Washington Blade answers my question

Ryan McCann directed us last week to an article posted on National Review Online about same sex marriage.  I was surprised to find the Washington Blade investigating a question that I've posed on this blog several times.

If you don't like my definition of marriage, then what would yours be?  If "moral values" are unimportant for a secular state-sanctioned marriage, what restricts marriages from being engaged between multiple partners (or for that matter, prostitution- which is nothing more than a legal contract between two consenting adults).  If it's discrimination against gay men who want to be married, how is is not discrimination against polygamists?  No one ever answers (I think Bil Browning did once- which was much appreciated).

From NRO.

What about polygamy? Is that the natural next step? When people ask me this, my stock answer has become, “I don’t know, go ask the guys in the Harvard Law School faculty lounge.” Because if the California decision stands, there simply is no longer any case to be made we have begun to win the war for judicial restraint. If a court can rule that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right (i.e., one deeply rooted in our nation’s traditions) then it can make up anything. Elite legal minds get to figure out what they think and break it to the rest of us once they’ve decided.

The Washington Blade, one of the nation’s leading gay newspapers, took up this question more thoughtfully than I do in its June 6 issue. The experts they consulted are somewhat divided on the question. But Prof. Jonathan Turley, for one, calls on gay-marriage advocates to make a clean breast of what the new “right-to-marry” principle means: Adult polygamists who “do not believe in child brides,” he told the paper, should be allowed to formalize their relationships.

“I don’t like polygamy but that’s not what’s important here,” Prof. Turley said. “[T]here will have to be a new definition of marriage because it’s disingenuous to say that gays and lesbians should be included in marriage but then for them to exclude others.” (emphasis mine).

I don’t know how the polygamy debate will end up. But if fidelity in marriage is culturally optional, and we’ve now got a fundamental human right to have the government confer dignity on all our family choices (which is what California supreme court ruled), the case for monogamy will surely be weakened as well.

But don’t worry: By the time it happens, culture will have shifted far enough that you won’t care anymore. That’s the progressives’ promise.

Read the Washington Blade's treatment of the issue here.  Of course, most of their "experts" dismiss the polygamy issue by creating a straw man- bestiality.   

Esther Rothblum, a lesbian professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University who published a three-year study on the effects of Vermont’s civil unions law, stresses that the California Supreme Court ruling has nothing to do with polygamy and said she doesn’t fear same-sex marriage leading to a repeal of polygamy laws.

“You hear people say that all the time,” she said. “‘Oh next they’ll rule that somebody can marry their dog,’ that kind of thing. But historically laws haven’t led to those kinds of things in other areas. For instance when women won the right to vote, it didn’t lead to children being able to vote, animals being able to vote. Nobody’s arguing for any of that. In a legal sense, I just don’t see that kind of thing happening.”

Ms. Rothblum, you are connecting two very un-related matters.  I just can't think of a strong reason to prohibit prostitution and polygamy separate from a strong belief in traditional marriage and healthy sexual mores. 

The fact remains, if the state defines same sex marriage bans as "discrimination", then how is it not discrimination to discriminate against individuals with multiple partners?  Or prostitutes?  There is no fundamental difference.