http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/06/mormons-enter-calif-marriage-f.php

I don’t disagree with your substantive point (see my #3).

Bob, I’m not sure where you find the presumption of a transhistorical nuclear family lurking in the observation that the decline of institutional service may be in some ways analogous to the decline of institutional marriage; if anything, I’m trying to emphasize the historical contingency of the family, in order to stress that it may disappear under changing conditions. As I remarked to Jonathan, there’s a certain logic to the father + mother + child arrangement, but as I said, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the “natural family” will always persist as the favored social arrangement.

Tony, thank you very much for the high praise. Wow!

And Raymond, thanks for your contribution. Nice points made.

What the LDS Church creates for each family is that village experience, in which we spend a good deal of our time with a limited universe of neighbors with various kinds of relationships, including leaders of the ward and of subsets (Relief Society, Priesthood quorum, etc.), in which there are both peer relationships among adults and among children, and mentoring relationships between adults and children. We become related to other families through our children’s relationships and through home teaching and visiting teaching relationships. We establish close relationships in presidencies of each organizational unit.

The fact that our LDS term for this village is a “ward”, based on a subdivision of a city, is an historical accident but very appropriate. It is more than a list of people who sit in pews for an hour each Sunday listening to sermons. It makes demands on my time almost on the level of my work and my immediate household. Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were very conscious of creating not just congregations of members, who lived most of their lives outside the context of the Church, but actual communities and cities that could require us to exercise our religion 24/7.

The ward environment has us interacting with each other not just individually but also on the basis of husband and wife and family. We are expected to sustain the ward, and the ward is tasked to sustain us, not just individually but also as a married couple and as a family with children. If marriage gives us each a witness to our lives, the ward gives us a witness to our families. The ward shares grief and joy, provides food and comfort, calls us to forget our own pain and ameliorate the suffering of others.

The randomness of the creation of a ward, the accident of where we collectively choose to live, is like the randomness of the children who arrive in our families. Apart from our spouses, we have no choice in our parents and our children, our brothers and sisters. We learn loyalty and love in relationships that begin with simple duty and dependence. Love grows toward the people we serve, people who have a relationship with us solely because a quorum or Relief Society leader matched our names on a list.

For that matter, while we choose our spouses, they are always strangers to us at first in so many ways, and we come to know each other as we live together through the ups and downs of life. Marriage is a pledge that we will maintain the relationship as a duty even when we realize we don’t fully know our partner, and will give love the opportunity to grow over and around this new facet of the other’s personality.

It seems to me that, whatever we want to say about marriage, it needs to be placed in the context of the larger relationships that a married couple are embedded in.

What makes you think that? As long as marriage carried with it legal rights and entitlements, anyone entering into marriage sends the message that those rights and entitlements are important. So what if not every married couple–gay or straight–gets sealed in the temple? That doesn’t send a message that married couples are uninterested in a long-term outlook for their relationship, nor does it devalue temple marriage. Likewise, marriage does not become socially irrelevant simply because not every child learns a “Families Are Forever, Fathers Preside with the Priesthood, Mothers Stay Home and Nurture” message from their parents.

Just sayin’…