Here’s a link back to something written in May, 2012, which I didn’t read at the time but I recently found cross-linked from another article. It’s a pretty thorough going-over of the various forms that marriage has taken in the last several thousand years, mostly taken from Biblical commands about how marriage ought to look.
So, let’s see if I can total all this up. Traditional marriage is one man with multiple wives, multiple concubines, wives conquered in war and wives acquired in levirate marriage, possibly including girls under the age of ten, but definitely not including anyone of a different ethnic group, in an arranged marriage with disposition of property as its purpose. That seems very different from “one man, one woman,” does it not?
Of course, it’s easy to say that marriage as an institution evolves—but then, if we admit that, we have to admit that sanctioning loving, same-sex unions is just another step in that evolution. Perhaps this is why the Tony Perkinses of the world simply ignore the Bible when it doesn’t suit their purposes, instead preferring to make pseudo-scientific (and wholly unsupported) claims about what’s best for children and society. The Bible’s truths are just too inconvenient.
Let me underscore that the last line is calling out how a study of the Bible is inconvenient for evangelical talking points about “traditional marriage”. The author is not calling the Bible itself inconvenient.