Same-Sex “Marriage” Never Normative In History

There is not one human society, advanced or primitive, civilized or uncivilized, where homosexual marriage has existed as a normative part of family life.  Homosexual marriage hasn’t emerged in any human culture until the last few years.  It was early 2001 that the first country on earth legally recognized marriage between same-sex couples.

Let’s look at the record of human history.

Early anthropologist Edward Westermarck, author of the groundbreaking, three-volume History of Human Marriage, explains that as we examine all human civilizations, we always see some basic characteristics:

Marriage is generally used as a term for social institution.  Marriage always implies the right to sexual intercourse: society holds such intercourse allowable in the case of husband and wife.… At the same time, marriage is something more than a regulated sexual relation.… It is the husband’s duty . . . to support his wife and children; . . . the man being the protector and supporter of his family and woman being the helpmate and the nurse of their children.  The habit was sanctioned by custom, and afterwards by law, and was thus transformed into a social institution.… [T]he functions of the husband and father in the family are not merely the sexual and procreative kind, but involve the duty of protecting the wife and children, is testified by an array of facts relating to peoples in all quarters of the world and in all stages of civilization.

Another celebrated anthropologist, Margaret Mead, illustrates the cultural universality of husband-wife/father-mother pairing in her work Male and Female: 

When we survey all known human societies, we find everywhere some form of the family, some set of permanent arrangements by which males assist females in caring for children while they are young.… [T]here is the assumption of permanent mating, the idea that the marriage should last as long as both live.

And a founding father of anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, in Sex, Culture and Myth observes: 

In all human societies the father is regarded by tradition as indispensable.  The woman has to be married before she is allowed legitimately to conceive…. This is by no means only a European or Christian prejudice; it is the attitude found amongst most barbarous and savage people as well…. The most important moral and legal rule concerning the physiological side of kinship is that no child should be brought into the world without a man--and one man at that--assuming the role of sociological father, that is, of guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community.  (T)his generalization amounts to a universal sociological law . . . and is indispensable for the full sociological status of the child as well as of its mother.

Glenn T. Stanton and Dr. Bill Maier, “Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting,” pg.48-50 (2004)