I’m willing to entertain the possibility that polygamy is not a horrible thing… I’m not there yet, but who knows?… but I dispute the assertion made by some that broadening marriage to include one man and another man (or one woman and another woman) does not open the door for other arrangements.

Y-not on April 20, 2009 at 9:38 PM

It depends how its done. If it is done by the legislature it probably doesn’t. If the courts to it, it might depending on how the arrive at their decision.

My guess is that SCOTUS will let the states define marriage and work on the “full faith and credit” questions raised by DOMA.

dedalus on April 20, 2009 at 9:45 PM

The most predictable social effect of legalized polygamy is further limiting the romantic possibilities for lower income young men, as the most wealth and powerful men draw an ever larger portion of marriageable females out of the population. It also reduces the number of children born into a polygamous generation, as only the wealthiest polygamous men will be able to afford children with all of their wives – especially in a consumerist, high-tech society where even affluent married couples frequently put off having children. If lower-income polygamous families decide to have lots of children anyway – a preference that tends to be encouraged by religions that endorse polygamy – the strain on social welfare services will be enormous. Daily demonstrations of the effect large numbers of impoverished, sexually frustrated young men have on a culture are held in the Middle East.

I think some of the anger in the growing backlash against the gay marriage movement comes from a mainstream American culture that is tired of having to defend itself against attacks from all directions. For the better part of fifty years, middle America has been besieged by a political culture that can’t wait to hand a microphone to every one of its critics. Political liberals, proud to imagine themselves as Citizens Of The World, are eager to let the American peasantry know just how much The World disapproves of them. Socialists with schemes to sell inflate every real and imaginary problem into a crisis, and inform Ma and Pa America that it’s all they’re fault, so they’re obligated to pay for it. Actors and musicians work to establish their artistic credibility and “edge” by thinking up clever new insults they can sell to studios, which repackage them and sell them at a markup to the targets of the insults, assuring them that objections to the content of these purchases would be boorish.

If you’re in your thirties now, you’ve spent every day of your life being told how terribly wrong your parents and grandparents were about everything, except for fighting the Nazis. Every day you went to school, you were taught about America’s history of crimes and oppression, followed by incredibly ham-fisted lectures in how the American way of life is destroying the planet, and topped off with the suggestion that your parents were wrong not to get you started on the basics of sexual intercourse when you were seven years old. You couldn’t make it through an evening of television without being told your traditions were ignorant and repressive.

Nothing anyone did, outside of the government when the right political party was in power, ever made any of these critics ease up. As soon as the environmentalists stopped complaining about disappearing rainforests, the polar ice caps started melting. America could never stop being a racist nation, with increasingly intrusive and lavishly funded “diversity” programs necessary just to contain the radioactive poison boiling in its heart. Middle America’s men were also sexists, almost without exception. If you’re thirty-something now, your twenties were filled with wall-to-wall news coverage of sexual harassment in the male-dominated corporate and military culture… stories which abruptly vanished in 1998, for some reason.

You also spent your twenties being told you didn’t care enough. You were blind to African famine, insufficiently angry about apartheid, cruelly insensitive to the plight of the homeless, and selfishly unwilling to pay your “fair share” of taxes. You needed your “awareness” raised about a long list of things, and an army of media-savvy activists was eager to invade your headspace and get to work. You even conjured a deadly disease, AIDS, into existence with your callous insensitivity. In the Nineties, you were told this disease could explode into a universal epidemic at any moment, but you were not allowed to ask any questions about how it spread, or how it might be quarantined. It could only be cured through pure, concentrated caring, and every day it wasn’t cured stood as an icy rebuke to your shriveled heart.

After a lifetime of being assaulted from every side, and told how benighted and ignorant they are about everything, I think middle America wants to have a few aspects of their lives that aren’t subject to constant deconstruction. There are a few things they’re just sick and tired of having to fight over every day… a few words in our common language that don’t have to be defined through legal battles. There are some ideas they feel entitled to cherish, without having to man the ramparts to protect them from an unending siege. One of those things, perhaps the principal among those ideas, is marriage.

The average mom and pop in flyover country don’t think they belong on trial, answering hostile questions about what marriage is and isn’t, from a prosecution that will never stop bringing up fresh charges. Most of all, they resent the assertion that they are not allowed to express their love for their hallowed traditions without being accused of hating someone else. They reject the notion that they cannot elevate traditional marriages without denigrating alternative lifestyles, or that tolerance is invalid without approval, and eventually submission. They aren’t much interested in persecuting homosexuals – they’d rather not think about what they do at all – but they’re increasingly angry at the suggestion that honoring and revering marriage between men and women somehow insults everyone who refuses to join them.

Doctor Zero on April 21, 2009 at 12:41 AM