First published on February 25, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.
When some opponents of gay marriage try to argue for their view, after they ritually condemn homosexuality they will claim that gay marriage "damages society" and "undermines marriage" in some unspecified way and end by postulating deplorable consequences of gay marriage: "If we allow gay marriage, then people will want to practice polygamy and marry their pets."
Well, when our opponents are reduced to arguing that gay marriage is bad because it might lead to something else, we have won the argument. When they have to change the subject, it means they do not have any good arguments against gay marriage itself.
You would think if the religious right were really so worried about polygamy - and whatever they privately think they do argue that way - they would use their energy to a) explain clearly how gay marriage could plausibly lead to polygamy and b) explain clearly why polygamy is bad. Yet they make little effort to do either.
Perhaps that is because nothing in the principles supporting gay marriage provides any support for the legalization of any other type of relationship, much less polygamy And the legalization of polygamy seems very unlikely anyway in modern societies like the U.S.
Over the centuries, heterosexual marriage shifted from being a merger contract between families or an economic and sexual arrangement to assure creation of legal heirs and caretakers for one's old age, and came to be understood primarily as a companionate relationship of mutual caring between two people who love each other.
But once the affectional bond became the central element of marriage, the rationale for limiting it to pairs who would procreate lost its force. Gays want nothing more than to participate in "traditional marriage" thus understood - marriage for the benefit of the marrying partners: meshing a person's life with someone they love.
Gays are not arguing that people should be able to have whatever marital arrangement they want. They argue only that everyone should have access to marriage as it is now commonly understood. Nor are gays arguing for any legal rights other people do not have. They argue that they are uniquely denied a right everyone else already has - the right to marry someone they love.
By contrast, an advocate of legal polygamy cannot argue that he (or she) is seeking anything akin to traditional marriage - unless the Old Testament is considered "traditional." Nor can he argue he is being denied a right that everyone else has. He would have to argue that he desires and deserves a new right that no one currently has. Perhaps that argument could be made but it has not been so far.
Now, if gay marriage opponents wish to argue that it could lead to polygamy, they also have to explain why polygamy is undesirable. After all, polygamy survived for centuries in many parts of the world and lingers in most Muslim countries today. In fact, the religious right has the causal relationship backward. Gay marriage does not lead to polygamy. Polygamy, however indirectly, led to gay marriage.
In any case, while there are some interesting arguments against legal polygamy, none of which would be weakened by gay marriage, it is more relevant to point out that polygamy was a response to certain pre-modern social conditions but that modern egalitarian, capitalist and individualist societies create little need for and considerable pressure against polygamy.
Polygamy flourished in primitive, male-dominated societies where women had little freedom of movement, education or employment skills and were dependent on men, where inequalities of wealth allowed some men to acquire several wives while others had none, and/or where male deaths in frequent military campaigns sharply reduced the number of potential husbands.
But in modern societies, women have equal access to advanced education and economic independence, social value apart from the status or wealth of a husband, and an equal male-female ratio. It is hard to imagine many women in the contemporary U.S. cheerfully welcoming competing wives or voluntarily becoming a second, third, or fourth wife.
In addition, women in third world nations - and southern Utah - who have left polygamous households describe them as rife with favoritism, rivalries, domestic abuse, and the like. It is hard to imagine a modern, educated woman entering or staying in such a family environment.
Nor would polygamy seem desirable for most males. Assuming an equal male-female population, a man who married two or more women would deprive one or more heterosexual men of the pleasures of a romantic, sexual and domestic life with a wife.
In fact, we may say that just as same-sex marriage is good because it allows more people to enjoy the pleasures and benefits of marriage, polygamy is undesirable because it deprives some people of the pleasures and benefits of marriage.
In short: None of the principles supporting gay marriage offers support for polygamy. Rather the opposite. And polygamy is not likely to be widely advocated because - unlike same-sex marriage - it answers no needs and removes no inequities in modern societies.