It is amusing to see the recent fulminations over polygamy, as noted by Prof. Blanchard, when this is exactly what Stanley Kurtz predicted two and a half years ago.
Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and "polyamory" (group marriage). Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every 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 network of grass-roots organizations seeking legal recognition for group marriage already exists. The cause of legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of family law specialists. Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform.
Prof. Blanchard notes that legislatures "can limit marriage to persons over a specified age and I suppose they can exclude marriages between first cousins." But why? If marriage becomes nothing more than a contract between two people who love each other, not only is it hard to see how limiting it to two people is not arbitrary, but how any exclusion can be defended. If marriage is a right, why can we exclude these groups (the young and incestuous)? Isn't any age of consent arbitrary? The fact that there are differences among the states just goes to show how arbitrary it is. It could easily be argued that this arbitrary and irrational limiting of marriage to those over 18 (or 17 or 16, whatever the state law says) is a violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. But, you say, marriage must be entered into consensually, and young people don't have the capability to consent. I could argue against that notion, but lets take it as given. Then why laws against incestuous marriage (or incest in general)? If marriage is a contract between two people who love each other, why not a brother and a sister? Ah, you say, there are problems with thinning the gene pool and the likelihood of birth defects is much higher than with a couple distantly related. But I though it was a left-wing mantra that people have reproductive freedom? Are you telling these couples that the state will rule over their wombs? If the problem with anti-abortion laws is that it tells women they must have their child, aren't these laws telling a brother and sister who love each other that they can't have children together? How is this not a violation of reproductive freedom? And after all, we have contraception and legalized abortion, so it is easy to avoid or erase any "mistakes." I am sure many people respond to this line of argument with, "But marriage between a brother and a sister is yucky." But the same was once said about same-sex marriage and polygamy. Look how easy it is to overcome the "yuck factor" with those arrangements. Katherine Harrison received much acclaim for her book The Kiss which details her affair with her father. Jerry Springer used to shock us with stories of incestuous relationships, but I bet not one Springer viewer in 100,000 could tell you what was wrong with those relationships other than "they're yucky."
The best arguments for gay marriage take on these problems. Jonathan Rauch's excellent book claims that marriage disciplines male behavior, and the problem with polygamy is that it allows some males to be very promiscuous while limiting the chances of marriage of other males (if some men get ten wives, many men get no wives). I recommend Rauch's book to anyone who cares about this issue, although like Andrew Sullivan's impressive Virtually Normal, Rauch claims to take his opponents seriously, but quickly creates straw men and finally slips into the notion that the only argument against same-sex marriage is bigotry. Still, I think Rauch gives the best and most thought provoking argument for same-sex marriage. The problem is, as many have pointed out, Rauch is almost the only one making his essentially conservative argument for gay marriage. I suspect, as Kurtz claims, that the real impetus behind the same-sex marriage push, which has led to the argument for polygamy, is the desire to eradicate marriage as a social institution.
Is there a positive argument for "traditional" marriage? I think Maggie Gallagher has the best one that doesn't resort to "because God said so," although unlike most others I don't immediately reject the "because God said so" argument. I think doing what God says is good policy, but admittedly finding out what God is saying can be an enterprise in ambiguity. If you want a good Christian account, see Lutheran theologian Gilbert Meilaender's "Homosexuality in Christian Perspective" (pdf alert).
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