“ The idea that marriage is under attack and needs defending is a central tenet of the so-called “culture wars”. The meaning and importance of marriage is central not only to efforts to ban same-sex marriage, but to pro-life politics, father's rights advocacy, abstinence-only sex education, the “mommy wars”, and pretty much the entirety of contemporary conservative politics. The (wholly imaginary) good old days that conservatives want to conserve is essentially a time when (straight, lifelong, twin-bedded) marriage was the fount of all that is good in society. And everything that is bad about today's society - teen pregnancy, street violence, welfare dependency, the spread of STDs, sexual predators roaming the Internet, even terrorism, is traced by said conservatives, directly or indirectly, to the decline and degradation of the institution of marriage. Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only - or even a particularly common - form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society. The Biblical marriage that religious conservatives hold up as their example and guiding principle would be (and is) almost universally condemned by today's Christians. ”

The End of Marriage

Found through this more recent post.

I like to read articles written using common sense and perspective instead of just taking a moral stance and then finding justifications for it.