Weird Arguments About Love and Marriage

When I dine at a relgios house, it doesn’t bother me to bow my head while they mumble some words before we eat.

What’s wrong with good manners?

I don’t think the religios want us to half believe their primitive superstitions.

They just don’t want us to laugh at them.

It’s poor manners to get gay-married in Pat Robertson’s house, because it would offend his religious sensibilities. Also that whole “breaking-and-entering” thing. So, don’t do that.

“The early Christians were persecuted, too!”
Turns out not as much as was previously supposed:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Myths-Behind-the-Age-of/137423/

I never said you were laughing at anyone, John.

I’m just saying in any political debate, your only obligation to someone who plays the “Because god said so” card is to try to not laugh at them.

IMO a bigger argument against privileging any religion is that almost no religious people agree want it done. Viz, each religious person will claim that only their particular religion should be so privileged. So much as with the religious consensus argument against religion in general, I agree that most religious people are mostly right – until a religion can demonstrate that it is correct to the satisfaction of everyone, none of them can be considered worthy of privilege.

The other obvious extension to religious arguments against miscegenation/ emancipation/ divorce/ diet/ shorts is that clearly the state should have no role whatsoever in religious mores. Whenever the state moves to legislate in a way that impinges on religious belief there’s a great outcry that such legislation infringes religious freedom. I agree! Wholeheartedly. There should be *no* involvement of the state in religious practice (and no involvement by religious organisations in the state). Civil marriage should be just that – civil. If people wish to have their marriage separately blessed by the great lord cthulu they can do that. But it has no effect on the legal condition of their union.

I note that this already applies to many things. As one example, the state ignores the genuine belief of many Christians that they regularly eat human flesh and judges that they are deluded (and no crime has occurred).

All those larks who think there’s something virtuous about being up at 8:00 a.m. can go fuck themselves. Seriously, I have a neighbor who had guys out trimming his pine trees — pine trees, for god’s sake, which you could easily trim with the saw blade on your Swiss Army knife — with power saws at 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday, and when I opened my bedroom window to yell at him, he was the one who thought he had a right to be righteously indignant, and that it would be okay and I could just go back to bed when they were done at noon. No the hell I couldn’t. I had places to be at 1:00. And I’d been awake until four. And I rarely get more than six hours’ sleep on a weeknight. So all those so-called-virtuous larks who are going to bed at 10:00 and getting up at 6:00 nd claiming they’re so much less lazy than those of us who sleep from four till ten can just go and fuck themselves.

One of the reasons Andrew Sullivan is being polite to the traditional marriage advocates is that they represent (as traditional implies) the status quo position, which needs to be changed, and therefore people need (amongst other things) to be talked out of it, and there it helps very much to be polite. By the time we have same sex marriage in 40ish states and then SCOTUS extends its application to the southern states nolens volens, these sort of let’s talk nicely to the Christianists events will be a bit passe. Who does edited collections of essays on bans-on-interracial-marriage these days, and if they did, would everyone be polite to those who wanted to reimpose a ban? So rather than, or as well as, being a discussion between a “liberal” and a “Christian”, the tone of the debate is of a particular particular moment, and one that is almost past.

etv13, it would be illegal to trim trees on a Sunday in Switzerland, so it would be inappropriate to use a Swiss Army knife under the circumstances. That leaves power tools.

Surely Millian ‘no harm’ reasoning is woefully insufficient for a modern liberal. You seem to be applying it in an uncritical way that would also speak against minimum-wage laws, food inspectors, medical licensing, etc. etc.

So, I really wish Sullivan hadn’t given Wilson a space to speak, but that’s obviously just my preference. Who knows, maybe Wilson will get more people calling him on his horrifically racist and misogynistic shit now.

Regardless, Wilson’s about the last person who should ever be making civil rights arguments, given this:

http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/slavery/southern_slavery_as_it_was.htm

And yes, it’s the exact same Douglas Wilson.

It feels disrespectful to religion to slight religious conviction by brushing it off as ‘mere private preference’. But the alternative is forcing people to semi-share all serious religious beliefs.

How about forcing people to wholly share all serious religious beliefs, or forcing people to semi-share some but not all serious religious beliefs, or encouraging and persuading people to semi-share all serious religious beliefs? Anything as precisely specified as that can’t be the alternative.

I suspect you’ve got here by starting with “it seems to be assumed that we’ll all kind of semi-share all serious religious beliefs, on the basis that the alternative would be to slight religious conviction as mere private preference, which would be disrespectful – and it would be, but it’s still better than the first option”. I think you’re staying within the terms of somebody else’s false dichotomy, IOW.

Not sure about “mere” private preference, either. “Private preference” covers an awful lot of ground – from the kind of bread I use to make my sandwiches to my core political beliefs (which go back to a conversation I had with my father in 1975, if not further, & which I couldn’t change without becoming a different person). I wouldn’t expect those beliefs to be treated as a trump card by people who don’t share them, but neither would I expect them to be treated as irrelevant or meaningless unless I specifically made the case that they should be taken into account; I would expect some shared recognition that these were the kind of beliefs which people often found relevant. A sentence beginning “Speaking as a ballroom dancer” or “Speaking as an Avril Lavigne fan” could be relevant to a discussion of penal policy, but the case would have to be made. I don’t think “Speaking as a Labour voter” – or “Speaking as a Christian” – should be treated in the same way, and I think Labour voters (and Christians) would be right to object if they were.

Phil @26:

I wouldn’t expect those beliefs to be treated as a trump card by people who don’t share them, but neither would I expect them to be treated as irrelevant or meaningless unless I specifically made the case that they should be taken into account…

Your assertion of this is not an argument, though. WHY should I not treat Christian beliefs as irrelevant to non-Christians? Why should I give them any kind of recognition? I would say that for the secular, they simply do not count as relevant arguments for making other people behave in a certain way, as opposed to choosing to behave in a certain way yourself because of your own beliefs. For the former, but not the latter, you really do, in a secular polity, need arguments that don’t presuppose your own religious beliefs. Otherwise your preferred behavioral strictures will indeed go the way of opposition to interracial marriage.

(And yes, that goes for “speaking as a Labour voter” also. You should be able to construct arguments for your preferred policies that go beyond mere invocations of political tribalism, at least if you expect to be taken seriously by those who do not share your political affiliation.)

I have read Boyer’s book and I see nothing in it at all that supports Clay’s position. And anyway it’s meaningless and carries not weight at all merely to describe something as a “social institution”. The KKK is a social institution.

Clay Shirky: Sullivan, who has more cakes and eats them too than any man alive, wants to reconcile Catholicism and gay marriage because fuck tha’ police, that’s why

Exactly, on the cakes and eating. But Andrew Sullivan hanging out in South Boston?

The arguments they come up with tend to be poor

Then their position is poorly supported and deserves to lose. That’s how it’s supposed to work in a liberal, secular society.

The KKK is an organization, racism is a social institution. But it’s been denunciated. Religion is sill very much accepted. That’s the whole point.

Mao, trust me, there are significant parts of the country where the KKK is still “very much accepted”. That argument really doesn’t work.

But the Civil Rights Movement happened, and religion persists (bless its little heart), while the overtly religious leaders of the movement put their arguments into secular terms. The rhetoric was religious, the logic was secular.

Which is a very good model. Note also that the leaders of the movement consciously incorporated religious but non-Christian (and non-Western) moral perspectives and tactics, i.e. King’s study of Gandhi. Theirs was not the kind of narrow sectarianism that one finds on the religious right, and that was a major factor in their success.

Probably the strongest argument is that in essentially every society where polygamy is widely practiced, it is associated with inequality and the subordination of women.

One problem with this argument is that the control group is no better. Almost *every* society is characterized by gender inequality and the subordination of women, whether it is polygamous or not. Lower tech societies even more so, and (probably by historical accident, although I suppose you could try to argue the contrary) the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution took off in traditionally monogamous societies first, and those societies are still in the lead in technology and education, for the most part.

Your neighbor is free to say this. But he isn’t entitled to you taking him seriously. If you tell him to keep his opinions to himself and he gets indignant – ‘that is a rigid standard for public discourse!’ – the scene has crossed over into comedy.
or not

religious tenants

I wonder how the landlord knows if they’re religious or not……..I’m sure it’s illegal to ask. ;)

It would behoove you to modify your derision. Based on numbers, the religious set makes the majority of laws and laughing at their reasoning gets you nowhere.

That’s why the cause of marriage equality is in full retreat, amirite?

The “religious set” that wants to legislate old-fashioned “morality” is a small minority of religious people, never mind of the population as a whole (the latter, by the way, contains a majority of non-churchgoers, even if most of those still label themselves as religious in some vague way. And 32% of the population is avowedly non-religious, not just “the small population set of Atheist/Agnostic college professors”.) Try a conservative blog where you might hope to get away with such shoddy stuff.

Re: “How about forcing people to wholly share all serious religious beliefs?” This was the Imperial Roman point of view. It worked well, for a while…

Completely wrong. All that was required was token, external observance; nobody cared about your actual beliefs. The variety of religions that peacefully co-existed in the Roman Empire was actually quite impressive. Only the rare ones, pretty much jsut Judaism and Christianity, whose adherents refused even token ritual obeisance got in trouble, and even then only sporadically (the extent of persecution of Christians is often exaggerated, and the Jews, while generally disliked, weren’t bothered about until they engaged in open political rebellion.)

@49

phos,

I think the important thing about that is relgios pass on their primitive superstitions to their children within their homes.

That’s how it spreads.

The hard core religios don’t even trust their children to keep the faith in public schools, so the kids get 24/7 brainwashing.

Brian Leiter’s new book Why Tolerate Religion? surely would be instructive here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9839.html

So did Douglas Wilson make a strong case *for* polygamy or just against same sex marriage?

Which is a loss for Wilson, a half win for Sullivan..and a triumph for polygamists

I know. We all have to be vigilant against the subtle creep of state tyranny. Private tyranny, not so much

We are more likely to see wealthy/powerful old men take multiple young women as wives, and societal instability to result when poorer young men are consequently prevented from entering romantic relationships.

I find this argument kind of gross and illiberal. It treats the women in question as commodities to be distributed to men. Certainly that’s how it worked in many societies, both polygamous and monogamous. But in the US we have an (imperfectly realized) ideal that women get to choose their own partners. So you’re basically proposing that we say to a woman “sure, I know you would prefer being the third wife of Attractive Rich Dude, but for the good of society we need you to go keep Unattractive Loser Dude from exceeding his unrequited horniness quota.”

“Wilson’s position on that issue is, at least, internally consistent, whereas Sullivan’s really is not”

This is the problem, which I already commented about above, about citing anything with Sullivan in it. It’s like “bad cases make bad law”. He can be relied upon to think in the same way as he’s always thought, whether his cause is good or bad.

For the more general question of whether people should respect religious belief, I don’t think that the analysis here draws enough on actual politics as opposed to philosophical argumentation. In any actually functioning democracy (as opposed to an ideal one), a large part of the functioning part of the democracy is to allow claims from power that don’t have to be followed through. In other words, someone gets to say “I speak for a whole group of people who believe X, and if you anger us, we’ll break things.” That’s really the tradition that “public respect for religion” is trying to call on in this case. It’s not respect for minority religion.

The aggrieved tone is because it’s a claim that can’t really be followed through on if it’s pressed. There aren’t enough religious people willing to go out and hate gays any more, so when people like Wilson play up being victims, it’s supposed to be a motivating device — people who are nominally of Wilson’s religion are supposed to hear him being “victimized”, feel a greater group identity with their co-religionists, and ideally go out and be vocal gay-haters in some tribalist fashion, which people like Wilson would certainly condemn in sorrow and then use to back up the implicit argument that people had better respect religion or more events like this will happen.

It’s undoubtedly due more to a defect in my own thought processes than in Sullivan’s, but everything he writes or says seems to me to be cribbed from some unpublished Monty Python script. I suspect I’d be a better person if I could take him seriously, but I just can’t.

Josh G at 72

this is about marriage, which is about explicit societal sanction

This is pretty much exactly Wilson’s argument against same-sex marriage.

SamChevre: the difference is that there really aren’t any good secular reasons not to extend that deference to same-sex marriage. It doesn’t affect heterosexual couples in any way, only requires a few minor changes to the wording of existing laws, and doesn’t threaten societal stability in the way that legalized polygamy would.

Re: But in the US we have an (imperfectly realized) ideal that women get to choose their own partners. So you’re basically proposing that we say to a woman “sure, I know you would prefer being the third wife of Attractive Rich Dude, but for the good of society we need you to go keep Unattractive Loser Dude from exceeding his unrequited horniness quota.”

This is, uh, really a pretty silly argument.

Of course women (and men) can choose their own partners, but the choices we make are conditioned by what we’re taught and influenced to think is culturally acceptable. In a society where polygyny is denied social recognition, and concidered weird and outre, not a lot of women are going to choose to enter those sorts of relationships.

Re: are there any against polyandry?

I think polyandry is actually less of a threat to social stability than polygyny is, and it actually has the advantage that it would make it easier for ‘low quality’ men to get mates.

Hector
I personally don’t see how legalising polygamy would lead to societal breakdown. The norms are pretty strong against it as is, and it probably wouldn’t have any affect beyond the small, isolated groups who engage in polygamous marriages as is

Re: Christians seem like secular liberals because liberality is like that; they have a hard time defending anything uncompromisingly to the world, because a refusal to compromise is not a core mental habit of groups of liberals.

Which is a good argument for Christian churches not adopting core mental habits of liberalism generally. I think it’s at least possible in theory, though (and some people have managed it) to take a judicious approach to ‘liberality’, and change some of your ideas (e.g. about homosexuality) without changing others. There’s no inherent reason, for example, why ‘I think that some homosexual relationships are morally OK’, and ‘I think that John didn’t write the Gospel of John, and the miracles therein didn’t happen’ have to be linked thought processes. Rowan Williams (now stepped down, unfortunately) is relatively orthodox theologically, but also seems to have been in favour of some evolution of Anglican teaching about homosexuality and sexual ethics more generally (though he was cagey about his actual views on sex once he got into office).

“Many people seem to feel that listening to an argument, trying to actually understand how the arguer is thinking, is tantamount to agreeing with it/them.”

This is exactly the problem with Wilson’s argument: “Sullivan has treated my position respectfully, thereby admitting that there’s something to it.”

Nonsense sans stilts.

It’s interesting that, from what I just read in wikipedia, what’s illegal in the US is not an actual polygamous cohabitation, but only a polygamous paperwork. Just like the gay marriage ban, it seems rather meaningless, and unlikely to stop anyone from entering the forbidden mode of relationships.

@ 93: Depending on the laws in your vicinity, you don’t have to be an adult to get married. Nor has “an ethos of equality” ever been much of a factor historically in heterosexual marital relations, as others have observed.

@75: Which has often meant a mistress or “second family” living life in the shadows, unrecognized by the law or society and thus with few rights, and children bearing the taint of illegitimacy, until quite recently a profound stigma. A high human price to pay, and not notably egalitarian.

The current state of the social safety net is a big issue. Obstacles to polygamous relationships start to fall away as there is a reasonable standard of living for those entering or exiting the arrangement.

Once you decide that not everything in that book is true, it seems to me you’re going to need some sort of extra-textual mechanism for hashing out which of the prescriptions and proscriptions contained therein are the real deal, and that hashing out seems to me to be the essence of liberal religious thought.

Of course, it’s pretty notorious that nobody actually obeys all of the injunctions in Leviticus.

Re: but I don’t understand how one could go around claiming that, say, Leviticus 18:22-23 is wrong, without having to at least consider the possibility that John 3:16 might also be wrong?

Well, possibly, because, um, one of them is about the central figure of your religion and the other isn’t? Because a not insignificant number of early Christians didn’t even treat the Old Testament as scripture, and most of those who did read it as allegorical and typological at best? Because the bible is a library of books, written by different people and meant for different purposes? And because of one of those books was written down centuries after the events it purports to describe, is directed specifically towards one tribal people, and contains clearly mythological elements, while the other purports to be an eyewitness account written a few decades after the fact by the best friend of Jesus?

I’m not saying I would even agree with all those arguments, but you certainly can make them, and many have.

Re: it seems to me you’re going to need some sort of extra-textual mechanism for hashing out which of the prescriptions and proscriptions contained therein are the real deal,

Well, yes. Catholics and Orthodox have such a mechanism (tradition, ecumenical councils, etc.) which to a lesser extent some other Christian churches would draw on as well. Reason, natural law, (purported) continuing revelation and experience might be other ones that other people would subscribe to. But yes, clearly you do need an extra-textual mechanism. You need one to even arrive at the truth of Christianity to begin with though- the bible is clearly not self-authenticating, and so you need some extra-textual guide to authenticate it.

Re: and both asking for and providing reasons in such a conversation is itself a liberal act.

Maybe we are using different definitions of ‘liberal’, but I don’t think ‘reasoning about the bible’ is a liberal act. I’d use ‘liberal Christianity’ to mean coming to very specific conclusions about what the Bible means (e.g. that the new testament miracles didn’t really happen, and so forth).

As a liberal christian, I do take issue somewhat at the false dichotomy between “liberals” and “Christians.” My Church, the United Church of Canada, was the first mainline church in the country to sanctify the marriages of same sex clergy, out ahead even of the secular policies of Canadian society.

What I came here to respond to is the idea of semi-accepting all religious perspectives in a liberal society. I see liberal society as a social space. You can choose to engage in the social parts of this space or not. When you enter into the space, it is always through some motivation – could be religious, ideological, philosophical, volitional, whatever – but that motivation matters to you. However once in that space, you cannot use that motivation as a trump card in your interactions with others.

Respect at all who enter this space, and good luck to you. You must agree on a terms of engagement before creating policy. If all of you want to do it on a religious basis, then away you go. But if some don’t then the space is not a liberal one if the religious perspective sets the terms of debate. This means that policy making is about both the philisophical and ideological underpinnings of the space as well as the content of the debate. When unfettered capitalism is the reason for making policy and not everyone agrees with that, the conversation splits to both capitalism’s relevance in setting the agenda, and the merits of various proposals in the space. This can seem confusing, but such dual level reasoning is really important to keep our liberal societies ticking along.

Not confusing the level you are discussing is a useful skill.

Steve #100 and Hector #102,

I didn’t mean to say that anyone acts on, or even believes in, all the rules set down therein. If mere hypocrisy were enough to undo religion…

It is however a matter of some curiosity that, even given Hector’s separation of Old and New Testaments, almost no Christian sects propose to go back and actually edit out the bits they edit out mentally. Something is going on there, where a doctrine can be struck down de facto (“Father O’Malley, why did Jesus say ‘Call no man your father on earth’?”) but can never ever be struck down de jure.

Also, the Bible clearly is self-authenticating. It is the Word of God; it says so right there in the Bible, which is, after all, the Word of God.

So to re-write around Hector’s observation, I’d say liberality and religion are in tension, and things like “continued revelation” are escape valves. A little bit of ijtihad goes a long way to assuring the parishioners that they and God see eye to eye on stuff like bacon-wrapped lobster and gay marriage and so on, while keeping enough of the really crazy stuff (re-incarnation of the dead, parallel universes) safely out of the claws of inquiry.

So I’m using liberal to mean not ‘reasoning about the Bible’, which every Christian sect does, but ‘reasoning about the Bible where the reasons for or against believing something are discussed in public.’ And that latter form, which is common to most accounts of liberal thought, is corrosive of received wisdom.

Indeed, one mechanism by which the gay marriage debate has been won so quickly has been asking, in polite but insistent terms, what it is religious folk have against it? Traditional beliefs, even the most time-honored, always sound stupid to non-believers, and after getting believers to repeat their beliefs in those settings, some of it comes to sound stupid to some of them as well.

‘Sneaky fuckers’ is a genuine term of art in zoölogy – and applies to human beings (at least) as much as to any other mammal. If zoologists 9or their subject matter) weren’t so sexist, this might be described as ‘covert polyandry’.

So polygamy is not all bad from the POV of those of us who are workshy but sexually attractive. Of course alpha wolves don’t employ eunuchs to guard their harems, but nor do most Western polygamists. DNA testing may yet throw a sand particle in the ointment though.

Re: It’s not about personal attractiveness but power relations.

Love and sex always have been and always will be about power relations as much as about ‘personal attractiveness’. Income, power, social status etc. are a big part of what women find attractive in men, as much as it makes some cultural liberals uncomfortable to think about.

The sexual marketplace will never be quite egalitarian, but banning polygyny is one way we can make it *more* egalitarian. (I don’t care so much about banning polyandry, mostly because men are less selective in general, so it will probably always be easier for women to find mates).

Income, power, social status etc. are a big part of what women find attractive in men

…

I enjoy comedy of manners. The light stuff. (Why else would I read First Things?)

I will never ever stop laughing at this.

Am the only one here that has doubts about equating women with products being bought at a market.

108. The problems with those societies is sexism, and the solution is less of it, not more.

Has the thread just turned into people punking each other? Poe’s Law? Suzanne gets high marks for “American-style polygamy as it currently exists creates a surplus of young men who can’t find wives because a few older men take most of the women”.

Hector’s “Love and sex always have been and always will be about power relations as much as about ‘personal attractiveness’” is particularly good in this context. OK, so the men who think this think that a) they really want to get married to a woman who’s all about “yeah, I could be third wife of a rich dude!” and that that is their idea of a good life partner, b) they have no resources of personal attractiveness, a job, or even a more or less acceptable personality which would cause anyone to want to marry them, c) rich dudes will marry so many women that it will measurably affect their chances, in fact rich people are pining at the chance to replace their mistresses who go away when they want them to with wives who get a share of the family wealth.

Not contrarian enough, you either need to come out with support for group marriage, or decide the inevitability of polygamy means that, with sadness, you must oppose SSM.

“Hector’s “Love and sex always have been and always will be about power relations as much as about ‘personal attractiveness’”

Yeah Hectors writings on the complexities of life, life etc (interspersed with biblical references)are certainly..depressing? When did we all become so cynical? (I guess this is just another example of the utility maximization problem ..is it? Bruce Wilder? I don’t know, I googled it)

I just wish to ask a question from the perspective of ignorance about such matters: has anyone argued that polyadic contracts are potentially inherently unjust especially if entered into in a non-synchronic fashion (as typically polygamous relationships are)? What I mean is that especially newer entrants into polygamous relationships might be disadvantaged simply because older contract holders may have emotional and power advantages that newer ones simply cannot fathom. But dyadic contracts cannot have that particular feature (though they might have others of course). Hetero- and homosexual contracts share the latter trait by definition. Thus they share potential for equality that asynchronous polyadic contracts may not.

This is just intuitive guesswork BTW.

That said, I think it’s true that the good arguments for permitting SSM generalize to polygamy, in principle.

Eh. The arguments for prohibiting same sex marriage also generalize to polygamy, in principle. After all, if we’re going to insist on traditional marriage, where can that end but in polygamy? It’s a slippery slope, I tell ya!

@127

” Let any man marry as many women as he wants, but level the playing field by taxing the b’jesus out of the 1%.”

The bride markets of ancient Babylon supposedly placed large taxes on beautiful potential brides and used the money to give less desirable potential brides dowries.

Re: Why should the government intervene to increase the supply of marriageable women by restricting the freedom of individuals to marry who they want?

I mean, you could make the same arguments about the freedom to make a ton of money, own assault weapons, hunt endangered species, buy expensive luxury goods, drive an SUV, snort coke, eat horribly unhealthy diets, etc. We might want to do lots of things that are bad for society, and sometimes the purpose of the government is to tell us ‘no’.

I’m not sure there’s any *absolute* ‘right to marry who you want’. I certainly don’t want people running around marrying their first cousins, for example. In England now they have a serious problem with birth defects now because of South Asian immigrants and their culturel practices of cousin-on-cousin marriage.

Hi,

I once had a wife. That was too many. Ever since I’m sleeping as late as I want.

Have a nice morning,
Antti

re: the apparently looming shortage of marriageable goils. Wouldn’t legalizing gay marriage and polygamy sort of cancel each other out? At least on the supply and demand front.

Anyway, worst case we can all take solace in the BDSM dungeon. Because in the absence of divine proscription, we’ll all, sooner than later no doubt, unhitch our repressed polymorphous perversity.

I’ve always secretly yearned for the soup Nazi to spank me so, so bad … .

the apparently looming shortage of marriageable goils. Wouldn’t legalizing gay marriage and polygamy sort of cancel each other out? At least on the supply and demand front.

Ummmmmmm…before my head explodes, could you explain how that works? It seems to me that what would cancel each other out is the gay male couples and the lesbian couples, leaving the heterosexual population’s supply and demand dilemma intact.

True that! Polyandry to the rescue!

Somewhere along here, shouldn’t somebody point out that the real threat to marriage, (traditional or utopian) is the people who opt out altogether, and are perfectly fine sleeping as late as they want, leaving their toilet seat down or up as they choose, getting another cat, cooking when and what they feel like cooking, sleeping with people or not, as they choose, and so on?

I’m thinking we need something more than the multitude of tax breaks and social barriers. Conscription?

Re Saletan’s column: the word “violence” covers a lot of different things and different circumstances, and not all ‘violence’ is a matter of public concern. Of course there are lines, e.g. someone should not be allowed to ‘consent’ to being killed, and exactly where to draw the lines may be a difficult question in some cases. But given all the more pressing social problems/issues one might write about, I’m not sure why he chose this one; maybe his bosses at Slate, desperate for eyeballs and ad revenue, chose it for him.

I’ve often said that “Conservative Christian”, or in this case “conservative Protestant”, in the US (and to a lesser extent Canadian) sense, is a highly misleading term, possibly intentionally so. “Conservative” in this phrase means *politically* conservative, and nothing else. While they like to paint themselves as *theological* conservatives – even going so far as to pretend to be Biblical literalists when it suits their political goals – their theology is actually quite radical. In particular, they turn everything Jesus stood for completely on its head. For purported literalists, their reading is awfully selective at times.

(And, I never understand why I as an atheist so often end up being the one to explain this to people.)

I have been in a polyamorous triad with two women for over 20 years. We spent a fair amount of money on getting powers of attorney (both general and medical) and making sure our various contracts for cars, house, etc. include everyone. We have all had illnesses/injuries that have resulted in hospitalization, and fortunately have not had any problems with staff concerning this (of course, we haven’t gone to a Catholic hospital). We live in the middle of the country, and have generally found acceptance from friends, neighbors and the general populace.

I have no interest in forcing my choices on others; I simply wish, like those working for marriage equality, to have the same rights everyone else has. When my (legal) wife was out of work for two years, neither of us had insurance. Our partner could have covered one of us, had we divorced, which we chose not to do.

Hector’s complaints would be laughable if they were not so pathetic: he can’t find a mate (Bonzo Dog Band reference), so no one else should either, because it cuts down on his alleged options. His constant references to women’s “preferences” for certain kinds of men are the tell — if he could just be rich and powerful enough, the babes would flock to him. Unfortunately for him, most people aren’t making choices for partners (whether for life or a night) on that basis, but because they find something attractive in that person (or persons). And while I do agree with him that “polygamy” (in the Mormon child abuse sense) can be a bad thing, this does not mean that relationships between consenting adults must needs be considered tarred with the same brush.

Why anyone takes Sullivan seriously is beyond me. From The Bell Curve to the War on Terror (“Hi, I’m Dr Paisley, and I’m a Fifth Columnist”), he has been nothing but a self-promoting, self-absorbed douchebag. In fact, he and Ross Cardinal Douchehat quite deserve each other (which I’m sure both attracts and repels poor Ross late at night).

In the end, marriage is a both personal (and potentially religious) and civil act. You can have three popes, two rabbis, the 13th imam, the Dalai Lama, and me (yes, I am ordained; gave the Universal Life Church $15 many years ago) to perform a ceremony, but if you don’t have the license for the state you’re in, you’re not married in the only way that matters in the real world. I support marriage equality in all respects, and for all people, in whatever combinations they might come up with. In the end, the anti arguments boil down to “I’m not allowed to do that, so no one else can either!” That’s your problem, not mine.

There’s certainly a bleak picture being painted here of polygamy/polyamory ‘as it exists in practice’. What would be the reaction if I were to argue that gay marriage is a bad thing because we’d just end up with old man + young man pairings, leading to power imbalance and exploitation?

@Asteele: I have a problem with this too. There also seems to be an argument that even if women are exercising some choice in this situation, society needs to protect them from their own desires. The implicit thinking here seems to be that a desire for polyamorous relationships exists among a section of the population, but that this desire is deviant and/or cynical (i.e. incompatible with ‘true love’) and should not be condoned by the state. It’s hard to see how this is different from the arguments made against same-sex relationships.

Hector @ 132: cousin-marriage was practised among the English long before the South Asians came alone — look at the Darwins and the Wedgwoods, for example, and a sizable proportion of the happy couples in Georgette Heyer novels (and, I vaguely remember, Mansfield Park).

“Bill Gates marrying multiple wives, literally makes it more difficult for other men to find partners.”

Incorrect. First of all, ‘partner’ is a concept often used to emphasize ‘not wife’. Bill Gates’ multiple wives may have multiple partners each. More to the point, each of them may have multiple husbands, and they probably would.

So in fact, polygamy would probably make it easier for men – and women – to find partners.

I said:
So: can we say we have an ethos of equality between marriage partners that is only possible between two consenting adults, thus admitting same-sex marriage but excluding polygamy?

Suzanne objected:
Depending on the laws in your vicinity, you don’t have to be an adult to get married.

Suzanne then wrote:
Even assuming a polygamous culture where there is no overt compulsion involved in an individual woman’s choice, a woman must be a legal adult to marry, and women are full economic equals

The rest of her objection:
Nor has “an ethos of equality” ever been much of a factor historically in heterosexual marital relations, as others have observed.

Historical levels of equality are in straight marriage are irrelevant; we are talking about arguments for polygamy in the present in the USA, and I believe most people today, in the first world, have an ethos of equality which polygamy arguably violates.

The suggestion has been made again that the state has some responsibility to preserve a pool of potential partners for its citizens; I can only point to the extensive slaughter of men at war and ask, is this supposed responsibility only conceivable on behalf of straight men? Perhaps we cannot come to any sensible conclusion re polygamy unless someone decides what model will prevail – all older, wealthier men have multiple wives while all younger poorer men are single? Or just a few Hugh Hefner types maintaining modern-day harems while most people choose monogamy in whatever fashion? The outcomes of one or the other seem to be dictating people’s arguments here.

“he doesn’t have much time for the dogma of an unrestricted free market, and he’s come out in favor of policies that would be considered “socialist” by US standards”

Can’t you be anti state/pro market and still live up to to the teachings of Jesus vis a vis the poor through charity work though? No need to be a dyed in the wool Randite when clamouring for small government and free markets neccessarily. That’s what I was told on twitter by a pair of well know Irish free market ultra Catholics anyway. (Before they blocked me for asking what exactly they did for charity. Nothing it turns out)

It should also be noted that Bill Gate’s appears to be involved in a long term, committed, monogamous relationship..so this hypothetical doesn’t work on any level

This is a nice article about Bill and Melinda’s first date

http://todaynews.today.com/_news/2013/01/30/16772061-bill-gates-recalls-his-spontaneous-first-date-with-wife?lite

Possibly an argument that could have been made is that gay marriage will undermine the institution of marriage in the Christian community. It is an assault on the Christian world view and therefore diminishes their sense of well-being.

Possibly an argument could be made that the “Christian world view” (or this slice of the world view of some people who have chosen to be and/or call themselves Christians) is an assault on gay people and therefore diminishes their sense of well-being.

To put it mildly, and leaving aside the fact that the assaults on gay people have often been of a more direct and physical nature than the kind where one person happens not to share the religious beliefs of another.

Or is it only the well-being of Christians that matters?

Or is it only the well-being of Christians that matters?

Of course not! It’s only the well-being of straight white homophobic Christians that matters. They’re, you know, real Americans.

I don’t think Wilson actually thinks that if only whites had only peacefully protested against all the peaceful civil rights protests, that would have proven the civil rights protesters were enemies of true civil rights

I think that’s giving Wilson entirely too much leeway – there’s a long and well-documented pairing of anti-gay bigotry and old-fashioned anti-African-American bigotry. Certainly, there was no shortage of religious leaders (some “Christian”, but not all – see also the Mormon church’s policies up to 1977) who insisted that the subjugation of non-whites was the Gawd-ordained order of things and that disrupting it would lead to the dissolution of the family, kids smoking reefer, communism, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, etc.

Personally, I find it morally offensive that the Catholic Church is still allowed to operate its pedophile-sheltering / RW-lobbying organization under the tax-exempt auspices of a “church”, or that evangelical churches slinging “Prosperity Gospel” are essentially state-sanctioned tax-free pyramid schemes – but that doesn’t mean I expect either of them to be shut down (too bad).

#129: Bill Gate’s maintaining a Turkish seraglio actually does affect sexual dynamics in the broader society

I’m glad you brought up Turkish seraglios. Bill Gates can’t *literally* maintain a Turkish seraglio, not just because it’s hard to find good eunuchs these days, but also because it would be false imprisonment and spousal abuse. If Bill Gates wants to maintain seventeen wives he has to convince them all to remain married to him of her own free will, each knowing about and accepting the presence of the other sixteen. The fact that Turkish emirs took the ferocious measures they did to maintain *their* harems — essentially keeping them as prisoners or slaves, an option not available to Bill Gates even if voluntary polygyny is legalized — suggests that this may be just a little bit difficult even if you are wealthy and high status.

Clearly, there are some people who would willingly enter into three or four person marriages if they had the opportunity. I don’t think there are many, or that legal barriers are the only thing holding back everyone from doing so. Jealousy is a powerful force, and I don’t think it would get all that much weaker without the backing of the law and societal norms proclaiming monogamy as the one true way to have relationships. ISTM that the instinct to jealousy is what created and codified monogamy normativity, rather than vice versa. (I could be wrong about this, but I’d at least need to see some empirical evidence to convince me otherwise.)

As for what effect this has on the relationship prospects of the average Joe (or, as the case may be, Hector), ISTM that in order to convince a woman to marry you, you already have to overcome the possibility that she might decide to try for someone richer and more famous, anyway. They aren’t *all* already taken, and even if they are, there are plenty of examples of a new woman convincing a rich and famous husband to break up with his current wife and marry her instead. (Theoretically this returns the ex-wife to the marriage market, provided the experience doesn’t sour her on marriage, but I doubt Hector is planning to court those women anyway.) Assuming for the sake of argument that at least some women are indeed motivated that way, aren’t they already pretty much lost to you?

Good thing women aren’t all alike, or it would be really hard for most men to find one suited to themselves. (Also, vice versa.)

#159: This being a thread started by John Holbo, I actually think it would have gone better if it had started with William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman. He was in a successful polygamous lifelong “marriage” with two women — successful in that the two women stayed together after he died, and their children happily reminisced about the family — in which they practiced BDSM. (Or at least the B part).

Not intending to threadjack, but this explains a lot about his work. Art imitating life, indeed.

rf @ 158: “Can’t you be anti state/pro market and still live up to to the teachings of Jesus vis a vis the poor through charity work though?”

IMO, no. Empirical evidence shows that private charity simply is nowhere near as effective as government action at preventing poverty. After all, that’s why the welfare state was created in the first place. Since nothing in Christian teachings, tradition, or history requires a belief in a “free market” (which didn’t even exist in the time of Jesus), putting such beliefs above the Christian imperative to care for the poor is worshipping Mammon above God.

Besides:

“No need to be a dyed in the wool Randite when clamouring for small government and free markets neccessarily. That’s what I was told on twitter by a pair of well know Irish free market ultra Catholics anyway. (Before they blocked me for asking what exactly they did for charity. Nothing it turns out)”

As you noted, most of the time “private charity” is simply an escape hatch, not something really taken seriously. At the very least, before I even take this argument seriously, I’d like to see some evidence that the ostensible Christians in question are actually following it rather than just using it as an excuse. (And no, giving money to your own church doesn’t count.)

“Not intending to threadjack, but this explains a lot about his work. Art imitating life, indeed.”

It wasn’t just imitation or writing from life, Marston had what might be called an ideological commitment to bondage. A quote from his wiki page:

“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound… Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society… Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element”.

Colin @ 150: “There’s certainly a bleak picture being painted here of polygamy/polyamory ‘as it exists in practice’. What would be the reaction if I were to argue that gay marriage is a bad thing because we’d just end up with old man + young man pairings, leading to power imbalance and exploitation?”

That would actually have been a reasonable argument a couple of decades ago. Throughout much of history, gay “relationships” have mostly taken the form of what we would today consider child sexual abuse. This was the case in ancient Greece, for instance. But over the past 50 or so years, we have seen that a large number of gay adults are primarily interested in long-term, consensual relationships with other adults. In addition, we now know that homosexuality is probably an inborn trait, or at least one fixed very early on, rather than a result of bad parenting or bad experience as was previously believed. Furthermore, the lead-up to gay marriage was actually rather slow and modest; at every step of the way there was the option of turning back if the dire consequences predicted by opponents materialized (which they never did). If civil unions or domestic partnerships had led to obvious abuses, we could have eliminated those fairly easily. Gays earned the right to marriage by proving themselves solid members of society, in a way that polygamists have not. There was, in effect, a “dress rehearsal” for gay marriage that lasted several decades, and gays passed the test. Polygamists, so far, seem to be failing (see the sordid FLDS compound, for instance).

Furthermore, the people agitating against same-sex marriage don’t seem to have any interest in bringing back any other sex-discriminatory rules of marriage—i.e., the rules that would affect straight couples.

Actually, I’m quite sure that Wilson would be happy with more traditionalist rules for marriage generally. He’s not exactly shy on the subject. (His book, “Reforming Marriage”, is still the most useful engagement present my wife and I were given.)

Why do you single out religious beliefs?
I mean, why do you think that e.g. the basic equality among people, or even the mere existence of “human rights” should be treated with more deference than any other belief?

“My objection was more to the contention that Bill Gates has a number of mistresses”

I only repeated that because it sounded like a humorous stand-in for “generic rich person”, not because I thought that it was actually the case.

UserGoogol (and Mao, earlier): “if you’re going to have polygamy it seems entirely fair that someone can marry Bill Gates and then turn around and also marry Hector”

But that’s exactly why Hector’s bit is so self-defeating. He really can’t think of a reason why anyone would marry him if a generic rich person was also available. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

And Hector had mentioned him (specifically) above on a number of occasions..which seemed odd considering the number of options he had..such as George Clooney, for example

165 “I really don’t think the issue is about paperwork and tax breaks. I think it’s about the ability of a couple to present themselves to the world at large as married, with all the implications that that relationship carries in our culture and society.”

But the implications (outside of the tax break) are of a religious nature. This sounds like they are assigning some ecclesiastical significance to … sorry, to government paperwork. I’m sure there is some of it, like with those ‘purple fingers’ of Afghani peasants 10 years ago, but I have no doubt that it’ll wear off soon. It’s an ephemeral side effect.

Dr. Paisley: “We have all had illnesses/injuries that have resulted in hospitalization, and fortunately have not had any problems with staff concerning this (of course, we haven’t gone to a Catholic hospital”

Given their purchasing of health systems and ‘partnerships’, you might find that they come to you.

Since the last sodomy law was repealed (and, incidentally, without any fuss)

Out of curiosity, how would you characterize Scalia’s dissent in Laurence? It looks to me like he was making a bit of fuss, there.

193 “You’re ignoring his prior statements in the thread.”

Ah, yes, I missed that. Yes, in that case the concern is warranted.

192 “how would you characterize Scalia’s dissent in Laurence?”

No idea. I’m just saying I don’t remember any significant public campaign to keep those laws on the books. But I could be wrong.

Re; What would be the reaction if I were to argue that gay marriage is a bad thing because we’d just end up with old man + young man pairings, leading to power imbalance and exploitation?

I’ve got to say, it’s pretty typical of cultural liberals that they see a partnership of an older and younger man (assuming both are, you know, over 18) and have more of a problem with the ‘different ages’ thing than the ‘same gender’ thing. I don’t have a problem with either one, personally, but at least the Christian and natural-law arguments against homosexuality make more sense to them (though I don’t agree with them) than arguments that older people shouldn’t be with younger (adult) partners. The other sexual taboo I see among cultural liberals is the one about class differences: in my experiences a lot of cultural liberals are uncomfortable with people dating/marrying ‘up’ or ‘down’.

Re: He can’t be the primary breadwinner if he’s husband #4 of a woman who is also married to someone rich

Actually, there are some kinds of polyandry (though not that one) that are perfectly compatible with ‘male breadwinner’, complemenetary gender roles dynamics. The kind where a woman has a primary relationship with a nice, stable, secure breadwinner , but occasionally sleeps with some football players or douchebag musicians on the side for variety. Or at a higher economic level, if some woman marries Bill Gates but occasionally sleeps with the pool boy. (Increasingly, the evidence from behavioural ecology suggests that’s actually been a very common pattern in our evolutionary past). I don’t think I’d be *that* unhappy in a relationship like that, though of course it wouldn’t be ideal.

My issue here is specifically with *polygny*, and more specifically with the forms of it that receive explicit social sanction and recognition. Having a ‘one spouse at a time, at least in the eyes of the law’ rule at least makes the sexual/romantic arena *slightly* more egalitarian and less concentrated.

Re: The reason that your particular set of beliefs is kind of funny is because it doesn’t work in any sense. If you’re going to be a “realist”, then look — Bill Gates does not want your prospective wife. If you dismiss love as a reason to get married, then you’re left with the realist statement that people marry within their social class.

Can you flesh out your reasoning a little more? because I’m not really following it.

I don’t really want to date/marry within my social class. I’d prefer to be in a relationship where my partner feels like she’s dating/marrying ‘up’ by getting a partner with higher earning power / education / social status etc., and where I feel like I’m dating/marrying ‘up’ by being with someone much younger/prettier/etc. than i could get without those ‘status’ advantages.

I don’t see what any of that has to do with whether ‘love’ is a good reason to date/marry or whatever. They’re really rather separate issues. Love is based around identifying your own happiness with the happiness of someone else, and getting your own happiness from making them happy. It’s not the thing that initially attracts you to someone, it’s the relationship that’s *built on* that initial attraction. (And I don’t see why status, income, etc. shouldn’t play a role in the initial attraction as much as looks, musical tastes, uh, hobbies, etc.) I want a partner that I can make happy, emotionally as well as economically, but part of making them happy, for me, is filling the protector/provider role.

Re: Only in places that are hellholes of disempowerment, like Saudi Arabia, do wealthy men marry lots of young women merely because they are attractive and available.

Africa actually has more polygamy than Saudi Arabia. But that aside, uh, wealthy celebrities in America get together with attractive young women all the time. Fortunately, the laws here only allow people to marry one partner at a time.

And no, I’ll probably embrace feminism when pigs grow wings.

Yup. I am not a feminist, and I’m strongly ideologically attached to the complementarian model of relationships. I also don’t really see what age has to do with it- plenty of people like older or younger partners.

Chris E @171: “Wilson’s feelings on this are well known and documented:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Wilson_%28theologian%29#Southern_slavery”

I didn’t realize that it was *that* BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPPPPP!

I won’t ask why Sullivan dignified that (turning it down a bit) beeeeeeep! with an interview, except that Sullivan has a history of giving credence and support to beeeeeeeeeeeps!

Re: It doesn’t follow from any of this that the state has any obligation to enforce that view,

Nor does it have any obligation *not* to. There’s no constitutional right to have a second spouse. And given that public opinion is pretty strongly against polygamy, I doubt that the laws are going to change either through the legislative process or through supreme court decisions.

I’m a Kierkegaardian about religion

But are you a Zizekian on the subject of polygamy?

I’m still missing something here. Why does the state have an obligation to recognize polygnous marriages, if it decides that a generally monogamous society is better for social stability? We recognize *marriage* because we think marriage is something to be encouraged, and now the consensus is increasingly in favour of recognizing same-sex marriages as well. If polygnyous situations run contrary to our moral judgments about the kind of society we want to create, I don’t see why we have an obligation to allow them (or more specifically, to give them legal status).

I think the interesting situation is going to be when African or Muslim immigrants starting petioning for polygamy on the grounds of religious freedom and cultural relativism. A lot of cultural liberals are strongly committed to cultural relativism already, and i suspect they’re not going to be able to find particularly strong arguments to resist polygamy.

The state might as well recognize multiple marriage because the people involved in such arrangements are already involved in them anyway. Just because it lacks legal recognition doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Surely the problem of social stability is not the problem of the legal status itself, but, insofar as it’s a problem at all, is one because of the actual social dynamics involved. If the social dynamics are already happening, and I don’t see anyone trying to roll back the clock by making it illegal to sleep with someone other than your spouse, then I don’t see what harm there is to give it equal legal status as well.

#189 – “But the implications (outside of the tax break) are of a religious nature.”
No, I don’t think they are. Many non-religious people get married, and the state (at least in the US and most Western countries) provides for non-religious state-sanctioned marriages.

You might argue that non-religious people marry out of a desire to be conventional, but convention is a powerful force. I’m persuaded that gay people want to marry because they do want to be conventional. They are not interested in being part of a fringe group that is confrontational and antagonistic to mainstream culture. They want to join the Boy Scouts and the Army. They want to pick up their children from school and dance with their spouses at the company Christmas party and be at the bedside in the hospital. They want to be able to have the same sort of conventional life that I have always had without even thinking about it.

Yeah, it figures that Sullivan had a respectful debate with someone who actually defends slavery. When are people going to stop paying attention to Sullivan already? It’s not like he’s an expert on anything, or a particularly good writer.

Hector: “I don’t really want to date/marry within my social class. I’d prefer to be in a relationship where my partner feels like she’s dating/marrying ‘up’”

Uh huh. In other words, you aren’t a realist. You have a domination fantasy. But you want your fantasy to go on 24/7, so you have to prop it up with little bits of conservative Christianity, sociobiological Just-So stories, anti-feminist “gender realism”, basically a grab bag of stuff intended to say that it’s really real, that this is how reality is and it’s not just your personal fantasy at all. I think that the feminist guy who’s confident enough to be able to tell the woman he’s sleeping with that he’d like to play Slave Princess Leia and Jabba the Hut ends up being happier and more likely to get what he wants, but hey that’s your choice.

But of course, as Jerry Vinokurov writes above, that leaves society under no obligation to defend your claims about what you’d like, any more than society would enforce a 24/7 BDSM slave contract. The logic of industrialized-world society is trending pretty definitely towards letting people make whatever marital arrangements they want, so I expect that the young Dr Paisleys of the world may get their chance to take your marriage prospects after all.

Re: Wouldn’t it be easy to coerce permission – a wealthy husband telling his stay-at-home wife “either consent to bring Blond Young Thing into the marriage, or I’ll divorce you and leave you with nothing”).

That’s actually one of the better arguments for polygamy (which is not saying much), and it’s one that Muslim and African advocates of polygamy are fond of making, that men who aren’t allowed to have multiple wives will just divorce their existing spouse instead. I guess there really aren’t any good solutions here. But I’m still not yet convinced that polygamy is the lesser evil.

Re: Existing polygamous regimes have clear answers to these legal questions, but they’re not answers you or I would consider acceptable…

Right. So instead of trying to figure out ways of incorporating polygamy in our society, why not just stay with the (legaly monogamous) status quo.

Re: The logic of industrialized-world society is trending pretty definitely towards letting people make whatever marital arrangements they want, so I expect that the young Dr Paisleys of the world may get their chance to take your marriage prospects after all.

Not necessarily, because the sort of person I’d be looking for probably wouldn’t be particularly interested in sharing a husband, or in hardcore ideological feminists. The bigger problem seems to be that the Dr. Paisleys, if there enough of them, would end up taking marriage prospects *from each other*, and the ones who end up without any prospects would be more likely to get involved in antisocial behaviors.

Also, ‘making whatever marital arrangements they want’ is sort of a slippery term. The choices we make, the things we think we want, and the options we have available are all conditioned by the kind of society we live in, including by its social and economic structures. ‘What we want’ isn’t purely something innate to our nature.

Given the Anglican church wars over gay inclusion today (I’m Anglican actually, not Catholic) it’s actually pretty interesting to think about the fact that there were Anglican church wars *over polygamy* about 100-150 years ago. They coincided with British colonization of Africa, and with the increasingly contact between Anglican missionaries and polygamous African cultures.

“I think the interesting situation is going to be when African or Muslim immigrants starting petioning for polygamy”

There has been (reasonably) large scale Muslim immigration into Europe over the last 50 odd years and that polygamy petioning hasn’t really gotten of the ground..when do expect it to begin?

Re: (Which is more or less one of the argument _against_ same sex marriage: that it would devalue eterosexual marriage).

Chesterton made some similar arguments against legalization of divorce- that if marriage was dissoluble, it would water down the meaning of marriage and take away the honour associated with it.

Re: Existing law pretty much says that if your wealthy spouse makes a romantic choice that you don’t like, and you get divorced, you get supported.

Except that a lot of people would prefer not being divorced, to being divorced and getting alimony. In a country where polygyny is illegal, the dude doesn’t have the capability to ask his wife to enter a polygamous marriage.

Because not having equal legal status means people are going to view it as sort of outre and odd, and are therfore less likely to be in polygamous relationships? There’s a big grey area (and their should be) between ‘illegal’ and ‘socially endorsed and promoted’.

The problem with that reasoning is that it applies to everything that’s “outre and odd,” including homosexuality, divorce, and, at one point, not wearing a suit at work. Indeed, I am reminded of CT’s very own John Holbo’s “Donner Party conservatism” post, wherein is contained an imaginary conversation between David Frum and a bearded fellow, with Imaginary Frum following much the same logic.

Josh G.,

What would “equal legal status” for polygamy even mean?

I have no idea how the mechanics of such a marriage would work. I’d like to think it’s possible to come up with legal arrangements that mirror two-person marriages. If we were at the point where we were actually devising such a law I guess I’d give it more thought, but for now I’m happy to say in the abstract that legal equality is a generally desirable thing and leave it at that.

Jerry,

Do you not think that any people at all are marginal cases who might go monogamous, or go polygamous, depending on their cultural/economic/social environment?

In other words, do you think polygamy is innate to the same degree as being gay?

If not, then I’m not sure why polygamy and gay marriege are analogous.

Do you not think that any people at all are marginal cases who might go monogamous, or go polygamous, depending on their cultural/economic/social environment?

Well, you know, I suppose there are always marginal cases. I suspect that, if the common understanding of “margin” holds, then they really will be “marginal,” that is, there will be way, way fewer of them than of either type. The fact that some people will fall on the other side of the margin doesn’t bother me too much. All sorts of things are legal and yet people don’t do them because they don’t have the inclination to.

In other words, do you think polygamy is innate to the same degree as being gay?

Actually I don’t care whether being gay is innate or not. I always found that to be a rather unpersuasive argument. I contend that whether or not being gay is “innate” is irrelevant; whether I’m just attracted to dudes exclusively or whether I just choose to marry a dude for other totally unrelated reasons (I believe a film was once made using this very premise…) is frankly no one’s business. Likewise with polygamy.

If not, then I’m not sure why polygamy and gay marriege are analogous.

They are analogous on the grounds that I can reasonably demand in each case that society respect my sexual autonomy, which I think is one of the most fundamental things deserving of respect.

“They are analogous on the grounds that I can reasonably demand in each case that society respect my sexual autonomy, which I think is one of the most fundamental things deserving of respect.”

And that should be enough to end the discussion. People should have the right to choose how they live their private lives. You don’t like what I choose to do? Great! Go do something different.

“There has been (reasonably) large scale Muslim immigration into Europe over the last 50 odd years and that polygamy petioning hasn’t really gotten of the ground..when do expect it to begin?”

The situation very complicated. But there is a tradition of recognition of polygamous mariages contracted abroad. The US has actively persecuted polygamists and has taken a prohibitionist stance due to anti-mormon feeling, but that’s kinda unique. Europe has been forced to be more accommodating for pragmatic reasons due to colonialism.

R. Puchalsky:
When are people going to stop paying attention to Sullivan already? It’s not like he’s an expert on anything, or a particularly good writer.

Sullivan is, or at least was, an expert on Michael Oakeshott, the subject of his PhD dissertation (subsequently a book). And people will continue to pay attention to Sullivan as long as prominent bloggers and journalists etc. continue to pay attention to him.

Jerry Vinokurov,

Thanks for your thoughtful response, with which I strongly disagree. And it’s quite fair of you to call me ‘regressive’ on sexual/relationship ethics: I’m a (s0mewhat) cultural conservative and a gender complementarian, and would happily embrace the label.

Re: Actually I don’t care whether being gay is innate or not. I always found that to be a rather unpersuasive argument.

Fair enough. You seem to take a libertarian approach to sexual ethics, and in particular to the gay debate. Which is fine, but I don’t, many people don’t, and in particular, the liberal side aren’t winning the gay marriage debate (and the debate over homosexuality in general) because of libertarian arguments. They’re winning because they’re increasingly convincing cultural ‘moderates’ that homosexuality and gay marriage are OK. And I don’t think they’re really convincing them on the basis of principled arguments cribbed from J.S. Mill.

I generally think about sex and relationships more in terms of virtue-ethics, natural law types of arguments. I stopped believing homosexuality was a sin, sometime about four years ago, because I became convinced that 1) there were ways to incorporate homosexual relationships within a virtue-ethics approach to sexuality, 2) the scriptural, traditional and natural-law arguments against homosexuality are all premised on it being a choice, and don’t work if it’s innate, and 3) the United States legal definition of marriage no longer has much in common with my own, and there’s no principled reason to deny gay people the same legal rights that attach to feminist marriages, childless marriages, remarriages, and any other forms of marriage of which I might disapprove. (Also, someone pointed out on Rod Dreher’s blog that the Romans used to have gay marriages too, until the Christians suppressed them).

I’m sure the reasons that 50%+ of Americans now support gay marriage varies from person to person, but I bet many of them were convinced by somewhat similar arguments, to the effect of ‘people can’t help being gay’, ‘it’s not a choice’, etc.

Now, as far as gay marriage goes, you and I agree that it should be legal, even if we get thre via different ideological routes. (I hesitate to say that I *support* gay marriage, but I think it should be legal). The problem is that when it comes to polygamy, your reasons for supporting gay marriage lead you to believe it should also be legal. My reasons don’t. And I think that enough people are in my ‘mushy moderate’ position about gay marriage, rather than your principled libertarian position, that they would say, ‘Just, no, bridge too far’ about polygyny.

Re: Otherwise, of course, there’s no real difference between the general case for it and the case for gay marriage.

Uh, yes, yes there is. You can’t make a “Baby I was born this way” argument for polygamy. I mean, you can, but then every man is going to say “I was born this way, too!” and then society collapses into chaos.

“Andrew Sullivan prefers the familiar-to-Andrew Sullivan to the unknown, the tried-by-Andrew Sullivan to the untried…”

For some reason I suspect that Andrew Sullivan did try plenty of polygamy. He just knows he has to draw a line somewhere, because next after polygamy a conservative is going to be bring up bestiality, and who wants to have that in this discussion?

What is this chaos society will collapse into? Suddenly people forget how to drive cars or what?

Eh. I think cousin-on-cousin is going to be the next Great Freedom Frontier, long before b*stiality. There are huge portions of the world where cousin-on-cousin is routinely practiced (as I pointed out, my own ethnic group is notorious for it, and I’m pretty sure I have some cousincest in the family tree a couple generations back), and you can make cultural-reletivist arguments for allowing it.

Substance @237

Are you going to enlighten us as to the provenance of that somewhat familiar-sounding altered quote, or force people to use a search engine?

Yeah, it’s “conservatives prefer the X to the Y” from, I forget where, “Rationalism in Politics,” maybe?

I have very little fondness for Sullivan, but he’s probably closer to being right than Doug Wilson.

Indeed, Wilson is doing a remarkably stupid thing that conservative Christians love to do (and that I used to do back when I was on the h*mophobe side), he’s trolling liberals with disingenuous arguments about ‘If you allow gay s*x, then why not polygamy or inc*st?” Gay s*x and gay marriage are already here to say, and what the Christian nitwits don’t realize is that increasing numbers of people (both people from foreign cultures who accept polygamy or cousinc*st, or else hardcore ideological libertarians on the homefront) are actually going to take them seriously and say ‘Gee, that sounds like a good idea’.

“doesn’t what I’ve highlighted make this a sensible moral panic, and serve as a rational basis for permitting gay but not poly marriages?”

No, not really. No one is talking about re-criminalising sleeping with more than one person without being married. So let’s say a few people want to make their multiple romantic relationships more serious and get married to more than one person instead. If statistical propensity to fail in marriage was a reason to disallow people from attempting them in the first place, then marriage would be disallowed for conservative heterosexual eighteen year olds one of whom got the other one pregnant. But the failure rate for poly marriages might be not be as bad as those of het teens, because there isn’t really a reason to attempt one unless you’re strongly committed to it, not when just having sex with multiple people is something any unmarried person can try.

Also, moral panic is not the same as concern. So far I’ve seen one person here say something like “There’s nothing really wrong with poly marriage in theory, but I’d guess that most of those marriages would fail because of jealousy.” (chris at 170, whose comment is sensible and non-panicky). No, instead we’ve been getting lurid stories about men owning women and men who can’t find wives running wild and women being forced to take on new young co-wives as their wealthy husband cackles evilly.

“Oakeshott!”

That was my suspicion/guess but I wasn’t sure. Thks.

I mean I know nought about Michael Oakeshot, let alone have a PhD on the man, but I’m pretty sure he’d be quite hostile towards the internet and general tech revolution, and would be an unlikely big name blogger..I could be wrong though

Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t make him all that much different from many other bloggers…

And we all know no society has allowed married men to tell their wives, “I’ll be taking someone else to dinner parties and spending our money on her, what are you going to do about it?”, much less a society in which religion played a strong role.

Re: This is a terrific idea.

I don’t think it’s a terrific idea at all. But if you had your choice, what would you set the age of marriage at, and would it have to apply to one party or both?

RF,

How does the logistics of that work?

..and if it turn out that people under the age of 55 end up engaging, in large enough numbers, in long term, stable monogamous relationships then we can decide whether to extend the right of marriage to them..providing it doesn’t undermine the new polygamy norm

Polygamous marriage would be allowed at 19..

#91: “Also, many Christians understand that “Love your neighbor” trumps Leviticus.”

It was far up-thread, but really, someone ought to point out that “love your neighbor” is from Leviticus (Chapter 19, Verse 18).

Re: It was far up-thread, but really, someone ought to point out that “love your neighbor” is from Leviticus (Chapter 19, Verse 18).

That it is. Thanks for the pointer, I haven’t read the Leviticus in a very, very long time. And there’s a bit of anti-gay stuff in the NT as well, of course though significantly, none in the gospels.

In your first sentence, you say that you never heard of Wilson, so I was not exactly being serious myself with characterizing you as calling them “two distinguished thinkers”.

But sure, if I’m going to be taking the rap for too much seriousness anyways — you really think it doesn’t matter that Sullivan suckered you into writing about Wilson’s argument? How long did Sullivan have to look, I wonder, to find a literal defender of slavery to raise the public profile of, which you then helped with? There can’t be many of them left. Yeah, I don’t really find that ha-ha funny.

Wilson defended slavery because it “produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since”.

“is it your view, Rich, that it is wrong to criticize the likes of Wilson, because ‘no such thing as bad publicity’?”

I don’t know why Crooked Timberites in general seem not to get this, but whenever you have a public debate with someone, you elevate that person’s reputation. They become someone worthy of debating, their name is often advertised to the extent that the debate is advertised, and in the best case they get follow-on think pieces like yours (which, in the contemporary era, raise their Google profile). And yes, my comment in a comment thread on your blog doesn’t add to the damage, because the original post has already been Google-indexed and the comments go along with it.

I’m sure that finding such people is good if you want new arguments to critique. After all, they’re cranks, so they’re more likely to have something new and unusual — just like Charles Murray sparked a book and many articles from people who had to answer his “scientific” racism. But yes, Sullivan could have found some more or less reputable opponent of gay marriage to debate, and if he couldn’t have found one, then that’s a sign that there should have been no debate. Assuming that there is reputable (i.e. non-extremely-racist) opposition to gay marriage, Sullivan just did all of those people a disservice. He also did a disservice to all of the people, like you, who routinely go to Sullivan as the source for their next current-events piece. (For inexplicable reasons!)

But that’s what he does. Now the people who start blog posts with “Sullivan just posted on X / had a debate on X / wrote a thumbsucker on X” have to think about what they do.

..or to clarify.. ‘There is noone else I can think of, bar Sullivan, who could possibly end up debating gay marriage with a proponent of slavery….AND LOSE”

John Holbo @ 275

Here’s Wilson on slavery; here he is on slavery and racism.

I would say “substantially and vocally opposed” is putting it mildly.

“I would say “substantially and vocally opposed” is putting it mildly.”

I would hope so

Winning the debate is about having the power to frame the terms in which the question is posed. It looks like whoever decided the gay marriage issue should be framed in terms of polygamy has won the Crooked Timber debate, since there are almost 300 comments about a red herring argument. I heard a defense-of-marriage spokesman after the last election try to frame the issue as “equal rights for people who believe in traditional marriage.” That might be a losing argument because the other side has more claim to “equality.”

But I already answered that. I don’t think that adding to the length of the comment thread on an existing blog post contributes meaningfully to the amount of public exposure that something gets. I do think that making another Google hit from a popular (within its context) blog like CT does. This is a matter about which I could be wrong, of course. But I observe that while people often link to critiques and boast about how many there are, even in the “I must have really annoyed my opponents!” sense, they rarely add “and that post got hundreds of comments too”.

“what factoids of Sullivan’s did I fail to check? What inaccurate study that he cited did I, in my post, well-wish its way around the world.”

I wrote an answer in three sentences, describing the general problem of replying to Sullivan. I’d hoped it was pretty clear that the first one, “You can’t just go in and say “Oh, I’ve never heard of this person, Wilson, who he’s debating, but I’ll just look at the argument”” was the one that applied in this case, while the others apply to other cases.

You did well-wish around the world Wilson’s exact argument. You quoted him as saying:

“I would also like to thank him for editing this book— Same Sex Marriage: Pro & Con. I thought he did a fantastic job of pulling together capable representatives of both sides of this issue, and I was very pleased at the absence of straw man argumentation, name-calling, and indignant screeching. I thought the position I am representing here tonight—opposition to same-sex marriage—was treated with an appropriate respect throughout, and I am grateful for it.”

Wilson goes on to say that “Now this means that to the extent Andrew is willing to treat his opponents as morally serious people, who have arguments that should be engaged respectfully, to that same extent he appears to be undercutting the view that the continued unavailability of same-sex marriage is a foundational civil rights issue.” But Wilson is not actually a morally serious person, even though you presented him as one and treated him as one. You answered his argument respectfully and pointed out why it doesn’t really logically work, but by doing so without adding “Oh, and Wilson has a special need to ask for being treated as morally serious, because he’s fond of apologizing for slavery” you helped him.

Whether red herring or not, it has taken over this thread. It is definitely a “slippery slope” argument. If arguments about coffee turn into arguments about meth…

It’s important to realise that Wilson isn’t merely defending some ideal theoretical system of slavery, or even a real-life historical example like medieval slavery in the crusader kingdoms (which was for all its evils at least *relatively* less cruel than American slavery). He’s defending racial slavery *as it existed in the American South*. More of Wilson’s greatest hits from that essay:

“Apart from the motive supplied by Christianity, slave owners had strong economic incentives to promote high standards of morality among their slaves. Planters encouraged strong families not only for the well-being of the slaves, but also for the well-being of the plantation. Strong families promote happiness and contentment. Happy, contented workers are good workers. Thus, even if a slave owner was not a Christian, there were important reasons to discourage immorality. Marriage was encouraged. Adultery was punished and divorce was discouraged by the whip…..The husband was the head of the house and there was a strong familial bond between family members. This kind of bond is not the product of widespread promiscuity. One could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery. It was certainly stronger under the southern slave system that it is today under our modern destructive welfare state.”

“After the death of the Old American Republic, the nation created by the new revolutionaries became a nightmare for the newly-freed black men and women. The laws which were ostensibly passed to help them were used more and more to exclude them from the privileges they once enjoyed under the restricted freedom of slavery. For example, licensure requirements and the rise of unionism have systematically excluded black artisans and craftsmen from making the living they had made before the War. Welfare laws have removed the black man from his position of breadwinner and head over the home, and the black family has been gradually destroyed. Blacks were freed from the southern plantations only to become the slaves of an impersonal state.”

“George Fleming of Laurens, South Carolina said: “I longed to see Marse Sam Fleming. Lawd, chile, dat’s de best white man what ever breathed de good air. I still goes to see whar he buried every time I gits a chance to venture t’wards Laurens. As old as I is, I still draps a tear when I sees his grave, fer he sho’ was good to me and all his other niggers.”42 And, with this use of the word ‘n*gger’, it is important for us to remember the mutable nature of human language. What today constitutes a gross insult did not have the same connotations a century ago.”

“The Narratives consistently portray an amazingly benign picture of Southern plantation life. Affection for former masters and mistresses is expressed in terms of unmistakable devotion. Testimony to the good treatment, kindness, and gentleness of many so-called “heartless slave holders” abounds. Many of the old slaves express a wistful desire to be back at the plantation.”

“Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care. In the narratives taken as a whole, there is no pervasive cry of rage and anguish. We see no general expression of bitterness and outrage. instead we find, on page after page, expressions of affection for a condition which, in the words of one historian, “shames the civilized world.” The overwhelmingly positive view of slavery is all the more striking when one considers that the period being remembered by these former slaves could arguably be called the most harsh years of the institution — those years when it was under fierce attack, and when slave owners had circled the wagons.”

I think John Corvino gives the best answer to these slippery-slope arguments. The long version can be found in his “Homosexuality and the PIB Argument” [PIB=Polygamy, Incest, Beastiality], Ethics 115 (April 2005): 501–534. The short version can be found on his website.

RPuchalsky@307

This is a tricky area. To be sure, CT bloggers have an audience b.c the blog has an audience, and part of the reason the blog has an audience is a result of, as JQ candidly said on a thread a long time ago, “who we [the bloggers] are.” Though a bigger reason may well be a recursive effect, i.e. that people know other people will be reading. OTOH I can’t get too excited about the extra publicity given to evil X or evil Y by one post here.

On another point you raised, the lack of an audience does not always free one to say whatever one likes, however one likes. Anything written on a blog can in theory be seen by anyone w an internet connection, of course, and one never knows for certain who might see what. Thus, for example, though a tiny # of people read my blog I feel that most of the time (not all the time, but most of the time) I have to write as if thousands might be reading. (Occasionally I’ve had a post put on reddit by someone and boom, the audience for that post goes way up.) It sucks to have to act based on a hypothesis one knows is usually false, but that seems to be the situation.

Wilson’s bizarre writings about race, and that Sullivan bizarrely praised him as ‘serious’ and ‘respectful’.

I don’t find it the least bit “bizarre” that Sullivan shared a platform with Wilson or praised him as “serious.” For the life of me, John, I don’t know why you would either.

Of course it’s a slippery slope argument. I don’t know why, other than for strictly political reasons, one would deny this. Hector, for all that I think he’s horribly wrong in his sexual politics, seems to get this.

Look, once you commit to the idea that consenting adults should be able to make their own sexual choices, what more is there to talk about? Note the two other slippery slopes I’m foreclosing on here: consent and age. I’m not going to defend those because I suspect no one needs an explanation for why those are legitimate distinctions. But what’s the legitimate distinction between “two people of the same sex” and “three people”? The number of people? Why is that a relevant distinction?

The level of argument that we actually have in the public sphere is, as with everything, woefully inadequate. We’re stuck at the level of “well, maybe I’m ok with sexual activity X, but not with sexual activity Y,” when there are no actually good material reasons for distinguishing between the two. And we have very good justification for concluding that there are no such reasons (apart from the fact that, you know, no one ever seems to come up with them) because if there were, if we truly as a society believed that certain sexual choices were just so harmful (even if they involved consenting adults) that we couldn’t allow them to persist, then we’d actually try and legislate for that. As it turns out, we don’t do anything like that anymore and haven’t done so for decades. Those questions have been a dead issue, legally, at least since Lawrence.

If you can’t find an actual material basis on which to discriminate between different situations, then it seems they aren’t so different after all. You can of course make whatever arguments you like about how you might not think three people is ok or not, but as a great philosopher once said, “That’s just your opinion, man.” Of course you get to vote your opinion without any obligation to be philosophically consistent about it, but in the context of a philosophical debate (which is what I take we’re having here, rather than some kind of strictly political planning session for how to get multiple marriage legalized) no one is required to respect that. “Credo quia absurdium est,” is not actually a useful argument when it comes to policy.

To recap: we already let people have pretty much whatever kind of sex they want. Not only that, but if you want to have a multiple-partner arrangement, literally no legal force will ever be employed to keep you from doing so. Again, I ask: what remains of actual material objections to multiple-partner marriages? The answer is clearly, for all practical purposes, not a thing. Once we have dispensed with the objections about the possibility of a triad or quartet being bad parents (are all individuals subjected equally to state evaluations of parental fitness prior to being granted a marriage license? Nope!), the completely unfounded “Bill Gates gonna marry my potential wife,” and the “social stability will be compromised in ways I can’t articulate,” the only practical obstacle is writing a properly comprehensive law. This might be potentially a non-trivial task, and the constituency for it is pretty small, but those aren’t really relevant philosophical objections, just like “I kinda feel weird about people taking part in this sexual activity” isn’t one either.

Too many debates in general go this way: it’s decided in advance that certain options or policies (not just sexually) just “feel weird” and therefore are no-go. If accidentally we find ourselves on the road to actually considering one of those policies as a consequence of other prior commitments, we all for some reason have to do a dance where we pretend that X doesn’t imply Y even when it does. You see this a lot in the discussion about unions, for example: “Well, you know, I don’t approve of worker abuse, but goshdarn it I just don’t feel like workers should be able to unionize and demand better working conditions for themselves because (insert irrelevant bullshit reason).” The alternative would be to either update our commitments or admit that those commitments are incompatible with some other thing we find distasteful and work through that distaste, but hey, reflective equilibrium is hard and beating cognitive dissonance is even harder. Better to just continue performing contortions to keep certain conversation subjects out of the public light because we have “ewww ick” feelings about them.

Debates seem limited in this way because we are dealing with moral narratives and taboos. More is involved than deductive reasoning from first principles in the cultural (and legal) governance of social behavior.

Yeah, the material reasons are that polygamy alters the gender ratio. The peanut gallery here doesn’t much seem to like my argument about Bill Gates and his wives, for some reason, but there are other arguments too. Polygamous societies might be more vulnerable to STD transmission; they might have lower investment in children; they might have more male competition which gets manifested in crime and warfare; they might have divided affections; there are lots of potential arguments you could make against polygamy, specifically in its male-on-female versions.

Yes, if you take the view that women are property instead of actual individuals capable of making their own choices, I can see how you might come to any one of these conclusions. Not that you’ve really addressed the substantive point, which is that you can pretty much have whatever kind of sex you want with whatever consenting adult you want to, and no one will stop you.

Re: Yes, if you take the view that women are property instead of actual individuals capable of making their own choices, I can see how you might come to any one of these conclusions.

Well, yes, Jerry, which is my point. You’re arguing that you can’t make a philosophical case that gay marriage should be legalized, and polygamy shouldn’t. I’m arguing (with Sullivan) that you can, and that it simply depends on your philosophical premises. Which you seem to concede.

You also seem to concede that in the political arena polygamy is not going anywhere, which I agree with, at least until some Muslim or Fundamentalist Mormon group starts making a religious freedom case. So I’m not really sure what we’re arguing about.

Re: Not that you’ve really addressed the substantive point, which is that you can pretty much have whatever kind of sex you want with whatever consenting adult you want to, and no one will stop you.

Not any kind of sex, incest is still illegal, at least in this state. And I addressed the point already by saying that there’s a difference between tolerating something and giving it explicit legal sanction. You’re free to choose homeopathy (or some other junk medicine) treatment to treat your high blood pressure, but that doesn’t mean the government should require your health insurance plan to cover it. By doing so, they would be giving the implicit stamp of approval to homeopathy as a form of medicine, which I don’t want them to do.

“The peanut gallery here doesn’t much seem to like my argument about Bill Gates and his wives”

Because there’s only one of ’em Hector!
Anyway, let’s say for the sake of argument that if we legalised polygamy the ultra rich would indeed ‘outbid the rest of us on the wife market’ ….and let’s accept, unquestioning, that this would then lead to anarchy..why not just redistribute wealth on gender grounds..have the same number of male/female billionaires..the female billionaires could then use their wealth to attract multpile husbands..and gender balance would be largely restored in society at large?

Oh ok, so you’re ready to assume that women are property then. Awesome. Good thing your assumption is one that most people reject. I’m going to stop arguing this now, for the simple reason that I don’t see how I could possibly sway anyone who holds these premises, and it’s not worth my time to try.

I don’t see the point of drawing any distance between tolerating something and explicit legal sanction; if it’s not forbidden, it’s allowed, and if it’s allowed, you might as well formalize it given that formalization actually carries substantial benefits in this regard (which, not coincidentally, is why gay people want that formalization as well). Basically, you’re ok telling people “do what you do out of sight of society and don’t demand the kind of rights that other people enjoy.” It’s charming disgusting that you’re willing to cut the baby this way, because apparently “ewww triads” or something, but I guess I should thank you for personally illustrating exactly what I’m talking about.

“Do poor people find partners? NO.”

Only b/c Bill Gates is unavailable, apparently

Re: People don’t like your argument Hector because it is idiotic! Why should I care how many people want to marry Bill Gates? Should

MPA Victoria,

But it’s simple math. The more women Bill Gates marries, the less there are on the market for Joe the Plumber.

Re: have the same number of male/female billionaires..the female billionaires could then use their wealth to attract multpile husbands

Uhhhh….because wealth and status aren’t generally attractive to men to nearly the same degree they are for women? I don’t think most men, at least in my experience, care much about how much their partner makes.

I think it would make more sense not to have billionaires (i.e. Bill Gates) to begin with. In a society with low economic/social inequality, you wouldn’t tend to see much polygyny.

“But it’s simple math. The more women Bill Gates marries, the less there are on the market for Joe the Plumber.”

So we should keep adult women of sound and stable mind from making their own choices in order to prevent the possibility that some man, somewhere may find it more difficult to find a partner? By this logic we should make it illegal for women to be single.

It often seems that all modern problems could be solved by higher taxes on the wealthy. Level the playing field and Hector may be able to purchase a not-too-used woman down at the local auction house.

Re: It often seems that all modern problems could be solved by higher taxes on the wealthy.

No argument from me there.

should be .. probably NOT working on your own

Rich: yes, indeed.

Wow. That’s amazing. Sullivan really shouldn’t be publicly debating with someone like that.

Please explain: do you think Sullivan has any moral authority that could be undermined by this? After his role in the Iraq debate I don’t see any reason to believe so.

MPAVictoria: “Rich I like you but I am getting a little tired of “the air is clear up here on the moral high ground” act. This is a blog post and John is free to write about what he likes. You don’t like it I am sure Crooked Timber would be happy to refund you your yearly subscription fee.”

I don’t think that “No one is listening to blog commenters, so we can write whatever” is exactly taking the moral high ground, but I freely admit to being a scold, which is probably what you’re mostly objecting to. So I’ll try to recast what I’m saying purely pragmatically. Way up at comment 25 I wrote “let’s also remember that this is Andrew Sullivan, and that anything he writes no matter how seemingly sympathetic will turn out to be based on an underlying stratum of stupidity and viciousness”. At that point I didn’t know any more than Holbo did that Wilson was a slavery apologist. But I was confident — from prior experience, not from moral discernment — that there was some kind of hidden land mine in anything that Sullivan was involved in.

And there it was. I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to ask people to generalize from experience and avoid predictably contributing to this kind of problem.

Re: I think it’s worth making the point that most, if not all, of the Muslim countries that have a tradition of polygamy in their history have made it illegal

I think ‘most’ may be an exaggeration. According to Wikipedia polygamy is currently explicitly legal in 39 African or Asian countries, not all of them Muslim. It’s legal in a further 3 countries for Muslims but not for others (India is one of those). And it’s legal in about 10 countries (mostly non-Muslim countries in Africa) under ‘customary law’. The legal status of polygamy in India is a perennial topic of debate, which pits secular feminists and Hindu nationalists on one side, against conservative Muslims and pro-Muslim leftists on the other. (I generally take the pro-polygamy side when it comes to India, because I dislike Hindu nationalism much more than I dislike polygamy).

There are also African countries where marriages aren’t generally ‘official’ anyway, so polygamy can be not legally recognized but quite common nonetheless.

Russia is apparently considering legalizing polygamy now, to deal with the fact that a large proportion of Russian men are alcoholics, chronically unemployed, have serious health problems, or are otherwise not prime marriage material.

The worldwide trend is probably against polygamy, but the change isn’t coming as fast as you might think.

Well as far as I can see no one has helped me in my admitted ignorance about questions that might precede more inflammatory ones on these issues. Dyadic or binary-termed contracts have at least a possibility of equality given ceteris paribus knowledge/power conditions. That is because they are entered into synchronically (at least as tendered if not in terms of final agreement). But typically poly-x-ic matrimonial contracts (unlike many similar business ones) are not synchronic–later entrants into the contract may not have knowledge/power privileges that earlier ones do for simple lack of shared history about such things. I take it that most poly-x-ic matrimonial contracts are of this latter character, because people are added into them over time, and thus later entrants are potentially disadvantaged simply because of the asymmetry of time as related to matters of knowledge and power. And this is a point about potential moral disadvantage in such poly-x-ic relationships that counts against them in principle. I may be wrong, but I wish those with more experience and wisdom about these things would (kindly) dismiss my worries. Of course this does not count against poly-x-ic synchronic matrimonial contracts; my point is that such are not typical in the history of multiple partner relationships.

Because the matter of conspiracy (intentional/unintentional) is a factor that cannot matter in dyadic contracts, at least as is a function of contractual participants. That’s my worry.

Conspiracy is not concealment simpliciter. The difference is obvious.

I made the ceteris ceribus claims. The relevance of that to various contracts is obvious as well.

I wish you well ceteris paribus. And now I’m done.

“Now this means that to the extent Andrew is willing to treat his opponents as morally serious people, who have arguments that should be engaged respectfully, to that same extent he appears to be undercutting the view that the continued unavailability of same-sex marriage is a foundational civil rights issue. ”

Shorter: We win the argument just by not hitting you with a nightstick.
Or: If you mock us we win because you refuse to engage in serious debate. But if you engage in serious debate, we win because this validates our position as serious and un-mockable.

RF,

Well, yes. As is female gen*tal mutilation (plenty of Christians in Egypt and animists in West Africa do it too). Like I mentioned, a lot of African *Christians* practice polygamy, will give you chapter-and-verse from the Old Testament as well as from reasoning about ‘human nature’ to justify it, and in some cases quite mainstream churches (including Anglicans) have taken seriously the arguments in favour of legalizing it.

Katherine was saying though that most Muslim countries don’t allow polygamy, not that some non-Muslim countries do. I don’t think that was correct. And the countries with the biggest Muslim populations (Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, India) do allow polygamy at least for Muslims.

The reason Hector can’t find a mate isn’t that the Rich Guys are taking them all. It’s that no self-respecting woman wants to marry a guy who wants a permanently-dependent subject-serf-housekeeper-sextoy! Even Jane Austen novels make this point repeatedly.
And this was back when cousin-marriage was totally accepted in wealthy WASP society, and women, like poor men, had no right to vote (though some were already agitating for universal suffrage) or own property once married.