*what is an Italian fog? A big-a-mist, of course.
You had to figure this post was coming.
So gay marriage...or as I prefer to call it, "marriage"...is at long last the law of the land of the free. And just as I noted more than ten years ago when it became the law of the True North strong and free (sorry)...the sun came up the next day and has continued to do so every day since.
Social attitudes are changing at an accelerating rate. I was born in 1972..not all that long ago...but sometimes it feels like the dark ages. Fights in school (of which there were many, at least one a day) gathered a crowd and each punch was punctuated by the bystander's chant: "Fight, fight, a nigger and a white!" (The "nigger" was, of course, the loser.) Meaningful punishment for these fights was rarely meted out, and nobody thought twice about the chant. Now, of course, both the fighters and the chanters would face harsh (and often similar) consequences. Hell, I learned a few years ago that my local school board will suspend you if you throw a snowball...even if it doesn't hit anybody. At that rate, my kindergarten-to-grade-three school (Georges Vanier in Bramalea) would have been empty of students and teachers both.
It wasn't all that long ago that gay people were shunned by anyone 'respectable' and quite often beaten for sport. Now you can face serious social and professional consequences for uttering a single gay slur, and people on the redward end of the necktrum bleat about freedom of speech: hey, buddy, your speech is as free as it ever was. But attitudes have consequences, same as they ever did. The consequences done went and changed on y'all, is all.
I almost feel sorry for the conservatives. They look around at the world today and don't recognize a thing: the nigger won the biggest battle of all, for the presidency of the United States, TWICE, against old white guys. Marriage is now between any two consenting adults, even -- gasp -- fags. Fewer people are calling themselves "Christian" at the rate of more than a percentage point a year. For heaven's sake, Americans are ever-so-slowly crawling towards universal health care!
With each change, the slope gets more and more slippery, with fewer and few rocky outcroppings to cling to. While the rest of us are gleefully skiing and snowboarding, enjoying the exhilarating speed of progress, the conservatives are looking fearfully out over the void and forgetting that it's a fear of heights which paralyzes them. And so we hear, for example, that once the gays can marry, people are going to marry their pets, pedophiles are going to marry their prey, and all manner of perversions and pestilences shall befall the land. Dear Lord, what's to stop people from marrying in ungainly clumps of three or more?
A few definitions before we dive in:
POLYGAMY, strictly speaking, is the practice of having multiple spouses. It is commonly assumed to mean
POLYGNY: the practice of one husband having multiple wives. But it also includes
POLYANDRY: the practice of one wife having multiple husbands.
All of this is separate from
POLYAMORY, which is multiple committed loving relationships (marriage(s), and even sex, optional, honesty and transparency mandatory).
Polygamy has been explicitly illegal in the United States since SCOTUS ruled on Reynolds in 1878, decrying the practice as
"odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people.”
Oh, dear. I'm afraid that reasoning won't stand up today. It seems, oh, I don't know, just a wee bit, uh, racist.
Mormons, for whom polygamy was by divine writ (you know, kind of the way it was throughout the Old Testament--seriously, folks, yon Bible has more fornication in it than any other book I know of), got around the law by simply not testifying they were married to more than one woman, and having their women back that up. So the Court did the only reasonable thing: an end run, Behold, "unlawful cohabitation": a man could only live with one woman. No need to prove an extra marriage. Devout Mormon George Reynolds tried to fight this on religious freedom grounds, and was trounced quite handily. The Court ruled that there were limits to religious freedom, and outright barbarity could not be countenanced.
"Suppose," the Court asked, “one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship,” or if a “wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile of her dead husband;” in cases of that stamp, surely the government can step in and forbid such vile acts."
Such a slippery, slippery slope. Let's reach for the most extreme case we can think of, and substitute that for what we're actually arguing against. You would think a Supreme Court would have a better grasp on rhetoric than that.
Besides, what's so vile about human sacrifice, anyway? To the Aztecs, it was the highest honour, something you were raised to aspire to. (No, I am not arguing for human sacrifice, merely reminding you that what seems ludicrous and horrific to one time and place is normal, unquestioned behaviour in other times and/or places. Hello? Paging Mr. Barack Obama? The '40s called, then hung up and burned their phone amongst a bunch of crosses.)
But back to "unlawful cohabitation", which covers what used to quaintly be called "living in sin" as well as having multiple partners. That was struck down as unconstitutional in Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), so even though a few states--Mississippi, Virginia, Michigan and Florida--still have such laws on their books, they are unenforceable.
How long before the laws against polygamy are likewise unenforceable?
Supreme Justice John Roberts' dissent in United States v. Windsor (a precursor to the landmark gay marriage decision handed down recently) noted
“It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.”
It being a dissent, the idea that plural marriage is destructive, immoral, or what have you
should be taken as read. My question is why.
A law is simply codified social convention, nothing more and nothing less. Historically the marriage laws have stipulated six hurdles to jump in order to qualify as married. They are number, gender, marital status, age, consanguinity, and consent. In other words, one unmarried man and one unmarried woman of marriageable age, who are not too closely related, and who consent to marriage, can legally marry.
It is worth noting that every single one of these hurdles is a social convention and thus subject to change. We have already seen it with 'same-sex' marriage. Polygny is not just Mormon, as the Supreme Court of the United States noted so acerbically in 1878, and sanctioned polyandry is seen in more than fifty tribes worldwide. The 'marriageable age' fluctuates throughout time and space; five or six generations back it was common to marry at fourteen right here on this continent, and elsewhere in the world to this day eight year olds might marry. Worldwide, one in ten marriages is between first and second cousins; other incest, despite being very much taboo here and now, has been actively encouraged at various times and places. Check out European royalty sometime: hey, if it's good enough for royals...
Even consent is mere cultural convention. In many places today, you marry the person whom your parents select for you to marry. Your feelings on the matter are irrelevant: voice them too loudly and you might find yourself dead.
I am not defending incestuous, child, or forced marriage any more than I will defend human sacrifice. I find all three abhorrent, for reasons I surely need not detail. But note: all three of these types of marriage harm either the individual or society: incest harms society because of its product and the others harm the individual because of a lack of consent. You can't make that argument with same-sex marriage. Nor can you do it--except in certain, troubling cases--with polygamy.
What matters isn't the number or gender of the people getting married. What matters is consent...and that can be thorny to prove or disprove.
It's common for people to see polyamory, let alone polygamy, as one creepy old dude with a harem of usually much younger women. I recoil from anything that even hints of such a scenario, because the power imbalance fundamentally offends me. For similar reasons, I detest a very common trope in polyamory called the OPP--the one penis policy. This is where a straight guy and a bisexual or bi-curious woman open their relationship and the guy is free to date whomever he pleases while the woman can only date other women. I could write an entire post on the many ways this is morally troublesome (and probably will, some day)...suffice it to say for now that blanket restrictions on whom your partner can and can not choose as other partners are very unethical and also likely to blow up in your face sooner or later.
(Loving more than one is easy. Most people can do it if they want to. Granting your loved ones the freedom to love others is more challenging...but if you can love others, so can he or she.)
Are the women in the "harem" happy to be there? Are they free to leave? Could they have have other partners of their own if they so choose?
The answers to those questions must be determined on a case-by-case basis where such family structures seek legal legitimacy. Where the parties, whom I'm tempted to say are always women, are there against their express and explicit consent, a free society has no choice but to outlaw the loss of freedom. Meanwhile, it must be noted that there are many other polyamorous structures that may choose to seek legal legitimacy: one woman, two men; two men and two women; any number of men and/or women. I can find no rational reason to deny them.
The Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made the prospect of some sort of multiple marriage inevitable. The cases are already making their way through the lower courts. While there are many polyamorous people who wouldn't touch marriage with a ten foot pole and who believe government should get out of the business of enforcing certain social structures entirely, there are many others who have held ceremonies and handfastings and such to show the world their commitment to each other. and who would very much appreciate legal recognition of their bond. As I have already written in defence of marriage equality, whether or not people choose to exercise a right does not have any bearing on whether or not that right should exist.
And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have a personal stake in this battle. While I am not insisting on any particular course in my polyamory, and I've barely begun to walk that path, I am open to the possibility of some sort of group marriage at some point in the future.
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