many legitimate forms of marriage practiced in cultures throughout the world. Stanton’s selective application of anthropology suggests to me that he is more concerned with Focus on the Family’s political agenda than promoting an honest, accurate, and representative definition for marriage.

Stanton: anthropologists do indeed recognize the fundamental nature of male and female in marriage and family across human cultures.

Chapman: anthropologists are inclusive of same-sex marriage because the central feature of marriage is the social and economic ties a marriage creates: biological sex does not matter. Historically same-sex marriage mirrored the gender relationships of heterosexual marriage. As modern marriage has become gender non-differentiated, so have same-sex marriages.

Stanton: there are no examples in past human experience, in any culture, of something looking like homosexual marriage where men as men and women as women are allowed to marry each other, regardless of what their “gender” might be.