Posted on 07/21/2020 12:57:07 PM PDT by Kaslin
Every argument supporting gay marriage—‘Love is love,’ ‘we deserve equal protection under the law,’ and ‘we’re not harming anybody’—also supports group marriage.
The Massachusetts town of Somerville has become the first in the nation to legalize polyamorous relationships. It’s evidence of the slippery slope social conservatives warned would follow legalizing gay marriage.
Polygamy was the obvious evolution of redefining marriage. After all, every argument supporting gay marriage—“Love is love,” “we deserve equal protection under the law,” and “we’re not harming anybody”—also supports group marriage.
Somerville’s legal recognition of polyamory came about on June 25 while the city council was changing its domestic partnership application to a gender-neutral form. When Somerville council member Lance Davis was challenged over why the form was limited to two applicants, he replied, “I don’t have a good answer.”
Indeed, if we are going to ignore the fundamental, dual-sex form marriage has employed for millennia, there is no good answer to why government-sanctioned adult relationships should be limited to two adults. That is, unless we consider the rights of children to be known and loved by the only two adults to whom they have a natural right—their mother and father.
Yet, according to the prevailing view of marriage, endorsed by the Supreme Court’s ruling mandating gay marriage in 2015, marriage has nothing to do with children. These days, marriage is simply a vehicle for adult fulfillment.
By such reasoning, there is no limiting principle for the sex, number, duration, or exclusivity of a marriage relationship. While the same cannot be said of the children resulting from their unions, plenty of adults feel fulfilled by short term, single-gendered, non-exclusive, or multi-partnered relationships. SCOTUS was indifferent to the needs of the children in their 2015 decision, and Somerville is following suit.
The Republican Party’s founding platform sought to abolish what they referred to as “the twin pillars of barbarisms,” slavery and polygamy. Republicans were successful in legally eradicating both: slavery in 1865, and polygamy in 1890, but pockets of polygamy persisted, especially within the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) church.
A woman who was raised in one such FLDS home until her mother left with her five children— we’ll call her “Cheryl”—noted of the Somerville decision, “I do not think that governments should legalize polygamist homes because they are generally abusive and harmful to children and women within them.”
While she concedes there are “polygamist families who function quite well,” the families she was exposed to were “almost always education deprived, low on resources and food, isolated from mainstream society, abusive, and perpetuated pedophilia.” She added that while the women in the home shared the workload, the children’s emotional needs would often go unmet.
Cheryl isn’t the only child to reject a polygamous life after growing up with parents who had several concurrent partners. Story after story after story of children who have abandoned the polygamous world of their youth has surfaced in the last few years. They often report power imbalances and jealousy among the wives, and inequality among the children.
Leftists proclaim, “But there’s a difference between polygamy and polyamory!” Right. Just like “pure socialism has never been tried.”
Progressives posit polygamy and polyamory are “vastly different.” They decry polygamy, in which typically one man has several wives, as oppressive and patriarchal, while the amorphous “polyamory” is consensual and liberating, even for the kids.
Amy Grappell, one such child of a poly relationship, would disagree. In Amy’s youth, her parents began spouse-swapping with the neighbors. In today’s terms, Amy was subjected to polyamory, or “ethical non-monogamy,” and it was no picnic.
In her documentary detailing her parents’ “Quadrangle,” Amy discloses how more adults in her home did not result in more parental love. Rather, the household dynamics centered on adult sexual desire, and the jealousy and competitiveness between the women was a constant.
Amy felt abandoned by her parents, and describes her feelings as “the enemy of their utopia.” The emotional and psychological fall-out from her parents’ sexual experiment has plagued Amy into her adult life.
James Lopez, who was also raised in a “modern” poly home, rejects the idea that polyamory just means a larger family for kids. “The problem is that children in homes with extended family members do not ever see those members kiss either their mom or dad, as is the case in poly homes. I didn’t like seeing my dad show affection to another woman, especially to a woman who wasn’t my biological mother. Those images still lurk in the back of my mind today. And they don’t bring a sense of ‘family’ to me.”
James believes that, “Instead of promoting poly-ships, our political institutions should revive the ideas that fatherhood matters, that motherhood matters because both are essential for the flourishing of children.”
There are very few reliable studies on outcomes for children raised in poly homes, but we don’t really need them. We already have a mountain of data on family structure that shows the presence of non-biological adults does not improve outcomes for kids, no matter what type of relationship exists between the adults.
Conversely, the data invariably proves that children fare best in the home of their married biological mother and father. Throughout nearly every religion and culture in history, heterosexual marriage has been to be the tool society used to encourage that child-centric union.
The officials in Somerville mistakenly believe embracing this “progressive” policy indicates they are making progress when, in fact, their new statute is a regression that sets society back by 130 years and comes at children’s expense.
Somerville, Massachusetts? Isn’t that where Nambla is headquartered? What next adults marrying children?
Towns can legalize things like polygamy? How about allowing ten year-olds to drive?
ML/NJ
Being married to more than one person would be it’s own punishment. Love my wife, but 2? Hard pass.
Rush warned about that several years ago.
You are right, of course, but the real danger arose from LBJ’s feral government welfare policy that intentionally attacked the nuclear family such that three fourths of black Americans are raised as fatherless feral amoral pavement primates.
some of us did on here too, plus the next one after this is reduce the age of consent to 13. I guarantee it the child molesting lot are very powerful as we can see by Epstein, and others who seem to die once they are caught or they go missing. Some of the powerful people involved Oprah, Ellen, Anderson Cooper, Tom Hanks, Clintons, some of their aides like Podesta.
Eventually, conceivably, someone could marry a relative (brother, sister, child, parent, even of the same sex) to keep their money in the family. It’s not personal - it’s strictly business.
Sometimes I hate it when I'm right all the time.
I said this when gay marriage first came about. Opens the doo up for anything that you think you want. I want to marry my dog and she gets equal rights to everything.
This is a Great Idea, we should all demand to MARRY Our Congressional Rep in Absentia, regardless of theirs or our own marital status so we can collect their Retirement Package and Benefits also.
I can’t imagine having more than one wife.
Unless they’re all really hot.
It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage. If “[t]here is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices,” ante, at 13, why would there be any less dignity in the bond between three people who, in exercising their autonomy, seek to make the profound choice to marry? If a same-sex couple has the constitutional right to marry because their children would otherwise “suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser,” ante, at 15, why wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to a family of three or more persons raising children? If not having the opportunity to marry “serves to disrespect and subordinate” gay and lesbian couples, why wouldn’t the same “imposition of this disability,” ante, at 22, serve to disrespect and subordinate people who find fulfillment in polyamorous relationships?I do not mean to equate marriage between same-sex couples with plural marriages in all respects. There may well be relevant differences that compel different legal analysis. But if there are, petitioners have not pointed to any. When asked about a plural marital union at oral argument, petitioners asserted that a State “doesn’t have such an institution.” But that is exactly the point: the States at issue here do not have an institution of same-sex marriage, either.
Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S.Ct. 2584, 2621-22 (2015) (Roberts, C.J., dissenting).
I guess he could say "I told ya so." But based on his reasoning in the recent abortion case, this probably means he is of the opinion that stare decisis demands a holding now that laws against polygamy are unconstitutional.
I waiting for cats and dogs to start living together.
I’ve always said that is their real agenda.
I just married my horse!!
Low-class town adjoins Cambridge ... home of Harvard and MIT ... but now gets its own 15 minutes of fame
Phyllis Scafley warned of this more than 40 years ago.
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