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 ...
Sorry, that wasn’t directed at you. I follow your comments and I think you’re one of the best posters on FR.
Well thank you. That’s very kind of you.
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.
...worrying about polygamy in our current cesspool of a culture is like a horse owner, having discovered that his prize stallion has bolted for parts unknown, then sits down and grouses that he didn’t eat all his oats before he left...
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
while for the time being there is no reason for polygamy it is obvious that there were a reason in the past.
There have never been a reason for sodomy or bestiality.
It is the liberals that put polygamy in the same class with the other two so why go along with their false premise.
Any God believing conservative can see the difference, and if they are not believers they can still see the difference.
Homosexuality and bestiality is against human nature, you do not have to go to church or even to be a believer to know that it is an abomination.
“All on one side and most on the other don’t believe that, as far as I can tell.”
And that is the point. A person who has studied Scripture can read what God says about marriage. For many others, the god of this world is big and bigger government. They like it that way because they can bend government to advance their beliefs, and when government decrees something, it establishes a moral force in their minds.
When I post what I did elsewhere, I sometimes get pushback from people who claim they are Christian but who look to government to “protect” marriage. The truth is that the more godly aspects of our lives (like marriage and charity) that we turn over to government, the more power over our lives we cede to it. We are amazed when we wake up to the monster we have allowed to put us in chains.
In this case the chains are in part that government will demand, backed up by the credible threat of deadly force, that we accept a definition of marriage that not only is contrary to God’s definition, but is intended in part to insult and marginalize people who accept God in their lives. Since when would anything think that “marriage” could be used as a weapon to help destroy society?
That day has arrived, at least in some jurisdictions that determine that it is a crime to decline to enable same-sex marriage by refusing to sell the happy couple wedding cakes or photography services.
To advance the legal case that a marriage between two people of the same sex is no different than a marriage as God defines it, the US Justice Department will base their arguments before the Supreme Court that a child does not need, nor have a right to a mother. [1]
Curiously, when advocates of gay marriage are asked if their policy also would allow polygamy or polyandry, they recoil in horror and insist that it does not. However, logic demands that it does. I would ask how same-sex parents are going to react in the future when, for example, Utah public schools officials require that teachers instruct the children that Mormon-related polygamy is just as “normal” as same-sex “marriage”. The fact that this will be an issue will show yet again that gay “marriage” is not about marriage at all it is about forcing the rest of us to approve of repugnant sexual immorality, something that LDS polygamists never demanded.
[1] DOJ: Children Do Not Need—and Have No Right to—Mothers March 3, 2013 By Terence P. Jeffrey
http://tinyurl.com/blcyj9u
...worrying about polygamy in our current cesspool of a culture is like a horse owner, having discovered that his prize stallion has bolted for parts unknown, then sits down and grouses that he didn’t eat all his oats before he left...
“They like it that way because they can bend government to advance their beliefs, and when government decrees something, it establishes a moral force in their minds.”
“Now, since the family and human society at large spring from marriage, these men will on no account allow matrimony to be the subject of the jurisdiction of the Church. Nay, they endeavor to deprive it of all holiness, and so bring it within the contracted sphere of those rights which, having been instituted by man, are ruled and administered by the civil jurisprudence of the community. Wherefore it necessarily follows that they attribute all power over marriage to civil rulers, and allow none whatever to the Church; and, when the Church exercises any such power, they think that she acts either by favor of the civil authority or to its injury. Now is the time, they say, for the heads of the State to vindicate their rights unflinchingly, and to do their best to settle all that relates to marriage according as to them seems good.”
—Pope Leo XIII, 1880
To the state, marriage is simply whatever judges, pols or the voting public think it can be at any one time. That’s it, that’s all it will ever be to the state.
“I sometimes get pushback from people who claim they are Christian but who look to government to “protect” marriage.”
That’s because anyone who thinks this way about the state and marriage is obviously a raging pro-gay marriage libertarian just like Pope Leo XIII. Or something.
FReegards
It will not be Mormans suing to get polygamy reinstated, it’ll be 5 or 6 dykes that all want to get “married” to each other, and it be considered one marriage. The word for multiple partners in the sodomite community is POLY. Sodomites see nothing wrong with “loving” as many as they feel like “loving” and having an orgy every night in two king sized beds pushed together. And when the brainless US Supreme Court rules it’s legal, which they will have to after making sodomite “marriage” legal, the fatherless children of the 10 dykes all sleeping together will be sleeping in the adjoining room.
“I sometimes get pushback from people who claim they are Christian but who look to government to “protect” marriage.”
That’s because anyone who thinks this way about the state and marriage is obviously a raging pro-gay marriage libertarian just like Pope Leo XIII. Or something.
>>>
Well sometimes not. But they confuse the force of government with moral force of the eternal God. They can have faith that a government that is tangible to them can and will enforce its (secular-based) laws that for the moment at least happen to roughly agree with God’s law that they (roughly) understand. They can’t have sufficient faith that God’s laws are above and beyond government.
Strangely, they don’t ever complain about “hippie communes” or where young people increasingly don’t get married, but conduct their lives in faux-marriage relationships and faux-family units. (Any relationship that includes producing children without any commitment to be permanent enough to raise those children to adulthood is not a “family”.)
So, the argument they pick with my position that it is time to revoke government’s power over defining who is married shows they don’t care what kind of sexual morality people have, or how people who are not married conduct their sexual lives. So, what exactly is “marriage” to such people? I think they being reactionary conservatives, that is they are strongly attempting to conserve some aspect of society yet they cannot understand why except that it is “tradition”.
It is for this reason that I beg people who call themselves conservative and especially if they also consider themselves to be a follower of God, that they stop and consider what, exactly, they are attempting to “conserve” and why. Some things should not be conserved, but returned to their original roots in timeless moral law.
“They can have faith that a government that is tangible to them can and will enforce its (secular-based) laws that for the moment at least happen to roughly agree with God’s law that they (roughly) understand. They can’t have sufficient faith that God’s laws are above and beyond government.”
Many have been conditioned to think marriage comes from and is defined by the state, that’s why so many accept the concept of ‘gay marriage’ in the first place. It can exist because the state says it can, it comes in little pieces of paper. The paper denotes a contract with benefits and strictures between any parties the state chooses and can be broken and resumed as long as the state gives its permission again.
A lot of times those faiths that accept ‘gay marriage’ won’t even act on this belief until the state tells them that it also accepts ‘gay marriage.’ Which might be more insane than buying into ‘gay marriage’ in the first place.
Freegards
“Polygamy would take away the reverence for marriage and reduce us to first class animals instead of a spiritual being.”
The Bible is peppered with examples of righteous polygamists. Curious, I never thought of King David as a first-class animal, but maybe he was. Religion is certainly part of culture, but in the case of polygamy, our objections to it may be more cultural than spiritual.
Bingo.
“Yet when the Son of Man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:8
That says it all. If it happens 200 years from now He will be probably be coming back to polygamous ‘gay marriages’ between child clones and animals with human brains, or some other evil impossibility the state decides to consider a marriage.
Here’s more goodness from raging pro- ‘gay marriage’ libertarian Pope Leo’s 1880 Arcanum:
“Nevertheless, the naturalists, as well as all who profess that they worship above all things the divinity of the State, and strive to disturb whole communities with such wicked doctrines, cannot escape the charge of delusion. Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it a something holy and religious; not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature. Innocent III, therefore, and Honorius III, our predecessors, affirmed not falsely nor rashly that a sacrament of marriage existed ever amongst the faithful and unbelievers. We call to witness the monuments of antiquity, as also the manners and customs of those people who, being the most civilized, had the greatest knowledge of law and equity. In the minds of all of them it was a fixed and foregone conclusion that, when marriage was thought of, it was thought of as conjoined with religion and holiness. Hence, among those, marriages were commonly celebrated with religious ceremonies, under the authority of pontiffs, and with the ministry of priests. So mighty, even in the souls ignorant of heavenly doctrine, was the force of nature, of the remembrance of their origin, and of the conscience of the human race. As, then, marriage is holy by its own power, in its own nature, and of itself, it ought not to be regulated and administered by the will of civil rulers, but by the divine authority of the Church, which alone in sacred matters professes the office of teaching.”
Freegards
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