« 'An antidote to Obama's Cairo speech' | Main | NASA Makes 'Amazing' Discovery: Sun Heats Earth »
June 5, 2009
Origins of natural - one man, one woman - marriage
Topics: Political News and commentariesPedro O. Vega's justification for natural marriage in other than religious terms is a worthy read. He is tolerant of same-sex "pairings," but resists "in conscience any artificial attempt to raise these relationships to the status of marriage and to subvert the natural order." He says call these "pairings" whatever you want, but "marriage" they are not.
A few writers in this newspaper's Readers' Forum have questioned, either implicitly or explicitly, the role of religion in general, and of religious people - Christians in particular - to have their worldview dominate in our society, at least until recently, the civil definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.Read it all ...Proponents of same-sex marriage dismiss this worldview as "patriarchal" and somehow "pre-scientific"; and also clamor for a better justification for natural marriage in other than religious terms.
I will attempt to do so briefly.
The one undeniable fact apparent to all students of the history of the institution of heterosexual, "natural" marriage is that its existence as a social institution precedes written history. That is to say, that its origins are pre-historical.
Other kinds of bond-pairings may have been tolerated more or less across global societies, but none of them enjoyed the social standing of natural marriage. Marriage, as the union of one man and one woman - or as a union of one man and several women - appears fully formed in the historical record at the time writing was invented.
For those of us who find no contradiction between evolutionary theory and faith-informed reason, it is easy to observe that the institution of marriage arose naturally from the evolutionary imperative of propagating the species in an orderly and efficient fashion.
It is reasonable to think that since the dawn of modern man, or Homo sapiens, roughly 200,000 years ago, human beings tried every conceivable form of pairing throughout countless generations until they settled upon the two kinds of unions they found most suitable for survival: Single-bond pairings (monogamy) and multiple-bond pairings (polygamy).
Other kinds of unions fell by the wayside as inefficient or disagreeable, but the "natural marriage meme" carried on through all human societies until today.
Early humans soon understood themselves to be distinct from other higher primates in whom other kinds of pairings occurred in situations of stress, or as a consequence of internecine rivalries between male or female animals.
Human psycho-emotional development and differentiation from other primates doubtlessly played a role in this process of "natural selection" of competing forms of social organization.
Posted by Richard at June 5, 2009 8:23 AM
Articles Related to Political News and commentaries:
- Origins of natural - one man, one woman - marriage - Jun 05, 2009
