Pandora and polygamy
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 17, 2006
Washington Post
And now, polygamy.
With the sweetly titled HBO series "Big Love," polygamy comes out of
the closet. Under the headline "Polygamists, Unite!" Newsweek informs
us of "polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage
movement." Says one evangelical Christian big lover: "Polygamy rights
is the next civil-rights battle."
Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons,
primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With "Big Love" it moves to
suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.
As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy
(or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing
legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out
that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights.
After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two
people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage
insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and
an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first
requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a
similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of
individual choice.
This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why
they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I'm not the
one who put them there. Their argument does. Blogger and author Andrew
Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when
it was considered pretty crazy, has called this the "polygamy
diversion," arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically
different because polygamy is a mere "activity" while homosexuality is
an intrinsic state that "occupies a deeper level of human
consciousness."
But this distinction between higher and lower orders of love is
precisely what gay rights activists so vigorously protest when the
general culture "privileges" (as they say in the English departments)
heterosexual unions over homosexual ones. Was "Jules et Jim" (and
Jeanne Moreau), the classic Truffaut film involving two dear friends in
love with the same woman, about an "activity" or about the most
intrinsic of human emotions?
To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender
mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to
each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as
mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what
grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary
number of two?
What is historically odd is that as gay marriage is gaining acceptance,
the resistance to polygamy is much more powerful. Yet until this
generation, gay marriage had been sanctioned by no society that we know
of, anywhere at any time in history. On the other hand, polygamy was
sanctioned, indeed common, in large parts of the world through large
swaths of history, most notably the biblical Middle East and through
much of the Islamic world.
I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to,
or assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within.
Marriage has needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide,
thank you. Astronomical rates of divorce and of single parenthood (the
deliberate creation of fatherless families) existed before there was a
single gay marriage or any talk of sanctioning polygamy. The minting of
these new forms of marriage is a symptom of our culture's contemporary
radical individualism -- as is the decline of traditional marriage --
and not its cause.
As for gay marriage, I've come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is
a mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference
between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy. On the
other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to
have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their
relationship with a loved one that I'm not about to go to anyone's
barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such
fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted
democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by
judicial fiat.
Call me agnostic. But don't tell me that we can make one radical change
in the one-man, one-woman rule and not be open to the claim of others
that their reformation be given equal respect.