Push to Legalize Polyamory

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DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - Not content with legal protections for same-sex "marriage," LGBT activists are now demanding the right to marry multiple partners.

Last week, CBS News profiled the next attack on the family in an interview with family law attorney Diana Adams, who provides legal support and advice for "non-monogamous people."

Adams specializes in advocating for legal protections for people in polyamorous relationships "before the law has caught up." She said, "There are significant holes in protections for persons who don't fit into a two-person relation."

"There's lots of different ways that we miss out on those other kinds of benefits because marriage has been so incentivized as the ideal family form," she added. "When have of American adults are not in those family forms, I think it's time to stop incentivizing and pushing marriage."

Speaking to The Christian Post on Monday, Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of the Ruth Institute and author of The Sexual State, explained that the goal of the LGBT legal community and their allies, after redefining marriage, is to redefine parenthood.

"The end game for the sexual revolutionaries is to capture the state to redefine parenthood," Morse said. "They want contract parenting, with no legal 'privileging' or 'incentivizing' of biological relationships."

"The charming lesbian couple with children was the rhetorical battering ram to accomplish that through gay marriage. Today, the 'consensual non-monogamy' people are their current battering ram," she said.

Morse's work with the Ruth Institute is focused on undoing the damage wrought by the sexual revolution by upholding "ancient Christian teachings about marriage, family, and human sexuality."

Morse blasted the American Psychological Association (APA) for setting up a task force on "consensual non-monogamy" and for its lack of any mention of the well-being of children subjected to the revolving door of sexual partners. She started her piece with a note explaining "this is not a parody" owing to the APA's own description of the task force:

The Task Force on Consensual Non-Monogamy promotes awareness and inclusivity about consensual non-monogamy and diverse expressions of intimate relationships. These include but are not limited to: people who practice polyamory, open relationships, swinging, relationship anarchy and other types of ethical, non-monogamous relationships.

"Indeed," she warned, "the underlying, but unspoken presumption is that there will be no children. Ever."

Morse explained that children exposed to these arrangements have reported distress with each new relationship and feel the loss when the relationships end. Additionally, statistics show that an unrelated male in the household increases the risk of sexual abuse of the children by 20 times.

Destabilizing Effect on Society

Though polygamy is illegal in most western countries, it is culturally accepted and practiced widely elsewhere. It is most commonly associated with Muslim culture but it is also common in Southeast Asia and parts of the Caribbean.

Where it is practiced, the culture is patriarchal — women are forced to leave their family completely and lose all support when they join their husband's household.

In October, an Indian women's rights advocacy group, Arunachal Pradesh Women's Welfare Society (APWWS) advocated for a "one man, one wife" policy to end polygamy. According to APWWS president Dipti Bengia Tadar, wealthy state officials in India are "indulging in polygamy, causing distress to many tribal families."

Men engaging in polygamy frequently take adolescent girls from poor families as second or third wives, often as an attempt to "rescue" them from poverty. In many cases, the young wives exchange poverty for abuse.

The APWWS provides shelter for many girls who fled the abuse or were abandoned by their husbands.

The practice of polygamy also destabilizes society as a whole and tends to lead to violence.

According to The Economist, "Wherever it is widely practiced, polygamy ... destabilizes society, largely because it is a form of inequality which creates an urgent distress in the hearts, and loins, of young men."

The inequality is created by the loss of the opportunity to marry that poor men face.

Polygamy involves the man paying the woman's family a "bride price" or dowry. In societies where wealth is unevenly distributed, that price is out of reach for most young men. This results in the man getting married older while the age of the bride is driven down.

Daughters must be married off before the sons can afford to pay for their bride. If the couple divorces, the bride's family must pay back the dowry — another reason women are forced to stay in abusive situations.

The Economist identifies the inequity in opportunity for marriage as one of the reasons for the Arab Spring, the wave of anti-government uprisings and revolutions that swept the Islamic world from 2010–2012. Additionally, because the Quran gives Jihadists the right to take women and children as "spoils of war" or milk al-yamin, when they are at war with a Christian nation, they have an incentive for clearing out entire villages.

"Polygamous societies are bloodier, more likely to invade their neighbors and more prone to collapse than others are," the authors note.

In South Sudan, the dowry for a bride ranges between 30 and 300 cows, a nearly impossible amount to acquire legally for most young men. As a result, deadly cattle raids are an almost daily event, as men fight to gather enough to buy a bride.

According to author Matt Ridley, "even moderate polygamy can produce large imbalances."

"From Troy to Brigham Young, from Genghis Khan to Islamic State, there has been a tendency for nations that allow polygamous marriage to exhibit more crime and more warfare than those that do not," he observes. "The cause is increased competition for mates. Polygamy results in more unmarried young men, and these commit most violence."

Pointing to the work of anthropologist Joe Henrich, Ridley explained:

Faced with high levels of intra-sexual competition and little chance of obtaining even one long-term mate, unmarried, low-status men will heavily discount the future and more readily engage in risky status-elevating and sex-seeking behaviors. This will result in higher rates of murder, theft, rape, social disruption, kidnapping (especially of females), sexual slavery and prostitution.

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