Grim's Hall

Gays & Polygamy:

Another Republican Senator is in trouble for his mouth. You'd think Republicans would just stop speaking in public. This time it's the Honorable Rick Santorum, who said this:

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

There are three things to be said about this. First, bigamy is perhaps the most improperly used word in American jurisprudence. It comes from the Greek, and does indeed mean "two-wifed." However, bigamy was the practice of having a second wife after the death of the first one, not the practice of having two wives at once, which was (and is) polygamy. American legislatures have always gotten the semantics wrong, which is irritating to those of us who like having words for each concept instead of confusing the concepts.

Second, Santorum here seems to be echoing Stanley Kurtz of the National Review, who has made this argument at great length. See his pieces "The Coming Battle," "The Real Issue" and "Gay Marriage Endgame". He's written more about it, most of which can be found by following the links contained in his articles. Stanley Kurtz and Andrew Sullivan have maintained a running fight about this for months. The Senator is just abbreviating Kurtz's points, with which he apparently agrees. It's unfair to call for his removal for participating in political discourse--that's what we expect of Senators, after all, it's what they are for.

Last, I find the Kurtz/Santorum argument astonishing. It takes this form: "Gay marriage should not be allowed because it would necessarily allow polygamy, and polygamy would mark the real destruction of marriage as an institution." But polygamy has been the main way in which marriage has been practiced for all of human history. It is specifically permitted in the Torah, which gives rules in Exodus for taking a second wife; when Jesus speaks to adultery in the New Testament, he clearly leaves open the traditional polygamist way of Jewish marriage; Mormonism obviously permits it in their scripture; and as for non-Judeo-Christian marriage, there isn't a religion among them that forbids polygamy. All of them have traditions of polygamist behavior historically, and many--Islam for example--have scripture to support the taking of extra wives.

No culture, however, has ever allowed gay marriage. The Kurtz/Santorum argument is perhaps the most extrodinary case of cart-before-horseism I've seen in my life. Polygamy, though problematic, would represent a return to roots, and indeed there are strong arguments in its favor in an era in which traditional families are crumbling and divorce rates are skyrocketing. Gay marriage is a complete departure from everything marriage has ever represented.