Until 38 years ago, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. Today, gay marriage is legal in six states and the District of Columbia, and 53% of Americans think gay marriage should be legal everywhere. The gay marriage fight isn’t over, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that gay marriage activists have already won. It’s just a matter of time before gay marriage is legal nationwide. The question is: What cause will civil libertarians embrace next?
Some social conservatives are worried that the answer to that question is polygamy. That’s not an unreasonable concern. It’s hard to say that gay marriage should be legal but polygamy shouldn’t. After all, if the government has no business telling people who they can or cannot marry, why can it tell people how many people they can marry? If marriage is about love and commitment, why should the number of marriage partners be capped at two? There are tradition-based arguments against polygamy, but they make little sense in a society where gay marriage is legal.
The polygamy debate is heating up. On Wednesday, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley made a civil libertarian case for legalizing the practice in a New York Times op-ed. And Canada, which legalized gay marriage in 2005, may be on the verge of becoming the first Western country to legalize polygamy.
But social conservatives shouldn’t fret, because polygamy won’t be legal in America anytime soon.
One problem for polygamy supporters is the fact that there are only, at most, a few hundred thousand polygamists in the United States. The small size of the polygamist population means that polygamists can’t sway elections by themselves — they lack the money and votes.
To succeed, the polygamist rights movement would have to rely on the sympathy of non-polygamists. But that sympathy doesn’t exist. According to a May 2011 Gallup poll, just 11% of Americans consider polygamy to be morally acceptable. By comparison, 45% of Americans consider doctor-assisted suicide to be morally acceptable and 56% consider homosexuality to be morally acceptable. Even in 1982, more than two decades before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, 34% of Americans considered homosexuality to be morally acceptable.
The gay rights movement has benefited tremendously from the fact that most Americans have a friend or family member who is gay. However, that dynamic isn’t present in the polygamy debate. In part because of the small number of polygamists and in part because polygamists are concentrated in religious communities that are isolated from the rest of America, few Americans know a polygamist personally.
Another major barrier to a polygamist rights movement is the lack of a natural constituency for it. Conservatives oppose polygamy for traditional reasons. Liberals oppose polygamy because they think that polygamist relationships subjugate women. The fact that most polygamists are religious fundamentalists makes liberals even less likely to come to their defense.
That doesn’t mean that some people won’t try to legalize polygamy. Earlier this month, the polygamist family that stars in TLC’s hit show “Sister Wives” filed a challenge to Utah’s anti-polygamy law. Turley, the libertarian law professor, is the family’s lead counsel. He has his work cut out for him.
Peter Tucci is an editor at The Daily Caller
Categories: Americas, Behaviour, Canada, Double Standard, Hypocrisy, United States
If Canada legalizes polygamy, the US will not have any reason not to:
http://www.themuslimtimes.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=74414&action=edit&message=6
Americans don’t know a polygamist personally? How strange that they have mistress/es yet can’t bear the thought of legalizing their alliances and giving proper rights to the women and children that they get due to these relationships.