The road to polyamory

Will same-sex matrimony extend spousalss stabilizing effects to homo verseds? Will ethereal conjugal union on a lower floormine family life? A contend is riding on the answers to these questions. notwithstanding the medias reflexive labeling of doubts about homo cozy nuptials as homophobia has made it almost impossible to debate the social effects of this reform. Now with the irresponsible Courts ringing affirmation of sexual liberty in Lawrence v. Texas, that debate is unavoidable. Among the likeliest effects of amusing jointure is to sire us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and polyamory ( host sum).Marriage resulting be transformed into a physique of relationship contracts, linking twain, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in e very(prenominal) conceivable combination of male and female. A scare scenario? Hardly. The bottom of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing. A ne twainrk of g rass-roots organizations seeking legal lore for meeting marriage already exists. The ca expenditure of legalized group marriage is champi aned by a powerful gang of family practice of law specialists.Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented perfect programs of marital reform. Some of these quasi-govern handstal proposals go so far as to suggest the abolition of marriage. The caprices behind this movement have already achieved strike decide with a prominent American politician. None of this is well k instantaneouslyn. Both the media and public spokesmen for the sprightly marriage movement treat the issue as an unproblematic advance for civil rights.True, a small identification number of relatively conservative cheery spokesmen do consider the social effects of amusing matrimony, insisting that they give be beneficent, that homosexual unions will become more stable. Yet another faction of zippy rights advocates real favors zippy marr iage as a step toward the abolition of marriage itself. This group agrees that there is a slippery slope, and requirements to hasten the slide down. To consider what comes after gay marriage is not to say that gay marriage itself poses no danger to the institution of marriage.Quite apart from the likelihood that it will usher in legalized polygamy and polyamory, gay marriage will almost certainly weaken the belief that monogamy lies at the heart of marriage. But to see why this is so, we will first convey to reconnoiter the slippery slope. Promoting polygamy DURING THE 1996 congressional debate on the Defense of Marriage Act, which affirmed the ability of the states and the federal government to withhold recognition from same-sex marriages, gay marriage advocates were put on the defensive by the polygamy question.If gays had a right to marry, why not polygamists? Andrew Sullivan, one of gay marriages most intelligent defenders, labeled the question fear-mongeringakin to the discre dited belief that interracial marriage would glide by to birth defects. To the best of my knowledge, said Sullivan, there is no polygamists rights organization poised to exploit same-sex marriage and fade the republic to heteroicous abandon. Actually, there are now m any(prenominal) such organizations. And their strategyeven their mankindowes much to the movement for gay marriage.Scoffing at the polygamy prospect as ludicrous has been the strategy of choice for gay marriage advocates. In 2000, following Vermonts enactment of civil unions, Matt Coles, director of the American Civil Liberties Unions homosexual and Gay Rights Project, said, I think the desire that there is some kind of slippery slope to polygamy or group marriage is silly. As proof, Coles said that America had legalized interracial marriage, time also forcing Utah to ban polygamy in the first place admission to the union.That dichotomy, said Coles, shows that Americans are capable of distinguishing between be tter and worse proposals for reforming marriage. Are we? When Tom fleeceable was put on trial in Utah for polygamy in 2001, it played like a line up rehearsal for the coming movement to legalize polygamy. True, colour was convicted for violating what he called Utahs dont ask, dont tell policy on polygamy. pointedly refusing to hide in the closet, he touted polygamy on the Sally Jessy Raphael, Queen Latifah, Geraldo Rivera, and Jerry Springer shows, and on Dateline NBC and 48 Hours. But the Green trial was not just a cable spectacle. It brought out a move number of mainstream defenses of polygamy. And most of the defenders went to bat for polygamy by drawing direct comparisons to gay marriage. Writing in the colony Voice, gay leftist Richard Goldstein equated the drive for state-sanctioned polygamy with the movement for gay marriage. The political reluctance of gays to embrace polygamists was understandable, said Goldstein, besides our fates are entwined in implicit in(p) ways . Libertarian Jacob Sullum defended polygamy, along with all other consensual domestic arrangements, in the uppercase Times. Syndicated liberal columnist Ellen Goodman took up the cause of polygamy with a direct comparison to gay marriage. Steve Chapman, a fraction of the Chicago Tribune editorial board, defended polygamy in the Tribune and in Slate. The New York Times published a Week in Review article juxtaposing photos of Tom Greens family with sociobiological arguments about the naturalness of polygamy and promiscuity.The ACLUs Matt Coles may have derided the idea of a slippery slope from gay marriage to polygamy, but the ACLU itself stepped in to help Tom Green during his trial and declared its support for the repeal of all laws prohibiting or penalizing the practice of plural marriage. There is of contour a difference between repealing such laws and formal state recognition of polygamous marriages. Neither the ACLU nor, say, Ellen Goodman has direct advocated formal state recognition. Yet they give us no reason to suppose that, when the time is ripe, they will not do so.Stephen Clark, the legal director of the Utah ACLU, has said, Talking to Utahs polygamists is like talking to gays and homosexuals who really want the right to live their lives. All this was in 2001, well before the prospect that legal gay marriage might create the cultural conditions for state-sanctioned polygamy. Can anyone doubt that greater public support will be forthcoming once gay marriage has become a reality? Surely the ACLU will tercet the charge. Why is state-sanctioned polygamy a problem?The deep reason is that it erodes the ethos of monogynic marriage. Despite the divorce revolution, Americans still select it for granted that marriage means monogamy. The ideal of fidelity may be breached in practice, yet fornication is clearly understood as a transgression against marriage. Legal polygamy would jeopardize that understanding, and that is why polygamy has historically been handle in the West as an offense against society itself. In most non-Western cultures, marriage is not a union of freely choosing individuals, but an alliance of family groups.The emotional relationship between husband and wife is weakened and subordinated to the economic and political interests of extended kin. But in our world of freely choosing individuals, extended families fall away, and honey and companionship are the only surviving principles on which families can be built. From Thomas Aquinas through Richard Posner, almost every serious observer has granted the incompatibility between polygamy and Western companionate marriage. Where polygamy works, it does so because the husband and his wives are emotionally distant. level off then, jealousy is a constant danger, averted only by strict rules of length of service or parity in the husbands economic support of his wives. Polygamy is more about those resources than about sex. Yet in many polygamous societies, even th ough only 10 or 15 percent of men may actually have multiple wives, there is a widely held belief that men need multiple women. The result is that polygamists are often promiscuousjust not with their own wives. Anthropologist Philip Kilbride reports a Nigerian survey in which, among urban male polygamists, 44 percent said their most recent sexual partners were women other than their wives.For monogamous, married Nigerian men in urban areas, that figure rose to 67 percent. Even though polygamous marriage is less about sex than security, societies that permit polygamy tend to reject the idea of marital fidelityfor everyone, polygamists included. Mormon polygamy has unceasingly been a complicated and evolving combination of Western mores and classic polygamous patterns. Like Western companionate marriage, Mormon polygamy condemns extramarital sex. Yet historically, like its non-Western counterparts, it de-emphasized romantic love.Even so, jealousy was always a problem. One study puts the rate of 19th-century polygamous divorce at triple the rate for monogamous families. Unlike their forebears, contemporary Mormon polygamists try to combine polygamy with companionate marriageand have a very tough time of it. We have no definitive figures, but divorce is frequent. Irwin Altman and Joseph Ginat, whove written the most exposit account of todays breakaway Mormon polygamist sects, highlight the special stresses put on families trying to combine innovational notions of romantic love with polygamy.Strict religious rules of parity among wives make the effort to create a hybrid hidebound/ modernistic version of Mormon polygamy at least plausible, if very stressful. But polygamy let loose in modern secular America would destroy our understanding of marital fidelity, while putting nothing executable in its place. And postmodern polygamy is a lot closer than you think. Polyamory AMERICAS NEW, souped-up version of polygamy is called polyamory. Polyamorists trace their des cent from the anti-monogamy movements of the sixties and mid-seventieseverything from hippie communes, to the support groups that grew up around Robert Rimmers 1966 novel The Harrad Experiment, to the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Polyamorists proselytize for responsible non-monogamyopen, loving, and stable sexual relationships among more than two batch. The modern polyamory movement took off in the mid-ninetiespartly because of the growth of the mesh (with its confidentiality), but also in parallel to, and inspired by, the rising gay marriage movement.Unlike classic polygamy, which features one man and several women, polyamory comprises a bewildering variety of sexual combinations. There are triads of one woman and two men heterosexual group marriages groups in which some or all members are bisexual lesbian groups, and so forth. (For details, see Deborah Anapols Polyamory The New Love Without Limits, one of the movements authoritative guides, or Google the word polyamory. ) Su pposedly, polyamory is not a synonym for promiscuity. In practice, though, there is a continuum between polyamory and swinging. Swinging couples dally with multiple sexual partners while intentionally avoiding emotional entanglements. Polyamorists, in contrast, try to establish stable emotional ties among a sexually connected group. Although the subcultures of swinging and polyamory are recognizably different, many individuals move freely between them. And since polyamorous group marriages can be sexually closed or open, its often tough to draw a line between polyamory and swinging. Here, then, is the modern American version of Nigerias extramarital polygamous promiscuity.Once the principles of monogamous companionate marriage are breached, even for purportedly stable and committed sexual groups, the slide toward full-fledged promiscuity is difficult to halt. Polyamorists are enthusiastic proponents of same-sex marriage. Obviously, any attempt to restrict marriage to a single man and woman would prevent the legalization of polyamory. later on passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, an article appeared in Loving More, the flagship magazine of the polyamory movement, work for the creation of a polyamorist rights movement modeled on the movement for gay rights.The piece was published under the pen name Joy Singer, identified as the graduate of a top ten law school and a political organizer and public official in California for the previous two decades. Taking a leaf from the gay marriage movement, Singer suggested starting small. A campaign for infirmary visitation rights for polyamorous spouses would be the way to begin. Full marriage and adoption rights would come later. Again using the gay marriage movement as a model, Singer called for careful selection of fillable public spokesmen (i. e. , people from longstanding poly families with children).Singer even published a lyric by Iowa state legislator Ed Fallon on behalf of gay marriage, arguing tha t the goal would be to get a congressman to give exactly the same speech as Fallon, but substituting the word poly for gay throughout. Try telling polyamorists that the link between gay marriage and group marriage is a mirage. The flexible, egalitarian, and altogether postmodern polyamorists are more likely to influence the larger society than Mormon polygamists. The polyamorists go after monogamy in a way that resonates with Americas secular, post-sixties culture.Yet the fundamental drawback is the same for Mormons and polyamorists alike. Polyamory websites are filled with chatter about jealousy, the problem that will not go away. Inevitably, group marriages based on modern principles of companionate love, without religious rules and restraints, are unstable. Like the short-lived hippie communes, group marriages will be broken on the contradiction between companionate love and group solidarity. And children will pay the price. The harms of state-sanctioned polyamorous marriage woul d extend well beyond the polyamorists themselves.Once monogamy is defined out of marriage, it will be next to impossible to educate a new generation in what it takes to keep companionate marriage intact. State-sanctioned polyamory would spell the effective end of marriage. And that is precisely what polyamorys newand surprisingly influentialdefenders are aiming for. The family law radicals STATE-SANCTIONED polyamory is now the cutting-edge issue among scholars of family law. The preeminent school of thought in academic family law has its origins in the arguments of radical gay activists who once opposed same-sex marriage.In the early nineties, radicals like longtime National Gay and Lesbian delegate Force policy director Paula Ettelbrick spoke out against making legal marriage a precedence for the gay rights movement. Marriage, Ettelbrick reminded her fellow activists, has long been the focus of radical feminist revulsion. Encouraging gays to marry, said Ettelbrick, would only a rmament gay assimilation to American norms, when the real object of the gay rights movement ought to be getting Americans to accept gay difference.Being queer, said Ettelbrick, means pushing the parameters of sex and family, and in the process transforming the very stuff of society. Promoting polyamory is the ideal way to radically reorder societys view of the family, and Ettelbrick, who has since formally signed on as a supporter of gay marriage (and is frequently quoted by the press), is now part of a movement that hopes to use gay marriage as an opening to press for state-sanctioned polyamory. Ettelbrick teaches law at the University of Michigan, New York University, Barnard, and Columbia. She has a lot of company.