marriage (Page 6)

Yale University historian John Boswell has discovered that the Catholic church has been marrying gays for centuries.

Jim Duffy writes in the Irish Times that in his book “The Marriage of Likeness: Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe,” Boswell describes an icon from St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai which shows a typical Christian wedding, except that the “bride” and “groom” are both men– Saint Serge and Saint Bacchus, Roman soldiers who became Christian martyrs.
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According to a new study, creative genius and criminality express themselves when men are in their 30s, but both are turned off when a man gets married and has children. Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa says, “Scientists rather quickly desist (from their careers) after their marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to make great scientific contributions later in their lives.”

Criminal behavior peaks around the same time. Juvenile delinquents are overwhelmingly male, and start on the road to crime in their teens. But those with good marriages usually go straight, while unmarried criminals continue their crime careers.
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Amanda Onion writes in abcnews.com that monogamy may be good for a marriage, but in some animals, it’s bad for the species. Researchers in Ghana have discovered that animals living on reserves, with access to fewer mates than they would have in the wild, have a higher risk of extinction.

“In avoiding extinction, it pays to be promiscuous,” says biologist Justin Brashares. He analyzed the population levels of large mammals in six reserves in Ghana, where rangers have kept careful records for more than 30 years. In that time, 78 species became locally extinct, mostly due to hunting and loss of habitat. But it was monogamy that dealt the final blow: the males had only a small group of females available to mate with.
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