There were similar attempts to classify systems of kinship and marriage, the most famous being that of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss Lévi-Strauss
He attacks everything, from marriage ("the most terrible ordeal God can inflict on you") to Darfur ("Sudanese coons"); his fine fury is sidesplitting.
Before Girardi's marriage, the most persuasive woman in his life was his mother, Angela, a petite, carefully coiffed woman with a kindly but uncompromising disposition.
"It walls off gays and lesbians from marriage, the most important relation in life," he said, "thus stigmatizing a class of Californians based upon their status and labeling their most cherished relationships as second-rate, different, unequal and not O.K".
Conservative belief in the institution of marriage runs like this: making a commitment to one another is what moral people do, and this makes marriage the most stable of all known relationships.
And as in Tyler's previous novel, The Amateur Marriage, the most dramatic events occur offstage - with the exception of one excruciatingly public scene, which takes place on the Donaldsons' front lawn.
"I'm a conservative who opposes radically redefining marriage, the most important social institution in human history," Mr. Vitter, a 46-year-old Republican, wrote in a letter last year to The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily.
Tennon shared some tender words of his own, calling their marriage "the most beautiful union".
Asian marriages are the most stable.
