The idea of male/female union was not my idea, but it works. Sperm 'n' egg are the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers of the human race. In our culture, boys study dads to learn to be men and how to treat women; girls study moms to learn to be women and how to treat men. Fathers protect their daughters; mothers protect their sons.
In the absence of either, we have problems. Not insurmountable, not life ruining, necessarily, but problems. Freud didn't concoct his theories of psychoanalysis from observing the secret lives of bees. Real people suffer real problems from the familial imbalances we strive as a society to correct.
Yet, when I suggest the patently obvious, that children need both a mother and a father and do best in an intact heterosexual household, I get hit with a barrage of primitive-culture benedictions. Marriage wasn't always thus and so. And who says children need fathers? And who says two mothers aren't just as good as a mother and father. Wait, here comes one now:
"Marriage is not as important to civilization as you make it out to be," says an e-mailer. "We are not a more advanced society than hunter-gather's (sic) because of our ritual of marriage."
Well, OK, I'll concede that agriculture was huge, not to mention Palm Pilots. But the family unit created by marriage between men and women isn't merely a quaint custom; it is the keystone to civilization as we know it. That we have done a lousy job in recent decades of honoring the institution is hardly reason to impugn its importance.
Whatever deviations, permutations or alterations we make to marriage in our accommodations to changing trends will not alter the fact - proven by experience, supported by social science and otherwise observed by any nursemaid - that children want, need and benefit most from a mother and a father.
Our resort to praising ancient or primitive ways as somehow exemplary is an adolescent's search for self-justification, grasping at historic precedent in order to grant equivalence to instinct and morality, appetite and reason. It won't wash, and speaking of which, those Siberian shamans could use a bath.