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Dec. 27th, 2008 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyContinuing to examine Rick Warren's claim that "For 5,000 years every single culture and every single religion has defined marriage as a man and a woman", I spent a few minutes Googling, and came up with multiple cultures for which this is not true.
There are cultures in Africa, including the largest ethnic group in Kenya, the Kikuyu, in which women marry other women. The word for male-female marriage and female-female marriage is the same, as is the marriage ceremony.
There are a large number of cultures in which polygyny, a husband with more than one wife, is quite usual, and that's been true throughout history. There are also some polyandrous cultures where women take more than one husband, such as the Nyinba of Tibet. (It's also possible that there were polyandrous marriages in early Sumer.)
And then there are also matrilineal, matrilocal cultures in which there's really nothing that looks like the Western idea of marriage, such as the Nayar of East India, and the Mosuo of China.
Even from this small pool of examples, it's obvious that Rev Warren's statement is incorrect: over thousands of years of history and thousands of human cultures, what counts as "marriage" has actually varied quite a bit. That said, Warren's argument is fallacious in any case; just because something is popular or traditional doesn't make it right.
There are cultures in Africa, including the largest ethnic group in Kenya, the Kikuyu, in which women marry other women. The word for male-female marriage and female-female marriage is the same, as is the marriage ceremony.
There are a large number of cultures in which polygyny, a husband with more than one wife, is quite usual, and that's been true throughout history. There are also some polyandrous cultures where women take more than one husband, such as the Nyinba of Tibet. (It's also possible that there were polyandrous marriages in early Sumer.)
And then there are also matrilineal, matrilocal cultures in which there's really nothing that looks like the Western idea of marriage, such as the Nayar of East India, and the Mosuo of China.
Even from this small pool of examples, it's obvious that Rev Warren's statement is incorrect: over thousands of years of history and thousands of human cultures, what counts as "marriage" has actually varied quite a bit. That said, Warren's argument is fallacious in any case; just because something is popular or traditional doesn't make it right.
