'Innovative' definitions of 'family' flout history

The importance of marriage as an historical and cultural anchor is also made clear by Harvard University's James Q. Wilson:

In virtually every society, the family is defined by marriage; that is, by a publicly announced contract that makes legitimate the sexual union of a man and a woman. Even in societies where men and women have relatively unrestricted sexual access to one another beginning at an early age, marriage is still the basis for family formation. It is desired by the partners and expected by society. Marriage, in short, is not simply a way of legitimising sex, and so it cannot be dispensed with just because sexual activity need not be made legitimate. Marriage exists because people must take responsibilities for childcare and assume economic obligations. Marriage, and thus the family that it defines, is a commitment.

Mind you, the marriage spoken of here is not same sex-marriage, as some are now pushing, but the traditional male-female form. Even the evolutionary biologists, like C Owen Lovejoy have acknowledged that the paleo-anthropological evidence makes clear that male-female bonding in lasting pairs was the critical step in human evolution.

The role of both the mother and the father is of great importance. Says Margaret Mead, “When we survey all known 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”.

Or as Malinowski put it: “Through all societies there runs the rule that the father is indispensable for the full sociological status of the child [and] that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is sociologically incomplete and illegitimate … The most important moral and legal rule [in primitive societies] 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 guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community.”

Malinowski emphasises this point:

I know of no single instance in anthropological literature of a community where illegitimate children, that is children of unmarried girls, would enjoy the same social treatment and have the same social status as legitimate ones. The universal postulate of legitimacy has a great sociological significance ... It means that in all human societies moral tradition and the law decree that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a socially complete unit. The ruling of culture runs here ... it declares that the human family must consist of a male as well as a female.

In sum, the attempt to redefine the family to include various “alternative lifestyles” ignores the historical and social record. The natural family remains an historical and social reality, which will not easily succumb to the revisionists.