Polygamy and the Homosexualists

The recent global wave of pro- and anti- gay marriage legislation has produced a fascinating public debate about the nature of marriage. One of the most interesting elements of the debate has been the conservative attempt to define marriage – even at a constitutional level – as a permanent relationship between one man and one woman. Conservative worldviews position marriage as the cornerstone of society. Challenges to ‘traditional’ marriage, such as the campaign for gay marriage, therefore threaten their whole social order. As Gwen Landolt, national director of conservative lobby group REAL Women of Canada, wrote: “If you can break down the laws guarding heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman, then anything can happen…If you can have a partner of the same sex, then logically you can have two or three of the opposite sex.” Landolt links polygamy and gay marriage as equally unthinkable and connected breaches to civilised marriage practice. While the connection between the two may only exist in the paranoid imagination of conservative ideologues the link does suggest a deeper critique of ‘Christian marriage.’

(not quite the critique i was thinking of...)

In its most basic form, the critique is to radically historicize an institution that Conservatives construct as universal and transhistorical. Other, more skillful scholars have shown just how recently heterosexual monogamy became the totalising paradigm that we take for granted in the West. Rosemary Radford Reuther and John Boswell in particular have provided masterful histories uncovering the long history of gay marriage and the short history of modern Christian family values. It is understandable that ancient gay marriage ceremonies, obscured by millenia, have not feature prominently in marriage discourse until historians such as Boswell remind us of them. I am continually surprised how even the very recent history of marriage and the family can fall from consciousness. For instance, while most people would be aware that the decision of some North American Episcopalians to celebrate gay unions and ordain an openly gay bishop is apparently causing the Anglican Communion to haemorrage abjectly all over the global media, few seem to be aware that in 1988 it decided that it could tolerate polygamy amongst converts. Seemingly the Anglican Communion can live with one breach of 'Christian Marriage' but not another.

Mormons, roughly as numerous as Episcopalians in the United States, seem much more open and consistent. Their highly publicised support of proposition 8 repealing gay marriage in California is contiguous with the repression of polygamy, especially in the context of their Canadian cousins' current attempts to use gay marriage in Canada to legalise plural marriage. The historical experiment with non-monogamous marriage explains, even necessitates, a more voluble defence of heterosexual monogamy today. The apparent paradox in current Anglican toleration of polygamy but not gay marriage has a similar root. The Latter Day Saints need to distance themselves from their polygamous past led them to support proposition 8. It was the Anglican need to distance itself from its complicity in a colonising past that enabled it to recommend toleration of polygamy. The Church of England's need to be postcolonial mirrors the Mormon need to be post-polygamous. Polygamy and gay marriage both challenge the hegemony of heterosexual monogamy. But not simply and not coherently. History's tangled web enables tolerance here and intolerance there.

The variable possibilities of tolerance of polygamy in various Churches surely provides a template for tolerance of gay marriage. Christian marriage is palpably not exclusively heterosexual and monogamous. Why the fuss over homo-marriage when polygamy is silently accepted.

P.S. And another thing, whatever happened to polyandry: