Heaneyland!

Wed, wed whine

From yesterday's referral log, I discovered that one person found my blog by searching on the phrase "POLYAMORY BY AL GORE". I don't know what they were actually looking for, but it was probably not so much a cartoon by me and more like this piece of scaremongering from the Weekly Standard. Articles like this certainly do arouse my ire, so even though it's a three-year-old article, I'm going to vent about it for a bit.

Polyamorists are enthusiastic proponents of same-sex marriage. Obviously, any attempt to restrict marriage to a single man and woman would prevent the legalization of polyamory.

Or it could be that polyamorists tend to be liberals who recognize that every justification for restricting marriage to heterosexual couples can be traced back to an essentially religious argument, and what was that separation of church and state business anyway? Anyway, as far as I know, there's no law against polyamory, which is a whole different thing than poly marriage.

Inevitably, group marriages based on modern principles of companionate love, without religious rules and restraints, are unstable.

And what data is this statement based on? We don't have legal group marriages, so where is the author getting his information? And what about traditional monogamous marriages between secular people? Are those marriages also inherently unstable because of the lack of "religious rules and restraints"?

Taking a leaf from the gay marriage movement, Singer suggested starting small. A campaign for hospital visitation rights for polyamorous spouses would be the way to begin. Full marriage and adoption rights would come later.

Actually, I think the strictures about hospital visitation rights are ridiculous in general. Why can't you designate as many people as you want as de facto relatives? I have lots of friends I consider as important to me as family members, and it's kind of bullshit that those people aren't allowed to have the same visitations rights that my family would have.

The harms of state-sanctioned polyamorous marriage would extend well beyond the polyamorists themselves. Once monogamy is defined out of marriage, it will be next to impossible to educate a new generation in what it takes to keep companionate marriage intact. State-sanctioned polyamory would spell the effective end of marriage.

Way to state your premises as conclusions!

Polygamy, polyamory, and the abolition of marriage are bad ideas. But what has that got to do with gay marriage? The reason these ideas are connected is that gay marriage is increasingly being treated as a civil rights issue. Once we say that gay couples have a right to have their commitments recognized by the state, it becomes next to impossible to deny that same right to polygamists, polyamorists, or even cohabiting relatives and friends. And once everyone's relationship is recognized, marriage is gone, and only a system of flexible relationship contracts is left.

Um...marriage is a relationship contract. How does creating more genres of relationship contract nullify the previously existing ones?

I have my doubts about how many people would take advantage of poly marriages, anyway. The type of polyamory I practice (where Rose and I are involved with people who are in turn involved with other people) seems particularly ill-suited to an extended marriage situation, although a system whereby we could assign certain rights to other people for certain situations (like the aforementioned hospital visitation rights) doesn't seem like such a bad idea. But if, say, three people are cohabiting and committed to living together and, perhaps, raising children -- well, that seems like a situation in which the participants might very well wish to avail themselves of the protections of marriage, and I don't see why those people should be denied it.

Oh, remember what I said before? Well, the author says he has an anti-gay-marriage rationale that's not religious!

There is a rational basis for blocking both gay marriage and polygamy, and it does not depend upon a vague or religiously based disapproval of homosexuality or polygamy. Children need the stable family environment provided by marriage. In our individualist Western society, marriage must be companionate--and therefore monogamous. Monogamy will be undermined by gay marriage itself, and by gay marriage's ushering in of polygamy and polyamory.

But preventing people from marrying in no way prevents them from raising children! The only thing it does is prevent people who are raising children together from having legal protections that prevent their children being taken away from them if the biological or legal adoptive parent in the partnership dies. And if a stable, married home is so important to raising children, why don't we also make single parenting illegal while we're at it?

Also note the unstated assumption that every marriage is about children. For instance, Rose and I aren't planning to have any. Whoops! We accidentally subverted marriage.

Posted by Francis at 12:27 AM