| Sunday, March 12, 2006 |
| Some things are true even if right wingers believe them |
One of those things is that as you liberalize the definition of marriage, it becomes harder and harder to limit those definitions to selected "minority" groups. Case in point, polygamists, who essentially have the same "equal protection" argument for their marriages (bolstered by a religious freedom argument) that gay couples do. Liberals may not like to hear that, but it's nonetheless true. From Newsweek:
Polygamists, Unite!
They used to live quietly, but now they're making noise.
March 20, 2006 issue - Marlyne Hammon knows what it's like to feel hated and hunted. In 1953, when she was an infant, her father—along with dozens of other men in her tiny community of Short Creek, Ariz.—was arrested and sent to jail on charges of polygamy. She, her mother and siblings were forcibly exiled from the community and sent to live with a family in a nearby city. Her father was released after a week, but because the family feared further prosecution, they lived apart and corresponded in secret for the next six years. "Our community had this idea that we should live our lives quietly to avoid trouble," she says. "We were taught not to make a big ruckus."
Not anymore. Hammon, who's involved in a polygamous relationship, is a founding member of the Centennial Park Action Committee, a group that lobbies for decriminalization of the practice. She's among a new wave of polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement—just as a federal lawsuit challenging anti-polygamy laws makes its way through the courts and a new show about polygamy debuts on HBO. "Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle," says Mark Henkel, who, as founder of the Christian evangelical polygamy organization TruthBearer.org, is at the forefront of the movement. His argument: if Heather can have two mommies, she should also be able to have two mommies and a daddy. Henkel and Hammon have been joined by other activist groups like Principle Voices, a Utah-based group run by wives from polygamous marriages. Activists point to Canada, where, in January, a report commissioned by the Justice Department recommended decriminalizing polygamy.
There's a sound legal argument for making the controversial practice legal, says Brian Barnard, the lawyer for a Utah couple, identified in court documents only as G. Lee Cooke and D. Cooke, who filed suit after being denied a marriage license for an additional wife. Though the case was struck down by a federal court last year, it's now being considered by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Barnard plans to use the same argument—that Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 sodomy case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individuals have "the full right to engage in private conduct without government intervention," should also apply to polygamous relationships.... Gay marriage advocates will of course call this a straw man argument -- I mean, how many polygamists are there outside of Utah? Besides, polygamy is about mysogyny, right? While gay marriage is about "affirmation..." well, I would challenge those advocates to explain to me, as a matter of law, how three consenting adults differ from two, in terms of their right to engage in private relationship contracts? You can't assume every woman in a polygamous relationship is coerced, unless you're willing to make a blanket statement about the inability of women in these situations to legally consent -- which you cannot do without seriously dissing women.
At some point, America will either revert to a very traditionalist model, where abortions are largeley illegal, Christianity is intervowen into law and public policy in all but a few states, and marriage is stuffed back into the Judeo-Christian box, or we will go the European route, where religion is dampened in all but a few, recalcitrant states, the idea of public morality is elasticized and replaced by a humanist focus on personal pleasures and wish fulfillment and marriage increasingly -- if incrementally -- means whatever a group of two or more consenting adults say it means.
I think the U.S. is moving in the latter direction, like it or not. That's not to say we're going to become some debauched Sodom and Gamorrah, where everybody is engaged in wild threesomes and people are marrying dogs, as Rick Santorum would say, but I really think Christians are in their last desperate gasp to get control of the country (case in point, the "intelligent design" and abortion battles) and that they will ultimately lose. Religion hasn't historically stood up well against secular humanism, and I have a hard time believing it will, even in occasionally fundamentalist America.
...Either that or we're headed for one hell of a cultural civil war...
Tags: Gay marriage, Politics, Polygamy |
posted by JReid @ 11:03 AM   |
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