Validation

[Edit: This isn’t new–the statement quoted here was released almost ten years ago–but it’s new to me, and it’s very relevant to current events.]

This isn’t exactly related to the major topics of this blog, but I can’t let it slip by unmarked. It’s too great.

I spend a lot of time wondering if what I’m doing right now matters. Generally I don’t see much day-to-day proof that it does. But occasionally something like this happens that goes a long way to making me feel better about myself.

Scholarship isn’t irrelevant. And it can, when properly motivated, add its voice to positive social movements.

Rock and roll.

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

(http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/Statement-on-Marriage-and-the-family.cfm)