I am bullish on polygamy. It has a bright future. Now that The Very Reverend Vaughn Walker, High Priest of the Church of Political Correctness, has cleared the way for the creation of the oxymoronic idea of “homosexual marriage,” polygamy's life just got a whole lot easier.
One tiny part of my weekly ritual is to read the wildly popular web site, Post Secret, each Sunday. Post Secret shares anonymous tidbits of those who send in a post card with their secrets declared and/or illustrated. I enjoy discovering what kinds of inner secrets people are carrying around.
Last Sunday, the site's first display stated, “I'm 25 and finally in a loving, committed relationship. It just happens to be with a married couple” The artwork on the postcard showed a stick figure man holding hands with two stick figure women.
My first thought: if “homosexual marriage” is acceptable, on what basis could one possibly say that this woman's innovative “marriage” is not? If (as the Rev. Walker has now issued forth in his judicial ruling this week) marriage is a civil right, and marriage is to be defined by an individual person, this 25 year old young woman needs to file a lawsuit seeking recognition of her special union too. She is in a hopelessly disadvantaged state. Her participation in that three-way relationship offers her no legal status as a married person, affords her no tax benefits, and leaves her in an inferior state. She has no claims on the children for whom she cares in that marriage relationship. This young woman is a second-class citizen.
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She is not the only one to wish to define marriage in her own special way. At the very least, she will find support in Texas, Arizona, and Utah, where polygamist communities in the Mormon tradition will eagerly embrace her claim. After all, if marriage is a civil right, and it is to be defined by each person, who is to say that polygamy is wrong?
Polygamy fulfills two main pillars of marriage: companionship and openness to the creation of new life, or procreation of children. “Homosexual marriage” achieves only half of those two. Government has a clear interest in the creation and rearing of healthy children since these are the future tax-paying adults upon whom society will be built. Moreover, children from stable, two-parent homes (a group soon to be placed on the endangered species list) generate lower social costs given that they are the group most likely to complete school, avoid substance abuse, stay out of the criminal justice system, and even ultimately create additional two-parent homes.
In addition, polygamy affords children the opportunity to be influenced by their own mother and father, another gift that “homosexual marriage” inherently cannot offer given its intrinsic barrenness. It seems most moral that children have a right not only to know who their parents are but to know each of them as fully as possible, a right not possible in “homosexual marriage,” but fully real in polygamy.
Polygamy also has much more traditional, historical support than any notion of “homosexual marriage.” A number of cultures across the millennia have embraced, even encouraged, multi-person marriage. Many non-Western cultures today still do.
Major faiths all have some rootage in the idea of multi-person marriage. David and Solomon each had a bevy of wives. Mohammed was a prodigious marry-er as was Joseph Smith. “Homosexual marriage” is entirely absent in faith communities.
Multi-person marriages can be fully consummated. Under natural law, such consummation inherently cannot occur in “homosexual marriage.” The notion of the complementarity of the sexes, another foundational concept for marriages and families, is entirely absent in “homosexual marriage,” but is entirely present in polygamy.
By now, it is clear that we have a problem. We have forgotten what marriage is, if we ever knew in the first place. It is not a mere matter of individual rights nor of individual interests. This is but one place where attorneys Ted Olsen and David Boies missed the mark in their arguments before The Very Reverend Vaughn Walker in the federal court. They also never even mentioned the nature and rights of children at all. In their minds, marriage and family have now become entirely about the rights of the adults.
The hallmarks of their legal case hinged not on defining what marriage is but rather simply insisting that it must be a right. Ted Olsen based much of his argument on equal protection under the law. Marriage in his world view is about your right to have what you want rather than marriage's being a building block for a healthy stable society and the best time-proven nest for the creation of new life. He even went so far as to say that “...family is about love,” thereby introducing Barney the Purple Dinosaur as a legal precedent.
Worse still, The Very Reverend Vaughn Walker seized on this individualistic notion of marriage rights to cap his career as one of two openly homosexual federal judges. In all caps, in the middle of his opinion, he wrote in all caps, “A PRIVATE MORAL VIEW THAT SAME-SEX COUPLES ARE INFERIOR TO OPPOSITE-SEX COUPLES IS NOT A PROPER BASIS FOR LEGISLATION...” Somehow, Rev. Walker misses the point that there is no such thing as having no moral view. He merely replaced one moral view with his own with his insistence that California's obligation is to treat its citizens equally, not to "mandate [its] own moral code." His lack of self-awareness and critical thinking is appalling. There simply is no such thing as moral-free thinking or legislating. The question is which moral system will you use not whether you will use one at all. Rev. Walker merely enshrined his own.
Many things remain uncertain to be sure, but this we know: when a door has been ripped from its hinges and frame, it is no longer a door but rather merely a large piece of wood flailing around aimlessly in the air. In the same way, when marriage is ripped from its moral frame of monogamy, fidelity, companionship, and openness to new life, it may be something, but it is no longer marriage. America is now fully on that trajectory.
All that to say, if you are investing in stocks in America, the future of polygamy looks bright.
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