"John Gaquin" wrote in message
...

"Steve House" wrote in message

....- to arbitrarily define that
"marriage" can only be between persons of opposite gender may be
traditional
but it is an anachronism based solely on an aversion to homosexuality.

Ah, so even in prehistory we are to blame all on "homophobes". Tripe.

You don't think there were bigots thousands of years ago? The Biblical
penalty for inter-ethnic sex was death--same as the penalty for gay sex, or
for worshipping the wrong deity. Those sentiments echo all the way to the
present.

The notion of a two-gender relationship around a core family unit evolved
millenia ago, even before the concept was recognized or codified as
"marriage". It evolved that way because even the most primitive of human
groups could recognize and understand the benefit to the entire clan of a
structured society and of a cohesive social fabric in which to provide
security for the clan and to raise and protect their young as they grew
and
learned the ways of the clan. To state that such an evolution was based
on
an arbitrary aversion to homosexuality is ludicrous.

To say that heterosexual unions evolved as an aversion to homosexuality
would indeed be ludicrous, but no one has said anything of the sort.

However, there does seem to have been an ancient, widespread aversion to
homosexuality, just as there were similar ancient, widespread aversions to
inter-ethnic sex, religious pluralism, political and social equality between
men and women, and countless other such prejudices. (No one knew better
back then; now we do.)

What Steve said is that the present-day insistence on excluding gay couples
from codified marriage has its origins in an arbitrary, ancient
prejudice--not that heterosexual couples or families originate from such
prejudice.

Incidentally, your fanciful story as to the origins of family structure is
almost as ludicrous as the story that you inaccurately attribute to Steve.
Family structures occur even in species that have no cognitive ability to
assess and compare the relative merits of various forms of social
organization, hence no ability to "recognize" or "understand" the putative
benefits of what they are doing. There is no evidence that early human
family structures arose more ratiocinatively than did the similar structures
in other primates.

It presupposes that homosexual love is somehow of lesser moral quality
than
heterosexual love.

I can't quite get my hands around a picture of a primitive clan discussing
the "...lesser moral quality..." of other members of the clan.

Good, since no one has proposed that picture. If you look at the full
quote, the "it" Steve refers to is the present-day marriage exclusion,
rooted in the ancient prejudice.

Such a
prehistoric evolution more likely simply recognized that a homosexual
relationship made no concrete contribution to the stability, security, or
social interweave of the clan.

That's a pretty far-fetched conversation for the ancient clansfolk to have
had, too. But since I can't interpellate your prehistoric protagonists,
I'll have to ask you instead: In what way does a childless gay couple make
less of a contribution to social stability etc. than does a childless
straight couple? In what way does a gay couple raising children make less
of a contribution to social stability etc. than does a straight couple
raising children?

--Gary

JG