No, not the American Automobile Association. This has been sitting in my inbox for a while, but I thought I'd share it here. My profession is easily ignored by right-wing culture warriors, but this statement (vague as it is, being a sound bite-sized press release) is a refutation of all this talk of "3000 years of human history" or "5000 years of human history" or however many years it's up to now.
Statement on Marriage and the Family from the American Anthropological
Association
Arlington, Virginia; The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropologists, the people who study culture, releases the following statement in response to President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization.
"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. 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.
The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."
There is some discussion of specific cross-cultural cases
here and
here.
I don't expect this will get any more play than past AAA statements (e.g. race), but it's something.
Oh, and here's a news story that will get Santorum all into a lather:
A 25-YEAR-OLD Indian man has married his 80-year-old grandmother because he wanted to take care of her.
...
Last June, a nine-year-old Indian girl was married to a dog near Calcutta after a priest told her parents the wedding would ward off evil.
Obviously all the fault of the Massachusetts SJC.