Maggie Gallagher has a seriously confused piece in the Weekly Standard that starts off by suggesting the danger that gay marriage will lead to polygamous marriage. She even throws in an Islamic bugaboo, wondering how long it will take Islamic leaders to recognize that the U.S. is not serious about enforcing its marriage norms and demand an acceptance of Muslim polygamy.
Yet, later in the same piece, she emphasizes that heterosexual marriage is deeply rooted in Christian and Jewish “not to mention” Muslim tradition. Well, polygamous marriage is deeply-rooted in Muslim tradition, and, for that matter, Mizrahi (Eastern, non-Ashkenazic) Jews practiced polygamy from Mosaic times until the middle of the twentieth century when the new State of Israel banned the practice; and Ashkenazic Jews only banned the practice in the Middle Ages under Christian pressure. So, by Ms. Gallagher’s reasoning, gay marriage may be awful, but maybe polygamy isn’t so bad. Then there’s oddity of both citing Islam as a source of eternal wisdom for its views on heterosexual marriage and as an existential moral danger for its views on polygamy in the same piece.
If the anti-gay marriage forces are going to win the day, they are going to have to do better than such incoherent claptrap.
I’ll blog more about this some other time, but how come no one seems to have written (UPDATE: except for this snide piece) about the fact that the legal accouterments of divorce–a unilateral breakup leads to alimony, equal division of assets, etc., don’t seem to be at all appropriate for a typical gay male couple? (UPDATE: because, to give you a very brief preview, they are generally intended to protect a partner who has given up financial gain and human capital for family reasons, and that is generally women of childbearing age).
UPDATE: Nate Oman has an interesting post on the federal effort to stamp out polygamous marriage among Mormons in the 19th century. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t entirely successful.
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