An anthropological perspective on DOMA's death

Today is a historic day in the U.S., with the Supreme Court ruling that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. From the perspective of someone who regularly teaches a course on cross-cultural understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality, opposition to the right of two, non-related adults of the same sex to enter into marriage, seems based on ignorance (in the true sense of the word, meaning to be uninformed, or lacking knowledge). Opponents of same-sex marriage define the institution premised on a limited understanding of the ways humans have organized social and biological reproduction over time and across space.

One of the arguments used to expose the absurdity of the opposition to same-sex marriage was based on evidence from the ethnographic record: humans understand "coupling" in myriad ways, and that there is no "natural" norm that should determine how humans select their intimate partners. In fact, in many societies, the idea of marriage has nothing to do with intimacy at all, and your "husband" or "wife" is not the person you consider yourself the closest to, or even as a "soul-mate." This idea of a soul-mate is a very recent, and very Western, capitalist conception of marriage, albeit one that seems to work well for some segment of the American population in our contemporary era. Extending the right to have an exclusive relationship to couples of the same-sex makes absolute sense in terms of our country’s notions of liberty, rights, and equal protection under the law.

Anthropological insights into how diversity is beneficial for us as a species were useful in eroding a noxious and discriminatory law aimed at a much maligned segment of the American public. Whether our contemporary form of "marriage" is the best of all possible worlds can be left to debate, but to narrowly define who has access to the standing institution based largely on ethnocentric and religiocentric ideas, is not in line with what we know about the diverse, and succesful, ways humans live cross-culturally. I think this current ruling is a useful example of why we should always question what we think of as "natural" for human behavior, especially when we haven’t bothered to check the ethnographic and archaeological record first.
 Prof. Haldane (I'll teach Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Gender/Sex/Sexuality again in 2014-2015)