C'mon, man. I support gay marriage, gay rights, and all things gay, But this statement, in all likelihood, just *is* more academic elite bullshit.
As much as I hate scholarly criticism by title-scanning, just check this out the CV of the AAA research contact.
bullshit
What part? It's not even particularly controversial, outside the looney right: "no support...depend upon...exclusively...contribute to...."
It's carefully worded, and I don't see the problem.
(Ignoring your scholarly criticism by title-scanning...)
It's either so carefully worded as not to matter or false. It's obfuscation of the "there's no evidence of logical necessity in nature" variety in service of implications *not* supported by anthropological consensus. Such as the denial that a. marriage has been an almost exclusively hetrosexual institution throughout history, b. marriage being crucial to social stability.
Friends don't present friends with false dichotomies, do they?
It says just what needs to be said: the social order doesn't depend on marriage remaining exclusively heterosexual (isn't this point disputed by the anti-gay marriage crowd?) and research shows that there can be stable societies that allow many kinds of relationships, including homosexual ones.
Admit it, baa, you saw "lesbigay" on the poor guy's CV and flew off the handle.
No, really, I flew off the handle at the perfectly modulated twaddle of the AAA. Anthropology shows that many forms of marriage can work -- like polygamy! But do anthropologists have a really good data set on non-heterosexual marriage? Does the anthropological record show non-heterosexual marriage to be common? Do anthropological findings show that shifting from a heterosexual to a sexuality-neutral definition of marriage does not damage society? No, no, and no.
Does direct fucking observation show the vast majority of gay couples to be good parents and solid citizens? Does common decency suggest that their love and their families should be recognized by the state? Why yes!
But to make those points, AAA can't employ the cudgel of their alleged technical expertise. So they indulge themselves in statements like the one you linked. Just another sad sign of academic politicization, in my view.
Look, the statement says very little, which you take to be a nefarious exercise in "perfectly modulated twaddle," but, if you'll fly back onto the handle for a moment, try reading it as a response to the overheated claims of the anti-gay marriage crowd. Then, the meaning is pretty plain: there's no evidence that a stable society depends on exclusively heterosexual marriage. This is a perfectly apposite thing to say to people like Steve Crampton of the AFA, who claims, "Unless the people of the state of Massachusetts rise up with one voice in opposition to this lawless and socially destructive decision, it will destroy society as we know it."
I think by now we've expended more intellectual energy than the AFA and AAA combined. But: the AAA statement clearly opposes a gay marriage ban, and suggests this position rests on anthropological expertise. I think that's bogus. The anthro record doesn't really speak to the current gay marriage furor, largely because a) there's not much anthro record of gay marriage, b) the fact that alternate marriage forms existed in stable society X in the past does not imply that switching marriage forms won't be destabilizing in the here and now.
So I don't care, really, what the AAA conceives themselves as responding to, they are engaged in technocratic bluff: "we experts understand better." Except that they don't. Look, I understand the outrage at the vile and ludicrous arguments that foes of gay marriage have inserted into political discourse. And perhaps I did fly off the handle. But I am very, very concerned about what I see as the debasement of the humanities in the service of politics. When I see stuff like this, it presses those buttons.
Ah, I think there might be a substantive point at issue, after all: Who bears the burden of proof? For me, and, I think, for the AAA, it's the anti-gay-marriage crowd. Since it seems like such pure bigotry to oppose gay marriage, we want some proof that this sky-is-falling traditionalism is valid. In that frame, saying "nothing tells us marriage has to be exclusively heterosexual" seems like a good and sufficient response to the collapse of civilization arguments. It doesn't matter that we don't have precisely on-point evidence about gay marriage, because we're not the ones doing the proving.
But conservatives like the AFA think that, even with exceptions granted, the weight of tradition is clearly behind heterosexual marriage, and, absent clear proof that gay marriage won't cause problems, tradition should be respected. In that frame, the AAA's statement is pretty weak sauce.
I agree that the burden of proof is on gay marriage opponents. I also think the AAA statement represents the debased, politicized humanities.
I guess I hate everyone, except gays who want to marry.
I don't get this, baa. Suppose (to take a very real example) that the Institute for Creation Research puts out a million pamphlets saying that evolution is false and teaching it is socially destructive, with a list of scientists who have rejected it. This becomes a huge political issue.
And then the AAAS issues a carefully modulated statement, with a certain amount of jargon in it, saying that there's a mountain of evidence supporting the truth of evolution, and these anti-evolution scientists are a small fringe group. Presumably there are many moral and political arguments the ICR is using that they haven't addressed. Have they gone into any detail about constitutional law and the Establishment Clause? No, it's not their specialty. Have they answered the claim that teaching evolution leads to school shootings and drug abuse? Not really. But they've addressed the factual claims.
Is this debasement of natural science in the service of politics? Should the AAAS just sit and take it, when people are out there spreading lies? This seems to me to be a directly analogous case.
...Anyway, the point I was getting at with the analogy is this: The American Family Association and other groups have been spreading around authoritative-sounding papers with heavily footnoted arguments about the destructiveness of homosexuality, and these have been getting cited in the conservative political literature and also in the blogosphere. I've seen them linked to and cited by people I'm pretty sure are basically decent-- saying that if it were up to them, they wouldn't really mind gay people, but this hard-nosed and factual research says that homosexuality is extremely unhealthy and bad for individuals and society. And seeing this initially gave me pause, because I've always been one to consider scientific claims carefully even when they seem counterintuitive.
Now, I haven't had the time to go through these papers and debunk the massive variety of arguments within them; they've taken the shotgun approach. But for the few cases I have bothered to follow, it turns out that the data come from deeply flawed studies or are being mis-cited outright. In other cases, the results are blatantly in contradiction with, as baa put it, "direct fucking observation" on my part-- particularly the logically tortured claims about the drug-addled and heterosexually promiscuous lifestyles of lesbians. In short, I strongly suspect that this popular anti-gay social science research is 100% nonsense.
...But I'm not a social scientist, and it would help a lot to have some debunkings that actually come from somebody who knows something about the subject.
...And (don't worry, this is the last post I'm going to make) I appreciate it even when all a given contributor can do is address one particular little thread of the argument, in this case the "marriage is defined as between men and women throughout all times and cultures" business. It may not address the heart of the issue directly, but it does in fact address a popular rhetorical attack.
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