Do you remember when polygamy was retrograde and conservative?
You only have to go back to about 13 years, when the gay marriage debate was hitting its climax. If we rewrote the definition of marriage, some conservatives argued, it wouldn’t end with abolishing the man-and-wife thing.
“Enough With the Scare Tactics,” shot back professor John Corvino in the New York Times, in 2013.
“Conservative fearmongers have long warned that same-sex marriage will send the nation down a slippery slope to polygamy,” Corvino wrote, adding “most polygamy proponents are religious fundamentalists.”
But study the record — and particularly the former “paper of record” — and you’ll see Corvino’s view was already dated.
The Times has been beating the poly-drum for decades, but more recently, it’s become relentless. Here are some Times headlines from the past few months:
“Lindy West Thought She Couldn’t Handle Polyamory. She Was Wrong.”
“I Was Content with Monogamy. I shouldn’t Have Been.”
And last month: “In the Northwest, Polyamory Finds Something New: Legal Protection.”
And this is the key.
Whether you call it polyamory or polygamy, it is not new, and it has never gone away. And the elites, since the sexual revolution, have never stopped singing the praises of non-monogamy.
“Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?” The Times asked in 2017, basically answering “yes.”
In the 1990s, the Times scolded college kids for having too few sexual partners.
In 2006, the Times published a lament that we were too puritanical and too judgmental of promiscuity. The proper attitude toward folks with tons of sexual partners, the Times told us, is: “That’s just the way that she is and we just love her for that … It makes her more interesting and fun and she always has good stories.”
Most famously, Time magazine White House correspondent Nina Burleigh weighed in on Bill Clinton’s Oval Office affair by penning an ode to infidelity. She declared herself “quite willing to let myself be ravished by the President, should he have but asked … I like to think I have rejected the old customs and mores.”
So disdaining monogamy isn’t new for the media elite. What’s new is asking the rest of us to endorse this lifestyle.
When they talk about “legal protection,” recall their demands for “legal protection” for transgender people. Of course, folks living “alternative lifestyles” deserve equal protection of the law, and they already have it. The current crusade is to force us to respect their throuple or whatever, and treat it the way we treat a real marriage.
Endorsement and respect by others is, after all, what legal marriage demands. Marriage is not a bilateral contract between two people. It is a covenant between a couple and society, which conveys reciprocal duties on both sides.
The polyamory normalizers aren’t begging tolerance of their lifestyle. They are demanding we participate in their perversion.
