
A Harmony in Living: Happy families are indeed all alike (2011) - pepys
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/family/harmony-living
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marktangotango
Honest question: how does one read something like this? Take the time to
research each obscure reference in each paragraph? I found it to be quite
impenetrable, and boring.

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scwoodal
I felt the same way after reading the first few paragraphs. I came to the
comments hoping for a TLDR.

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lolc
TLDR: Family is what you make of it.

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cousin_it
Tl;dr family is valuable because it keeps dangerous idealism in check.

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osti
Any examples of dangerous idealism mentioned in the article?

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lolc
In the first paragraph, did I understand the author right in saying that happy
homosexual couples are a recent invention?

"[other couples] of more recent vintage with chromosomes exactly matched,"

To me, literal reading of that fragment would posit identical twins as married
couples. Any other interpretations?

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zamalek
I disagree strongly that homosexual couples are recent "invention" given that
it is so easy to hypothesize how it could occur as a evolutionary response,
and that it occurs in as many as 1500 species[1].

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals)

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lolc
Well, the author was talking about happy couples in that list. In my
interpretation it says that there were no happy, gay couples before our time.
That is both wrong and ignorant. The author was too busy minding his obtuse
style to pay attention to meaning I'd say.

