Doesn’t it tell you everything you need to know about the state of the family in Western civilization today that we even need to refer to a man, a woman, and children as a “traditional family?” Why not just “family?”
The fact that it even needs an adjective tells you how imperiled families actually are.
When obvious facts need modifiers, it shows how twisted our version of reality is. Like babies in the womb are referred to as “potential” human beings. Like the marriage of a man and a woman is referred to as “traditional” marriage as if there’s nothing else to recommend it other than it’s the way people who are now dead used to understand things.
Language is the front line of the culture war.
December 27, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Humans are not bonobos. Our social behavior, when it isn't the monogamous nuclear family that the West has traditionally favored, is silverback-and-harem gorilla/orang polygamy. In that system, males who can't establish a harem use a strategy called "roam and rape", where, whenever they find an unattended female, they force a mating. There's a reason traditionally polygamous cultures, like Arabia and China, are also cultures where girls are escorted everywhere they go.
The nuclear family is the only alternative (of the behaviors in our evolutionary repertoire), and is linked, in the fossil record, with anatomical modernity—namely, decreased size-difference between the sexes. We know that the size-difference didn't get smaller because of promiscuity, as it does in chimps and bonobos, because A) male humans' testicles are still too small (chimps have to maximize the sperm they can get into every mating), and B) human males take far longer than any other primates to achieve orgasm. That second one is at the short end of the range for canids…whose long mating time is designed to establish a bond between the alpha-pair of a nuclear family pack, which is what the "traditional family" actually is.
Tell us again how religious people hate science, people who are deliberately ignoring what evolution says about our make-up.