3/23/2005
It was just last month, right in the middle of this married men’s Bible study I attend every other week that the conversation began. We were taking a look at the life of King Solomon, the man who asked for wisdom from God and was given both wisdom and incredible wealth and power.
As many know, towards the end of Solomon’s life and reign, he began to turn away from God’s laws. His first mistake, the Bible tells us, is marriage. Not the traditional “one man/one woman” marriage that you and I know, rather, the mass marriages that Solomon for some reason seemed to prefer.
King Solomon had 300 wives and 700 concubines! Yup, a wealth of women I guess you could say. Insanity is what I would say. I have one wife and two children, and that is more than enough.
But, off the cuff, a good friend of mine spoke up to say something along the lines of, “you know, this early on in the Bible, it really doesn’t say a whole lot about the traditional marriage that we know of today.” I looked at him with raised eyebrows and asked, you mean, beyond the statement that Adam and Eve were made for each other and the affirmation that, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh?
He acknowledged those passages, but the debate continued on at length. But, really, it was a lighthearted debated among men who all agreed upon, accepted, and acknowledged the Biblical mandate of “one man/one woman” in marriage.
Unfortunately, for some, this is not a lighthearted debate at all. And I’m not just referring to the debate over “gay marriage,” rather the argument that many, including myself, have made that allowing gay marriage will open the door to nearly every other type of marriage relationship. This argument, of course, has been pooh-poohed by many who support gay marriage, but it turns out that we were right and advocates for other kinds of marriage are not going to passively accept the new standard proposed by gay marriage activists.
The fact is, if gay marriage becomes normal, so will a host of other types of marriage. Still don’t believe me? You will.
Stanley Kurtz, a columnist and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution wrote an in-depth and spot on article in August of 2003 called, Beyond Gay Marriage, where he said this of the growing gay-marriage debate:
POLYGAMY, POLYAMORY, and the abolition of marriage are bad ideas. But what has that got to do with gay marriage? The reason these ideas are connected is that gay marriage is increasingly being treated as a civil rights issue. Once we say that gay couples have a right to have their commitments recognized by the state, it becomes next to impossible to deny that same right to polygamists, polyamorists, or even cohabiting relatives and friends. And once everyone’s relationship is recognized, marriage is gone, and only a system of flexible relationship contracts is left. The only way to stop gay marriage from launching a slide down this slope is if there is a compelling state interest in blocking polygamy or polyamory that does not also apply to gay marriage. Many would agree that the state has a compelling interest in preventing polygamy and polyamory from undermining the ethos of monogamy at the core of marriage. The trouble is, gay marriage itself threatens the ethos of monogamy.
Well, it appears that Kurtz’s article was prophetic. Today he published another article entitled, Rick Santorum Was Right: Meeting The Future of Marriage in America, where he states:
I have seen the future of American family law, and her name is Elizabeth F. Emens. A whiz kid with a Ph.D. in English from Cambridge University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, Emens, who teaches the University of Chicago Law School, has published a major legal and cultural defense of polyamory (group marriage)…
Emens’s 2004 article, which appears in the Volume 29, Number 2 of The New York University Review of Law and Social Change, is called, “Monogamy’s Law: Compulsory Monogamy and Polyamorous Existence.” Emens begins by suggesting that Senator Rick Santorum was right — or, at least, she seems to be trying to bring Santorum’s prophesy to fulfillment. The professor is unhappy that proponents of same-sex marriage agree with Santorum that were gay marriage to create a new openness to adultery, bigamy, and polygamy, that would be a bad thing. Emens’s preferred response to Rick Santorum’s parade of horribles is “So what?”
I have not yet had the chance to read Emen’s entire article, however, I have seen enough to know that Emen’s article is brilliant and does make excellent legal sense in light of the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling. Emens even takes a newer Christian approach to marriage, called, “Coventant Marriage” which is now on the books legally in Louisiana, and creates more stringent requirements around divorce. In Emen’s example, however, she proposes creating marriage options that allow people to choose monogamous or nonmonogamous marriages.
Once you’ve made a choice and chosen your marriage option, you are, at least for the length of that marriage, locked into that option. Sounds almost like we are trying to turn marriage into some kind of wireless or long-distance calling plan.
Here are a few unanswered questions in this whole debate:
- Do we have any clue whatsoever what the long-term impact of such arrangements might be on society?
- Might not these more liberal marriage options give Christian conservatives like myself a HUGE advantage in terms of population growth? Liberal marriage options are likely to produce less children, which ultimately means that conservatives who prefer traditional marriage will have larger families and, with each generation, exponentially more cultural leverage.
Let me offer a case in point; it’s what James Taranto in his Opinionjournal.com column, Best of The Web Today, calls “The Roe Effect of The First Century”:
In its cover story this week on early Christianity, Newsweek notes that “the sociologist Rodney Stark calculates that the number of Christians rose from roughly 1,000 (or .0017 percent of the Roman Empire) in A.D. 40 to nearly 34 million in 350 (or 56.5 percent of the total population).”
How’d they do it? Here’s one way: “By largely banning abortion and female infanticide, Christians increased the ranks of women who could in turn bear Christian children.”
We already know that pro-life families tend to have more children and that those same families are more conservative around marriage in general. Wouldn’t the liberalization of marriage have the effect of accelerating what Taranto calls “The Roe Effect” further? I think so.
So perhaps, in light of that knowledge, Christians should be gung ho regarding these attempts to liberalize marriage. The very liberals who complain that we Christians are trying to take over the culture and move back towards the dark ages, or some such silly nonsense, are going to help us do exactly that.
We don’t have to lift a finger. Instead, we’ll allow liberals to select their ideology for exctinction and we can just sit back and wait to inherit society.
Sounds like a plan.
David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com
3 Comments
From Gay Marriage to ‘Anything-Goes’ Marriage
Gay marriage advocates dismiss those of us who have warned that it will lead to polyarmy. But there may be a silver lining…
Trackback by Blogcritics — 3/23/2005 @ 10:56 am
Polygynous marriages can (and do!)easily outbreed traditional marriages. With one guy and many women, several women can be pregnant at a time.
Comment by kate — 4/5/2005 @ 6:42 pm
Kate,
Why would one man want to make several women pregnant at one time? Unless he had a mammoth ego that he had to stoke.
Children needs their fathers too, not just their mothers, and a father divided to such extremes could not possibly be the kind of father he should be.
I think any married man or woman will tell you; having one spouse and whatever number of children with that spouse is difficult enough. No need to complicate things further if you ask me.
David
Comment by David Flanagan — 4/5/2005 @ 8:00 pm