Posted on 06/29/2014 8:47:28 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The normalization of polygamy would undermine our commitment to human dignity—our sense that each human being is to be valued as an end in him- or herself, and not merely as a means to others’ ends.
Conservatives have long warned that the redefinition of marriage sought by the proponents of same-sex unions will prepare the way for a further redefinition of marriage to include polygamy. Some liberals have already done their part to fulfill this prophecy by assuming that the argument over same-sex marriage is over and by beginning to argue for a normalization of plural marriages. As I have recently argued here at Public Discourse, I do not agree that the argument over same-sex marriage is or should be over. Nevertheless, because some liberals have started to defend polygamy, conservatives who want to preserve our moral inheritance need to think through what kind of arguments caution against this further step.
Defenders of conjugal marriage confront a problem here, because it seems harder to make a principled argument against polygamy than against same-sex marriage. The principled argument against same-sex marriage holds that marriage by its nature is ordered toward procreation. Since this cannot be said of same-sex unions, the argument runs, it makes no sense to recognize them as marriages. This argument is not available—or is not so easily available—in opposition to polygamous marriages. After all, to the extent that such marriages are heterosexual, they can be naturally ordered toward procreation.
Without denying the possibility of a strong principled argument against polygamy—an argument based, say, in the nature of human sexuality and its natural purposes—I would like here to venture a prudential argument against it.
A Prudential Argument Against Polygamy
The normalization of polygamy would undermine our commitment to human dignity...
(Excerpt) Read more at thepublicdiscourse.com ...
Well, the Mormons are just licking their chops to get this going!
Mormons? Muslims.
Polygamy would take away the reverence for marriage and reduce us to first class animals instead of a spiritual being. The heathens know what they’re doing. It’s exactly how Satan views us and us mentioned in the Satanic bible. We know where this thought originates from. The idiots are too stupid to figure it out though they can play a mean game of Minecraft and can text while they drive (until they crash)
Over the years, I have heard all these debates about homosexual marriage. And the liberals would laugh and ridicule anyone who said we were on a slippery slope to legalizing polygamy or group marriage, or adult / child marriage. The liberals ridiculed anyone who thought that legalizing homosexual marriage would lead to legalizing other arrangements.
It remains to be seen where this goes, but, the same arguments made to justify homosexual marriage, namely that it’s all about who you love, consenting adults want to live their lives and have legal recognition, etc. — those same arguments can also be used to justify polygamy.
And if liberal judges who have been forcing homosexual marriage down our throats use the same legal reasoning, they will also impose polygamy on us.
God invented marriage, not man. God designated marriage, not as a contractual agreement, but as a covenant. Governments may be able to regulate contracts, but a covenant is based on the laws of God and not man. Thus marriage is an institution outside of the bounds of government.
Government was happy to intrude into the marriage because when we gave tax exemptions based on marital status, or when we taxed a person’s estate upon their death, or when the State stepped in to direct the disposition of an estate, or when we used the State to enforce marital fidelity or grant divorces, we had to allow the State to define who was “married” and who was not.
As with all things Statist, the secular State’s definition of marriage and divorce has come to have more weight in society than God’s definition.
God defines marriage as being between men and women. While many men whom God called righteous in the Bible practiced polygamy, Jesus is quoted in Matthew chapter 19 that from the beginning of humanity, it was God’s intent that marriage would only be one man and one woman. In Mark chapter 10, Jesus stated that God, not man, joins the husband and wife and the two are “one flesh”, an act that by its very nature can only be heterosexual.
These are ecclesiastical considerations that are outside of secular government, that is unless we want government to police sexual behavior between consenting adults based on the standards of the Bible, assuming we can agree what those are. Do we want Congress to have that debate?
Maybe it is time to get government out of the marriage business and to return it to the private sphere. The problem for me today is that people who want to call themselves “married” against God’s law (as I read it) are willing to use the State to force me to recognize that marriage, which I cannot do. The want to have the State’s public education system indoctrinate my children that homosexual marriage is “normal”. They want to force me to subsidize the homosexual marriage in the tax code just like the godly marriage is subsidized, and they will use state agencies to punish me for “discrimination” if I decline to accept their status in any way.
This applies to same sex couples as well as polygamy and polyandry. If government eventually assumes the power to “marry” these relationships as well, then our children will be indoctrinated as to how government defines “normal”, and the left will be happy to label anyone who believes otherwise as a “H8er” subject to sanctions where possible.
You didn’t know that Mormons taught polygamy as religious doctrine but were forced by the US Government to give it up?
Here’s a point of contact between end-stage Western leftists and Muslims. The Christianity they both hate grants no favoritism between Greek or Jew, free or slave, man or woman. Faithful Muslims are granted multiple women in heaven, relegating women to perpetual inferiority, whereas Jesus Christ says that we don’t marry in heaven.
Perhaps what is at root is a shared disregard for the reality of natural law which western leftists hold in common with Islamic fundamentalists. See a reprise look at Robert Reilly’s “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis” at Catholic World Report, “The Islamist Spring and the West’s Decline“ http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2544/the_islamist_spring_and_the_wests_decline.aspx .
“God invented marriage, not man. God designated marriage, not as a contractual agreement, but as a covenant.”
All on one side and most on the other don’t believe that, as far as I can tell.
Freegards
Well, just for fun— what do you think of the state NOT “legitimating” or licensing homosexual or polygamous arrangements, but just not banning them either?
That’s the one thing they won’t do. They must let you know that they are in charge and control everything in your life.
All I know about Mormons is they wear holey underwear.
you are certainly correct about that!
alas.
alas
well, it is just a hypothetical question anyway...
Anyone who believes that divorce and remarriage is okay, profoundly disagrees that marriage is a covenant.
When people decided to re-write the rules and make divorce so easy and so prevalent, they made it clear that they fundamentally disagreed with God and are above Him in the rule-making department.
Gay marriage is another step on that continuum, not a path on its own. Gays didn’t start the assault against marriage. People who got tired of their spouses and wanted “out” of their covenant with God did that decades ago.
Judao-Christian monogamy was tested against Muslim polygamy during the last 1,400 years. A case can be argued that this is the world’s longest running test of a social hypothesis. Unambiguously, it is the largest social experiment in terms of experimental populations.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the array of genetic diseases acquired consequential to 1,400 years of first cousin marriage, the subject of Muslim negative impact onall aspects of the male/female issue was never as well summed up as by Winston Churchill.
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”
I’m not in to polygamy but the first sentence in this article contradicts itself in a way.
It assumes that all polygamists are polygamists for ulterior reasons and totally misses the fact that while some may be in it for themselves, others may have altogether different reasons which tend towards the altruistic in varying degrees.
I didn’t have the desire to read the rest after that.
Mormons? Muslims.
You bet, this IS creeping Sharia! Makes me sick when I hear people say this is about “love”.
This is to get marriage in the western world away from Christian marriage to Islam!!
The problem with the argument is that society has already leapt way passed polygamy in terms of threats to human dignity. Abortion on demand is a direct affront to human dignity, and it's been legal by judicial fiat since 1973 in this country.
Polygamy is the least of our worries. Three consenting adults committing to each other is perhaps a sort of theoretical threat to human dignity, since overall and given enough time it would tend to derogate from the Christian notion of the infinite value of each human should, but it is nothing like the very direct threat posed by things like abortion on demand, designer genetic engineering of children, homosexual propaganda in schools, and so forth.
News flash to all who oppose polygamy - far worse is already the law of the land. The legislature just hasn't figured it out yet.
You misunderstand me and I’m not the author of this piece.
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