Is Gay Marriage a slide toward Polygamy? Or away from it?.
some comment about muslims & sharia in the thread. i don’t know if i think gay marriage has anything really to do with polygamy & muslims in the USA (the author makes that point in a follow up post). i mean, how many weirdo muslims like they have in europe do they have here anyway? my understanding is that most american polygamists are mormon or west african.
Willow 10:18 am on November 17, 2008 Permalink |
I agree. They’re apples and oranges. I think he’s right in that at their core, the conversation about gay marriage (and before that, interracial and interfaith marriage) speak to the endurance and healthy of marriage as an institution, not to a laissez-faire attitude toward sexual proclivities.
The vigorous American dislike of polygamy is rooted in 19th century politics. Anybody interested should read about the anti-Mormon movement of the 1830s-40s…a lot of the rhetoric is identical to Islamophobic rhetoric used today. Progressives talked about “stamping out the twin pillars of barbarism, slavery and polygamy”. Authors–many of them women–wrote some pretty racy harem-type novels about life inside polygamous Mormon sects. (Out in the desert, under the yoke of a somewhat insane religious firebrand…sound familiar?) Sadly most of them are now out of print.
Our attitudes toward polygamy are so longstanding that I really don’t think they’ll ever change.
Willow 10:18 am on November 17, 2008 Permalink |
*at its core, not their core.
Willow 10:20 am on November 17, 2008 Permalink |
My God, excuse all the grammar in that comment. I haven’t had any caffeine yet today.