With all this said, however, polygamy has already become more mainstream than even a slippery-sloper like myself once expected. The suburban plural marriage on HBO’s “Big Love” seemed like a fantasia when the show first aired, but thanks to the magic of reality television (which has produced three polygamist-themed shows in the last five years) we know not only that such families exist, but that their lives can be turned into bourgeois-seeming sitcom fodder as easily as any other arrangement.

We know, as well, that a bourgeois polygamy can win victories in federal court, as the Brown family of “Sister Wives” fame has done: Not formal recognition for their marriage(s), but the right to live as man and wife and wife and wife without fear of prosecution.

And we also know that “polygamy” is just the uncool, biblical-sounding term of art. Call it polyamory or “ethical nonmonogamy” and suddenly you have a less disreputable demographic interested — not only the commune-and-granola set, but the young and fashionable in Silicon Valley, where it’s just another experiment in digital-age social life.

So polygamists don’t have to win explicit marriage rights to become more legally secure, more imitated, less frowned-upon and judged. Indeed, greater acceptance is almost guaranteed.