Same-sex marriage is legal in a number of states, but various kinds of restrictions on same-sex marriage and its recognition exist in the other states. What anthropological questions can you identify about the meaning that such unions have for Americans in different parts of the country that help to explain the legislative patterns in each state? What can we say about these cultural expectations when all of these changes happened within less than a decade?
Who would possibly be the “parents” and what kind of possible relationships would exist between those parents and a child in a birth in which an infertile couple used a sperm bank and the egg from the wife’s sister, a surrogate mother? What would change if the legal parents were killed in an auto accident and the child was adopted by the mother’s sister?
