Coming Soon: Polygamy

You could see this one coming a mile away, and many of us did. When the Supreme Court declared that there is no rational reason to deny the right of two people of the same sex to marry–love is love!–it eliminated the teleological foundation of marriage and the family. If marriage is no longer grounded in the biology of reproduction–it takes two, a man and a woman, to make a child–then the number two is likewise irrational. If George and Ken can be in love, and therefore entitled to marry, then why can’t George, Ken and Susan?

The inevitable has happened, as a court in New York seems to be the first to extend the logic of Obergefell to polygamous relationships. FrontPage reports:

New York City’s eviction court – the venue of a landmark same-sex relationship decision long before Obergefell v Hodges – is now the source of a legal opinion that comes down clearly on the side of polyamorous unions.

The decision came in the case of West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill, decided by New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan, concluded that polyamorous relationships are entitled to the same sort of legal protection given to two-person relationships.

In June [2020], Somerville, Massachusetts, passed an ordinance allowing groups of three or more people who ‘consider themselves to be a family’ to be recognized as domestic partners. The neighboring town of Cambridge followed suit, passing a broader ordinance recognizing multi-partner relationships. “The law has proceeded even more rapidly in recognizing that it is possible for a child to have more than two legal parents.”

“Why then,” posited the judge, “except for the very real possibility of implicit majoritarian animus, is the limitation of two persons inserted into the definition of a family-like relationship for the purposes of receiving the same protections from eviction accorded to legally formalized or blood relationships? Is ‘two’ a ‘code word’ for monogamy? Why does a person have to be committed to one other person in only certain prescribed ways in order to enjoy stability in housing after the departure of a loved one?”

Chief Justice John Roberts was one of many who saw where the logic of Obergefell would lead. He wrote, in dissenting from that decision:

Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not.

Exactly. If you take biology out of the mix, “two” is an arbitrary and irrational number. And in the short time that has gone by since Obergefell, the concept of biology itself has come under widespread attack. If things continue on their present course–and they will, absent a vastly invigorated conservative movement–the “right” to polygamy will soon be established. Which is to say that the rest of us will have polygamy jammed down our throats.

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