The great social barrier to homosexuality is the family. As long as the family, as now understood, commands the rational and emotional assent of most people, it is hard for homosexuality to enter the mainstream of American life.
Historically, all major societies--eastern and western--have been built on the family, a social unit that exists and persists through both space and time. Across space, at a given moment, the family can be more or less extended, from the nuclear family of parents and children to a skein of relationships linking hundreds of people. Through time, there are the generations, ancestors of the present family members and the potential descendants, the future offspring.
As a social unit, the family entails obligations to currently living members across space, in the here and now, and through time to previous and to future members. These obligations are purely social in character, even though the definition of family membership is, in fact, usually biological. There is a bloodline.
The obligations are socially defined, socially accepted, and socially enforced, and yet there still lurks the primitive notion that blood is thicker than water. The strength of the blood tie, the biological basis of the family, is mitigated by the quite common requirement of exogamy, that is, that marriages be carried out with people from different families, even from different tribes. This has biological as well as social consequences.
Whether the family is ultimately biological or social can be debated; it is certainly biologically defined, but that definition is socially determined and other species show no uniformity in grouping themselves in blood families. But, in a certain sense, the ultimate philosophical source is immaterial, since historically human society has been built on the family, with a web of intricately interconnected rights and duties, privileges and obligations. The family is social, in fact.
The first function of the family (even though it is social) is a biological one: to produce children, to raise them, and to connect them socially and morally with other family members. The family is, in fact, the unit of individual and social reproduction. Should it be? Is it the only possible one? All that can be said is that experiments with alternatives have not survived.
It has been claimed, by Marx and Engels, for example, that the family
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