disallowed marriage between people of different races and those which disallow marriage between those of the same sex is an argument that, unfortunately, has used our society’s penchant for 20 second sound bites that take the place of logical, thoughtful discussion. Of course, anyone giving the topic a bit of thought, anyone with a knowledge of history and anthropology will be able to explain how the two situations are not at all analogous. For this explanation to have an effect, it presumes someone is willing to listen.

Marriage developed as a way to formalize the bond, and thus strengthen the bond of a man, a woman, and their offspring and in so doing strengthen the order of the society in which they live. It’s a way of avoiding chaos, in other words.

The natural inclination of a male is to desire a variety of sexual partners, while the natural inclination of the female is to want a protector and one who can be counted on to provide for her and their offspring. Males who are successful in mate selection choose healthy, fertile females; females who are successful choose healthy males capable of provisioning.

However, cultural proscriptions, the most important of which is marriage, developed in order to provide stability to the culture by assuaging the natural fears of the male and the female.

What are those “natural fears”? They exist cross-culturally. They exist in monogamous society and in polygamous societies.

What the male fears most is that a woman might bear children that are not his and that he will be tricked into providing for them. What the female fears most is that the male she has mated with will abandon her and her offspring, leaving them w/out means of sustenance.

The bond that marriage provides universally is the bond of assurance to both the male and the female that biological offspring are provided for both economically and psychologically and that what they fear is less likely to eventuate.

A man is more likely to leave a woman for other mating opportunities (or to want to) if he has no good reason for futher investment. Feeling safe that the offspring are genetically his is reason to stick around. A woman is less likely to leave a man or to fool around with other males if she has produced offspring with the man who has been ritually bound to her (a husband) both for psychological and economic reasons.

The “governments” of societies (it could be governments as we think of them in modern terms or the tribal elders of a small band of people), saw the danger to their group in allowing anything to undermine the importance of the male-female bond. (Witness what has happened to our own society as we have devalued the marriage bond: a growing number of males are now following their natural inclination to have many sexual partners as they can get, feeling a bond to no female in particular and feeling no security that the women with whom they have mated could ever be trusted sexually to produce his and only his offspring; the females are no longer seeking men who are perceived as kind and apt to make good fathers from both an economic and psychological perspective since they have a “daddy” in the form of a goverment that provides for them–the welfare state has, in effect, attacked the institution of marriage., making the males unnecessary as either husband or father.

The society has a vested interest in promoting that the offspring of the mating of males and females are well-adjusted and suited to become productive, healthy citizens themselves. From a sheer economic and non-religious standpoint, whether we are discussing modern America or small hunter-gatherer societies, the society’s fitness, indeed its very survival, in every way depends on 1) offspring being produced and 2) offspring growing up in stable conditions which make them likely to become productive citizens who, in turn, produce more offspring who will become productive citizens, etc.

Marriage exists, and has forever, for the purpose of providing order, stability, and legitmacy to the bearing of and the rearing of the next generation. It’s about offspring and about how to keep parents fully engaged in raising those offspring.

Only because mating produces offspring did marriage come about. Marriage itself is about offspring, not about mating. That can occur w/out marriage. Governments have no vested interest in mating choices, but they do have a vested interest in offspring.

Because sexual unions between males and sexual unions between females lead to no offspring, governments have no vested interest in them.

That is not the case with sexual unions between men and women.

The reason governments banned interracial marriages include several reasons that involved attitudes about offspring: 1) they felt the sexual unions between the races would lead to inferior offspring; 2) they feared the offspring of such unions would impose a burden on the state because neither race would accept the offspring and they would become the responsibility of the state; 3) they felt that some races were superior to others and they didn’t want the superior race “watered down.”

The notion of interracial marriage is not analogous to that of homosexual marriages, where there can be no biological offspring of both partners.