[Mb-civic] Pandora and Polygamy - Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Pandora and Polygamy
<>
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

And now, polygamy.

With the sweetly titled HBO series "Big Love," polygamy comes out of the 
closet. Under the headline "Polygamists, Unite!" Newsweek informs us of 
"polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement." 
Says one evangelical Christian big lover: "Polygamy rights is the next 
civil-rights battle."

Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, 
primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With "Big Love" it moves to 
suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy 
(or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing 
legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out 
that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. 
After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two 
people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage 
insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and 
an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first 
requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a 
similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of 
individual choice.

This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why 
they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I'm not the 
one who put them there. Their argument does. Blogger and author Andrew 
Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when it 
was considered pretty crazy, has called this the "polygamy diversion," 
arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically different 
because polygamy is a mere "activity" while homosexuality is an 
intrinsic state that "occupies a deeper level of human consciousness."

But this distinction between higher and lower orders of love is 
precisely what gay rights activists so vigorously protest when the 
general culture "privileges" (as they say in the English departments) 
heterosexual unions over homosexual ones. Was "Jules et Jim" (and Jeanne 
Moreau), the classic Truffaut film involving two dear friends in love 
with the same woman, about an "activity" or about the most intrinsic of 
human emotions?

To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender 
mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to 
each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as 
mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what 
grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary 
number of two?

What is historically odd is that as gay marriage is gaining acceptance, 
the resistance to polygamy is much more powerful. Yet until this 
generation, gay marriage had been sanctioned by no society that we know 
of, anywhere at any time in history. On the other hand, polygamy was 
sanctioned, indeed common, in large parts of the world through large 
swaths of history, most notably the biblical Middle East and through 
much of the Islamic world.

I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or 
assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage 
has needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you. 
Astronomical rates of divorce and of single parenthood (the deliberate 
creation of fatherless families) existed before there was a single gay 
marriage or any talk of sanctioning polygamy. The minting of these new 
forms of marriage is a symptom of our culture's contemporary radical 
individualism -- as is the decline of traditional marriage -- and not 
its cause.

As for gay marriage, I've come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is a 
mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference 
between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy. On the 
other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to 
have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their 
relationship with a loved one that I'm not about to go to anyone's 
barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such 
fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted 
democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by 
judicial fiat.

Call me agnostic. But don't tell me that we can make one radical change 
in the one-man, one-woman rule and not be open to the claim of others 
that their reformation be given equal respect.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601312.html?nav=hcmodule
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