They were bipedal and married: a romance
Hey the Family Research Council has gone all Darwin and sciencey on us.
Some people believe that religious dogma is the only reason why anyone opposes same-sex marriage. Those who believe the human race began with Adam and Eve, and that their relationship was God’s model for marriage, believe marriage should be between a man and a woman. But those who don’t believe in the Bible, who think Adam and Eve are a myth, and who don’t accept a Christian view of the human person, have no reason to believe marriage is an opposite-sex union. Right?
Well, no, not exactly. Those who don’t believe the Bible is some kind of magic rule-book and who don’t want Christians telling them what to do, have no reason to think that the word ‘marriage’ has some absolute for-all-time set in stone meaning that can’t ever be changed, or that the word ‘marriage’ is the same thing as the institution of marriage and that both (or both in one) should be treated as sacred and inviolable and immune to alteration. Those who think Adam and Eve are indeed a myth have no reason to think that we can’t shouldn’t mustn’t alter our practices and domestic arrangements as our ideas about people and sex and morality change. It’s more like that. It’s not that we disagree that marriage has always referred to the legal union of a woman and a man* – it’s that we disagree that it can’t now expand its meaning to cover other kinds of couples. It’s that we think it’s a human arrangement, intended to meet human needs of some kind, and that we are free and entitled and allowed to adapt it to meet other needs, or the same needs of other people, or both.
But never mind that, go ahead.
The scientists believe that a primate skeleton found in Ethiopia is that of a human ancestor—one that lived 4.4 million years ago. Almost at the end of this long piece, the article describes what C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University, says about the social organization of this species:
The males, he argues, pair-bonded with females. Lovejoy sees male parental investment in the survival of offspring as a hallmark of the human lineage. So, how long has marriage (i.e., “pair-bonding”) been a male-female union? About four million, four hundred thousand years, if this secular scientist is to be believed.
Uh…..pair-bonding isn’t the same thing as marriage, which is kind of the point. Gay pair-bonding already exists and is now mostly legal, but many gay people want marriage. Ardipithecus didn’t have marriage. Furthermore, the fact that males, according to Lovejoy, pair-bonded with females, of course doesn’t necessarily mean that all males pair-bonded with females or that all females pair-bonded with males. Obviously Lovejoy would have no way of knowing that, and it’s most unlikely that he meant to imply that. He meant, it seems fair to say, that in general males pair-bonded with females – as opposed to abandoning them after mating and playing no role in child-rearing. And furthermore again – what does the Family Research Council care what some pesky secular scientist says?
It cares because it wants to say
Marriage is not merely a religious institution, nor merely a civil institution. It is, rather, a natural institution, whose definition as the union of male and female is rooted in the order of nature itself.
Fine. Marriage is the institutionalization of a natural tendency to pair-bond, if you like. Fine. But so what? Pair-bonding has fostered a vast array of elaborations and decorations over these 4.4 million years, so what is the problem if some people want to avail themselves of the institutionalized version even though they don’t match the male-female child-rearing model? The old model gets to continue, complete with quarrels and divorce and bad jokes, so what difference does it make if other people join the party too? None. But the FRC isn’t going to mention that aspect of the story.
*Though of course we do disagree – since it has meant other things too, such as polygamy.
Heterosexuality exists therefore marriage is between a man and a woman.
Homosexuality exists…but it shouldn’t!
There’s no need for them to co-opt this new discovery to make the same point they can make by simply pointing to animals alive today: you need a mommy and daddy to make a baby, and they will often stay together afterwords. So what? Natural Law Arguments invariably rest on the naturalistic fallacy: whatever is natural, is good and right.
But as Jakob just pointed out, that seems to imply that bad things are outside of nature, for they break its laws. Gay marriage isn’t so much evil, as supernatural. Homosexuals are defying Nature. They’re performing paranormal stunts, presumably, and should all apply for the Randi challenge.
Natural Law arguments rely on belief in the supernatural, same as religious arguments. They may think they’re using science’s own discoveries to refute secularism, but they’re blind to their own presuppositions. We’re not working from their assumptions. Right and wrong aren’t structured into nature, regardless of human needs and wants.
Another excellent post.
This is just a guess, but I suspect Lovejoy used the term “pair bonded” instead of “married” for a reason. Like, he didn’t want anyone to be tempted to make a superficial generalization from “pair bonded” to “married.”
Those folks chez Family Research Council are so used to dealing with suckers that I guess they didn’t think the rest of us would notice.
(Also cute how they report that “males pair-bonded with females.” So the gals kind of sat around I guess until one of the males came along with the super-glue to bond w/them).
How stupid do they think we are?
On the plus side the Family Research Council are sending a clear message that men should not come home and expect the wife to have cooked a meal. Unless they’ve found evidence of cooking 4.4 million years ago.
It’s a shame they won’t be able to expand on the idea in future articles because last time I checked writing isn’t natural.
Those guys pair bonded without actually being married. Accordingly, marriage is unnatural. Obviously this entails that we should make it illegal.
(Warning: the above argument is not meant to be taken seriously.)
Yes I almost needled the ‘males pair-bonded’ thing too, but then I noticed that Lovejoy went on to indicate that he meant ‘as opposed to wandering off, leaving the female pregnant’ rather than ‘it’s all up to the male to decide’…so I skipped that particular needle. For the moment.
“And he [Solomon] had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.” — 1 Kings 11:3.
Some pair-bond.
‘March of the Penguins’ re-visited?
Ah yes…I forgot about that.
Is it too pedantic to point out that the “naturalistic fallacy” is not about whether whatever is natural is good, but about whether the value term ‘good’ can be given some sort of naturalistic analysis? I sometimes I think I’m fighting a losing battle when it comes to this piece of philosophical jargon.
How do you feel about the battle for the original meaning of ‘beg the question’?
For what it’s worth, I hate the usage of “beg the question” to mean “raise the question”.
I don’t care so much about naturalistic fallacy, but it’s quite true that the expression refers to something different from Hume’s point that you can’t, without some kind of explanatory theory, go from an “is” to an “ought”.
What worries me more than the incorrect labelling of Hume’s point as a point about the naturalistic fallacy is that Hume actually did have such an explanatory theory – and a pretty good one at that. His theory – in a nutshell – was that any analysis of “ought” must, sooner or later, include reference to something like a desire. It’s especially annoying when people deny that an ought can arise in circumstances where Hume himself would have said it can.