Conservatives who raved about "traditional marriage" at the just-concluded Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington might give a thought to how traditional marriage has been destroyed in Iraq since 2003. A good Post piece told that story this weekend. It mentions that one third of Iraqi marriages crossed sectarian and ethnic lines. In other words, perhaps 8 million Iraqis are Sunni-Shiite, or Arab-Kurdish, or some other mixture. Here's an excerpt and the link:

While there are no official statistics, sociologists estimate that nearly a third of Iraqi marriages are unions between members of different sectarian or ethnic communities. In the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many Iraqis argued that the prevalence of such unions showed that Iraqis cared more about their Arab or national identity than their sect, which would spare the country a civil war.

But Iraq's sectarian strife has risen sharply since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra by Sunni militants a year ago. Since then, more than 500,000 Iraqis have fled their homes, a number that is growing by 50,000 every month, according to the United Nations. The vast majority have left mixed areas, the main battlefields of the sectarian war.