Statement on Marriage and the Family
American Anthropological Association - 2004
Arlington, Virginia--The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropologists, released the following statement on February 26, 2004 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.
American Anthropological Association
2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301
Arlington, VA • 22201
Gay Marriage and Anthropology
Linda S Stone
Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University
May 2004 - Anthropology News
...Perhaps the most profound change of all, and one undoubtedly linked with the above transformations of kinship and the family, is a perceptible change in the cultural construction of kinship in the US. An earlier emphasis on kinship as based on biological connection (what David Schneider termed “shared biogenetic substance” in American Kinship, 1980), is giving way to a new conception of kinship as a relation based on personal choice and commitment (Linda Stone, Introduction, Contemporary Directions in Kinship, Kinship and Family, 2004). The US is in many respects culturally embracing a wider variety of family forms and an expanded construction of kinship through choice and self-definition as much as through biology.
It is within these new dimensions of family variation and choice as a basis of kinship that, I think, we can best view the movement for legalization of same-sex marriage. From an anthropological perspective that focuses on the whole of humanity, what same-sex couples seeking legal marriage in the US are trying to do is NOT to redefine marriage. They are seeking legal recognition in the US for doing what people around the world have always done, that is to construct marriage for themselves.
Linda S Stone is Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. She is the author of Kinship and Gender: An Introduction and editor of New Directions in Anthropological Kinship.
Defending 'Traditional' Marriage? Whose Definition? What Tradition? - 4/30/12
Gay Marriage - Anthropology - Natural Law "LOVE NEVER FAILS" – 11/8/13
Lifetime Harm to Gay Children Growing Up
Severe INVISIBLE form of CHILD ABUSE
For the heterosexual boy at the same age in early childhood years has hopes and aspirations of wanting to marry his mother. These innocent childlike expressions of love for his mother are affirmed and are experienced as acceptable to the mother and the other adults in the child's life at the time. The child is told that he cannot marry his mother but that someday he can meet someone like his mother who he can marry.
This same situation for a gay male child, who is raised in a social environment that is influenced by antigay social and religious norms, his signs of affection for his father will be in a number of ways rejected, even scorned. In addition, not only will this boy be suffering from this kind of emotional abuse but he could also be physically abused, as well. When this male child expresses his desire to marry his dad he is likely to be told most emphatically in a shaming tone of voice that he cannot marry his dad that boys do not marry boys. The shock of this unforeseen forceful rejection of this male child’s most authentic and sincerest desire to express his love for his father can be quite traumatizing for him. Because it is an attack on the core of a human being most basic need to love and to be loved. This male child’s hopes and aspirations are not affirmed as acceptable, in fact they are considered unacceptable and offensive. Any child of either sexual orientation at this early age in childhood development will experience this kind of rejection as confusing and depending on intensity even traumatizing. This male child throughout his early childhood years is likely to experience this kind of rejection multiple times having different levels of severity because he does not understand what he is doing wrong. To a gay male child this kind of reaction is not only extremely hurtful but at the same time it most confusing, it does not make sense to him. There is no one who can help explain the overwhelming flood of emotions he experiences every time he reaches out to love. Ultimately a child will realize that he is not to trust his inner feelings to love and to be love that in fact as for many, he will come to the conclusion that he is "always wrong" about love. This is one of many defenses any child would enact as a form of protection from what is experienced in a child’s mind as a horrific onslaught of rejection. This leaves the child living in an "implicit" form of isolation from human connectedness or bonding.
According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, the attachment process would be seriously altered for this child realizing that his basic human need to be connected to another human being is somehow terribly wrong and unacceptable. If he persists he is threatened with the overwhelming fear of being abandon, which for a child at this early age of child development can be severely traumatizing. This is a form of "implicit" child abuse because for this child’s very basic need and expression to love and to be loved is inhumanly being denied.
Suppressing The Need For Love And Human Connectedness FOREVER
For a child will realize that his future well-being depends on how well he can suppress his need for love and human connectedness forever. And like with all traumatized victims, the child will instantly try to suppress as completely as possible any trace from his memory of his most innocent attempts to express his desire to love and be loved. Because he experienced this overwhelming feeling of disappointment and abandonment each time he has tried to do so. A child experiences overwhelming feelings as never ending…
3 PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTS ABOUT GROWING UP GAY
Rippling effects of Childhood Dehumanization, Benedict XVI’S GAY OBSESSION - Fighting Against Homosexuals Human & Civil Rights - Past 32 Years - US Catholic Bishops Continue Same - Opposed - ENDA - Kids Are Being Hurt !!! – 11/15/13
Injustice anywhere is a
The Nobel Peace Prize 1964
Martin Luther King Jr.
What you cannot do is accept injustice.
From Hitler – or anyone.
You must make the injustice visible
– be prepared to die like a
soldier to do so.
Kids Are Being Hurt!!!
Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that
the most deadly of all
is the mutilation of
a child’s spirit.
…whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.