The linked article is by a Dr Peter Wood, and again, my juvenile sense of humor is piqued by the name and my appreciation for the not so subtle innuendo of ZZ Top ... more on Peter here.
Unlike me, the article is very academically serious -- sexual morals are one of the most important bases of culture, and therefore are a major part of religion, which up to say "1700" pretty much WAS culture.
I love his opening paragraph "all night diner" ... it is strongly visual for me.
Anthropology—hometown to cultural relativists and all-night diner for disaffected intellectuals—may not be where you would most expect to find good reasons to defend traditional American family values. But anthropology, in fact, guards a treasure house of examples of what happens when a society institutionalizes other arrangements.
I'd argue that the points he makes here are those kinds of points that are known in our souls before he even says them, and if they were not, a cursory look at statistics for the US circa 1960 to now would show that the obvious is indeed true ...
Want to know what it really means for a society to recognize “gay marriage”? Or for a society to permit polygamy? Or when the stigma on out-of-wedlock birth disappears? Care to know what happens to a human community that tolerates sexual experimentation among pre-adolescents and teenagers? Are fathers and mothers really interchangeable? Anthropology actually has a large amount of empirical evidence on all these matters—and many others that are now on the table in the United States thanks to various advocacy movements.
The Leftist political convictions of many of my fellow anthropologists tend to keep them silent about some of the scientific findings that have accumulated over 150 years or so of systematic ethnographic study. But these findings strongly suggest that the family is a bedrock institution and that the kinds of modifications to the family advocated by gays, feminists, and others who speak in favor of relaxing traditional restrictions on sexual self-expression will have huge consequences.
The article is a pointy-headed intellectual discussion of anthropolical / historical results of various sexual arrangements -- shockingly, sex is not new, nor are pretty much any form of deviation thereof. And, like everything in this universe, choices have consequences. If our society and especially political elites actually had any interest in "science" they would take this very seriously. The following paragraph has no connection to prudish religion, yet is pretty much factually obvious ...
What does gay "marriage" (or any other sexual variation that can be imagined) have to do with you? Why not just "live and let live"?
Forms of “sexual expression” are, at a deeper level, modalities of social relationships that do have very real public consequences. Whatever a society accepts as legitimate “in the bedroom” inevitably becomes a choice affecting the status of husbands, wives, children, and many others. In this sense, every society in effect chooses to have a strong version of marriage in which husbands and wives are bound by public expectations of good behavior or it chooses a weak version in which people work out their dissatisfactions and hurts in private and walk away from the marriage when they can’t. Likewise, a society chooses to respect women as mothers or treats them primarily as income-earners. It chooses to create families that invest love and attention in their children or alternatively to treat children as a luxury good. Society chooses whether children will be the focus of adult sexual interest; and it chooses whether it will cultivate families that care deeply about education or delegate the whole task to strangers, and so on. If we indulge the fantasy that “sexual expression” is only an individual matter of no valid concern to society at large, we choose our high rate of divorce, our ambiguous regard for motherhood, our unhappy children, and our poor schools. It doesn’t seem like an especially good choice.
Because just like putting nasty things in the air we all breathe, we all have to live in and around the BOistan "culture" polluted and falling apart though it may be. We did some cleaning of the air and the water from the '60's on, but our pollution / destruction of the culture accelerated to the point at which addiction and suicide are gigantic issues here in BOistan.
It's not an article that is going to change many minds -- it does however put some academic light on the level of intellectual dishonesty that has been required from the elite in their present attack on the family. Social "engineering" isn't really "engineering" (there are blueprints for that, and codes, and inspections) and it certainly isn't "science". Science, religion and philosophy all knew and know that what is happening is a disaster for our civilization and millions of people -- they just fell under the spell of the poltical dream that they could "progress" to a brighter future, and got the imaginary ends mixed up with the noxious means as humans are wont to do.
Further reading at https://privatemoose.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-aristocrat-next-door.html
and http://www.moosetracksblog.com/2015/05/proof-of-god-inhumanity-of-western.html
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