Nancy Haught quotes the comments from anthropologists, sociologists, legal scholars, historians and religious leaders:
“In the big sweep of human history and broad cross-cultural comparison, monogamous, heterosexual marriage, voluntarily entered into, is a pretty rare form of marriage,“ says Roger N. Lancaster, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. ... “A wide swath of cultures have allowed or encouraged or celebrated same-sex unions,“ Lancaster says.
“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,“ his group says in a prepared statement.
In North America, Lancaster points to Native American cultures that allowed men to marry other men, if one partner underwent a ritual that assigned him a woman's responsibilities. In the 1800s, Lancaster says, two women could live together and be spoken of as a “Boston marriage.“ Two examples from elsewhere in the world are the Nuer people of Sudan in Africa, who allowed women to marry other women, and the samurai warriors of Japan, who sometimes married other men, he says.
It is unquestionable that the one man + one woman definition of marriage is more common today and has been for a while more common than other definitions, but it is also unquestionable that other conceptions of marriage have also been very common and that some forms of gay marriage have existed right alongside standards heterosexual definitions. No one who is even slightly familiar with the research and literature can deny this. Thus, either conservative opponents of gay marriage are unfamiliar with the research (which makes their pronouncements on the nature of marriage completely worthless) or they are familiar with it, but are lying to people.
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