SSM AND POLYGAMY: Jonathan Rowe

...In this post, I demonstrate that Mr. Carter is wrong, that we indeed can meaningfully distinguish between gay marriage & polygamy. Note, I don't argue that ultimately we, as a society, must outlaw polygamy. It could be that competing principles, for instance the freedom and right of consenting adult individuals to enter into contractual relationships, ultimately trumps the arguments against polygamy. What I argue is that if you want some meaningful grounds in which to argue why we should recognize gay marriage but not polygamous ones, we have them. ...

This is the natural explanation for why polygamy not only has been so cross-culturally widespread, but also almost always one-man, many women. And given that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, widespread polygamy invariably equates with significant numbers of males with no female mates. That is unfair and wrong. And that's what we seek to avoid by outlawing polygamy.

Note that the grounds for prohibiting polygamy seem entirely different than the ones for prohibiting same-sex marriage. But the two are related in this sense: We outlaw polygamy for precisely the same policy reason why we would demand the recognition of gay marriage: the meaningful chance for any individual to marry a person they love. The gay man, like the single-unlucky male in a polygamous society cannot marry any person he loves.

This argument was briefly alluded to by a commenter in Carter's post, to which Carter responded:

Isn’t it a bit sexist and homophobic to assume that all polygamous marriages would consist of one man and several women? Why not have numerous men intermarrying or one woman and five men? This is a pluralistic country. We could have a wide permutation of relationships.

Given that gays are only 3% of the population, I'll ignore the "numerous men intermarrying" and instead focus on one women, many men. Human nature tells us that this won't happen to the degree that one-man, many women will. Human nature tells us that if widespread polygamy is allowed, its most common form will be one-man, many women and this invariably leads to large numbers of men without mates.

This is what we see in Islam, and the sexual frustration of these men leads an innordiate number of them to practice situational homosexuality, and because it's situational (the acts are homosexual, the desire is heterosexual), younger teen-boys who are proportionately closest in size to adult women are abused -- forced to play the sexual role of the female -- as they are chosen as substitutes for unavailable women. Moreover, this frustration no doubt drives many of them into terrorism and Jihad-war.

more
posted by Eve at 10:18 PM | link

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home