Posted on 07/02/2015 7:45:40 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It should by now be abundantly clear that the laziest cases against the inevitability of polygamy are starting to push up the daisies. Before Justice Kennedy decided to appoint himself the nation’s most cherished arbiter of dark magic and inscrutable liberty, it was sufficient for the champions of matrimonial transformation to wave their hands and to cast their inquisitors as madmen. “Nobody is talking about multiple marriage,” they would scoff.
“And even if they were, the people wouldn’t stand for it.” Today, in the first week of the Age of Substantive Due Process, neither of these rejoinders will fly. It is not just that we are now moving with such speed that what “nobody is talking about” yesterday becomes our deafening conversation by the next — although, increasingly, we are — it is that what the majority wants has been set aside. Had the Supreme Court elected to find a narrow right to gay marriage within the Constitution’s text, the “polygamy couldn’t happen brigade” might have a leg to stand on. It didn’t. They don’t.
It is for this reason, I suspect, that supporters of the ruling have this week intuited the need for a more robust set of rebuttals. One such, featured yesterday in Politico Magazine, struck an uncommonly exasperated note. Although “the polygamy argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny,” Jonathan Rauch griped, “that doesn’t stop it from popping up everywhere.” Rauch concedes openly that he has been irritated by the likes of Justice Roberts, Fredrik deBoer, and Carmen Fowler LaBerge — all of whom have reacted to the ruling by indulging in a “non sequitur.” “No,” he writes impatiently, “polygamy isn’t the next gay marriage.” Shut up, already!
Rauch’s central contention is an unashamedly practical one. “Unlike gay marriage,” he advances, “polygamy is not a new idea.” Rather:
it’s a standard form of marriage, dating back, of course, to Biblical times and before, and anthropologists say that 85 percent of human societies have permitted it. This means we know a thing or two about it.
It is not just that polygamy is an old idea, Rauch continues, but that it is a bad one. To underscore this judgment, he cites the “extensive literature,” which apparently demonstrates that “polygynous” cultures exhibit “significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault robbery and fraud” than monogamous cultures, and shows that “monogamy’s main cultural evolutionary advantage over polygyny is the more egalitarian distribution of women, which reduces male competition and social problems” — among them, increases in “long-term planning, economic productivity, savings and child investment.” In fact, Rauch concludes, “by abolishing polygamy as a legal form of marriage, western societies took a step without which modern liberal democracy and egalitarian social structures might have been impossible.”
EDITORIAL: Against Redefining Marriage — and the Republic
Over at Time, Reason’s Cathy Young rests her own polygamy-is-not-next case upon similar ground. “The entire existing structure of modern marriage is designed for a dyad,” Young proposes, and Americans are simply not ready for
the massive overhaul multi-partner marriage would require: including revising the rules on post-divorce property division or survivor benefits for three, five, or 10 people instead of two; adjusting child custody arrangement for multiple legal parents; and determining who has the legal authority to make decisions for an incapacitated spouse.
It is possible that Rauch’s empirical judgments are correct; feasible, too, that Young has offered up a fair adumbration of exactly what it would take to adjust the legal order to accommodate polygamous relationships. And yet, in the long term, these roadblocks will almost certainly prove irrelevant. As anybody who followed the debate must surely recognize, same-sex marriage did not win the day in the court of public opinion because Americans came to believe that the “literature” supported it, or because the empirical evidence apropos of divorce rates and domestic violence bolstered the case, or because it became possible to convince judges that there was no “rational basis” on which the status quo could be maintained. It won because it was presented as a moral imperative (#LoveWins), because its opponents were cast as “haters” and thereby frozen out of the debate, and because its champions came to make heavy use of two ideas that Americans rightly cherish: namely, “rights” and “equality.” The precise moment that the specter of Jim Crow was raised, the traditional-marriage movement was dead in the water. Upon that instant, all the talk of children, of divorce rates, of history, of civil society, of unintended consequences — all of these became a mere sideshow. The central question: Were you on the Good Side or the Bad?
RELATED: The Supreme Court Has Legalized Same-Sex Marriage: Now What?
If the nascent polyamory movement prevails, it will be for exactly the same reason. In his Politico essay, Jonathan Rauch knocks Purdue’s Fredrik deBoer for arguing immediately after the Obergefell ruling that polygamy was the obvious next step. DeBoer, Rauch alleges, elected to “ignore the literature altogether,” thereby revealing a dangerous “intellectual laziness” and a lack of interest in the parameters of the present debate. To my eyes, this is an unfair charge. In the course of his argument, deBoer cites John Roberts’s asseveration that the Supreme Court’s inchoate majority opinion could well be applied elsewhere; he notes that “polyamory is a fact,” and that the material question is thus whether we will “grant to [its practitioners] the same basic recognition we grant to other adults”; he addresses head-on the critique that “polygamous marriages are typically sites of abuse, inequality in power and coercion”; he draws a line between bestiality and strictly human arrangements (“consent”); and he preemptively knocks Cathy Young’s practical objections by supposing that “logistics . . . are insufficient reason to deny human beings human rights” and that “if current legal structures and precedents aren’t conducive to group marriage, then they will be built in time.” What deBoer does not do — and he is smart to so decline — is indulge the conceit that questions such as these are resolved by fealty to the rule of law or by close reasoning. They’re not.
Which is to say that Fredrik deBoer appears to know instinctively what Jonathan Rauch and Cathy Young do not: That this is a culture in which spending time repudiating your naysayers’ objections is wasteful and counter-productive. As deBoer writes on his blog, he starts not from the position that polygamy makes sense in a vacuum, but that there exists a “natural moral right to group marriage,” and he proceeds with gusto from there. “If my liberal friends recognize the legitimacy of free people who choose to form romantic partnerships with multiple partners,” he asks puckishly at Politico, “how can they deny them the right to the legal protections marriage affords?” Give him this: The man knows his audience. To the reader who wants to be “on the right side of history,” words such as “deny,” “legitimacy,” “free people,” and “right” are potent indeed. “Literature,” “empirical,” “constitutional,” “statistical,” “historical”? Not so much. The great tragedy for Jonathan Rauch and his many brothers in arms is that what they regard as being a solid case for the status quo will in reality be treated as such for only as long as our political instincts demand. In five, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty-five years, Rauch may well find himself presenting precisely the same arguments as he is today, but being booed rather than applauded for his troubles. This is not the battlefield on which the war will be won.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.
If marriage can be redefined, then polygamy is easy.
Give me $20, and we will complete a marriage contract and you can have access to my healthcare benefits, tax benefits, etc. Join today.
This assumes that their ARE benefits to marriage, but you get the ideas. Marriage is now a business contract and business model not for three or eight persons, but for millions.
Well, if it’s all about who you love, and we accept people no matter who they love and all that, there is no way to be intellectually honest, and be in favor of homosexual marriage but against polygamy.
The underlying idea behind homosexual marriage is the idea that consenting adults want to live their lives as they see fit, and that they are entitled to social/governmental endorsement/approval of their living arrangements.
The idea is that we have to give “equality” to homosexual pairings.
The idea is that we are not to make moral or ethical judgements about homosexuality, as we allow homosexual marriage.
How can we use this sort of reasoning to allow homosexual marriage, but turn around and deny the same “equality” to consenting adults in polygamy??
How can we say you can’t make moral judgements about homosexuality, but then turn around and make moral or ethical judgements about polygamy???
A lawsuit is pending in Montana, where a husband wants to legally marry his 2nd wife. Stay tuned on that one.
Legally speaking, if the judges apply the same criteria to polygamy as to homosexual marriage, there’s no way you can ban polygamy.
Polygamy only made sense in tribal cultures where “replacement rate” reproduction was a challenge and a significant number of males were killed off in frequent warfare.
The argument that we’ve k own about polygamy for a while and know it’s bad could have been applied to homosexuality, but it wasn’t.
RE: Polygamy only made sense in tribal cultures where “replacement rate” reproduction was a challenge and a significant number of males were killed off in frequent warfare.
Therefore, what follows in the USA after gay marriage?
That all these concern about legalized Polygamy is much ado about nothing?
Here is a defender of homosexual marriage declaring that polygamous marriage is an non-starting idea because it is a bad thing. That it hasn't worked well. That it has bad consequence.
What can one say in the face of such insanity in an otherwise sensible, psychologically healthy person. When otherwise rational people, who can tie their shoes and work a job and pay bills and purchase vegetable for dinner and feed themselves nevertheless make such non-rational and non-reasoned claims, one can only conclude that supernatural forces of Satan are at play.
Who in their right mind would want more than one wife?
RE: Here is a defender of homosexual marriage declaring that polygamous marriage is an non-starting idea because it is a bad thing. That it hasn’t worked well. That it has bad consequence.
Here’s a question — has he shown that same-sex marriage on the other hand is a GOOD thing?
By the way, when confronting the other side's ongoing use of the word "love" as a misdirection in the debates over homosexuality and same-sex marriage, consider this:
1. The civil state does not use love as a legal, documented, prerequisite for marriage. I believe this is the case in all 50 of the U.S. states and in no western, secular nation.
2. I suspect that on no request form for a marriage license, does any state make the applicants certify by checkbox and signature that they are in love.
3. In any event, I'm confident that none of the 50 U.S. states and no western, secular nation uses any sort of test to certify independently of the individuals' claims that true love is present. There is no test for love involved in the application for licensing. (Somebody point out if I am mistaken on these technical specifics.) Ergo, in historic and current civic practice, there has been and is no requirement for "love." This is one of two basic rebuttals to the misdirecting use of "love" as an argument in favor of same-sex marriage.
That’s my [unstated] point.
Polygamy is a relic of barbarism and a sign of a low level of civilization.
I suspected this would happen. Polygamy would primarily benefit mormons ... now. If enough liberals start demanding it then we would see a push for it.
“It takes a village”? You just as well marry your whole neighborhood.
There are only so many people that you can say “Yes Dear” to at the same time!
Is PERVERSION on the Right Side of History? [The Left Says that it should not be a concern]
THE BOOK OF JACOB
THE BROTHER OF NEPHICHAPTER 224 Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord.
25 Wherefore, thus saith the Lord, I have led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem, by the power of mine arm, that I might raise up unto me a righteous branch from the fruit of the loins of Joseph.
26 Wherefore, I the Lord God will not suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old.
27 Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none;
28 For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women. And whoredoms are an abomination before me; thus saith the Lord of Hosts.
29 Wherefore, this people shall keep my commandments, saith the Lord of Hosts, or cursed be the land for their sakes.
30 For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.
31 For behold, I, the Lord, have seen the sorrow, and heard the mourning of the daughters of my people in the land of Jerusalem, yea, and in all the lands of my people, because of the wickedness and abominations of their husbands.
32 And I will not suffer, saith the Lord of Hosts, that the cries of the fair daughters of this people, which I have led out of the land of Jerusalem, shall come up unto me against the men of my people, saith the Lord of Hosts.
Or even HERE:
1 Timothy 3:2-3
2. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach,
3. not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.1 Timothy 3:12
A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well.Titus 1:6
An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient.
THE
DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS
OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTSSECTION 13251–57, Emma Smith is counseled (commanded) to be faithful and true; 58–66, Laws governing the plurality of wives are set forth.51 Verily, I say unto you: A commandment I give unto mine handmaid, Emma Smith, your wife, whom I have given unto you, that she stay herself and partake not of that which I commanded you to offer unto her; for I did it, saith the Lord, to aprove you all, as I did Abraham, and that I might require an offering at your hand, by covenant and sacrifice.52 And let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, areceive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me; and those who are not pure, and have said they were pure, shall be destroyed, saith the Lord God.53 For I am the Lord thy God, and ye shall obey my voice; and I give unto my servant Joseph that he shall be made ruler over many things; for he hath been afaithful over a few things, and from henceforth I will strengthen him.55 But if she will not abide this commandment, then shall my servant Joseph do all things for her, even as he hath said; and I will bless him and multiply him and give unto him an ahundredfold in this world, of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, houses and lands, wives and children, and crowns of beternal lives in the eternal worlds.
It would make a small sect of Mormons very happy—Even in historic times—most Mormons had only one wife. Besides, we have Polygamy—we just have different wives one at a time via divorce. This would help Moslems who can have up to four wives. People are doing it—making it legal will give wives # 2, 3, 4,5. have some legal standing for them and their children—a thing they do not have today as “Spiritual Wives”. The Christian core—caused the Mormons to backtrack on this in 1890. Its not everyones cup of tea but for some it might work. Why not? Its ancient—its even found in the bible.
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