No one in American punditry is more consistently wrong than Charles Krauthammer:
And now, polygamy.
With the sweetly titled HBO series “Big Love,” polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline “Polygamists, Unite!” Newsweek informs us of “polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement.” Says one evangelical Christian big lover: “Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle.”
Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With “Big Love” it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.
As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.
Millions of Americans think we should call off the Drug War. That doesn’t mean it is about to happen. Just because Newsweek can find one evangelical Christian that wants two or more wives doesn’t mean that there is about to be some big social movement on behalf of polyamory rights.
I don’t understand why the Washington Post allows Krauthammer to write columns that call Mormons secretive, Africans primitive, and Arabs profligate. But more than that, I don’t know why they continue to employ someone who is so consistently dishonest and wrong.
Polygamy has no future in America. Much more likely is that people will stop getting married at all.
