Backers of California's so-called Knight Initiative, a local Defense of Marriage Act that would forbid the state from recognizing same-sex matrimony, are reviving the old argument that gay unions will open the floodgates to all sorts of alternative arrangements, including polygamy.
The initiative, which will be put before California voters next March, counts among its supporters Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who ran for California governor as the conservative alternative to then-governor Pete Wilson, and who is expected to run for the Senate in 2000. In a recent opinion column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Unz warned that "Legalizing gay marriages today means legalizing polygamy or group marriages tomorrow." He reasons that if same-sex unions become legal, "How can one then deny the right of two men and three women to achieve personal fulfillment by entering into a legally valid group marriage?" Moreover, "If our common legal structures were to be bent or stretched to accommodate one [nontraditional arrangement], they must be made to accommodate others as well."
Just how great is the polygamous threat in today's America? It turns out there is, in fact, an ongoing debate about polygamy, but it's not between conservatives and progressives. Instead, the polygamy debate highlights a division among religious conservatives themselves. This is most obvious within the Mormon community.
Last year, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt suggested that the practice, with roots in early Mormon doctrine, might be protected under the First Amendment. Although polygamy was officially abandoned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1890, officials estimate that anywhere between 30,000 to 40,000 dissident traditionalist Mormons still practice it despite the risk of excommunication by their church and the lack of state sanction for their (illegal) relationships.
But don't think that polygamists are our allies. For while gay rights activists (and a great many feminists) often claim that same-sex unions are a good thing but polygamy isn't, those in the pro-polygamy camp argue that polygamy is a good thing, but homosexual unions are not. Gayle Ruzicka, president of the conservative Utah Eagle Forum, told the Salt Lake Tribune in September 1998 that "For polygamous folks, it is a religious belief and at least through their religious ceremonies they think they are married before God. Homosexuality is not part of somebody's religion." She added, following the brouhaha unleashed by Gov. Leavitt's suggestion of polygamy tolerance, "These people out there living polygamous lives are not bothering anybody."
Not everyone, of course, was so accommodating toward plural matrimony. In reaction to Gov. Leavitt's stance, a group of self-described "former polygamists" held a news conference outside his office and demanded that the state's constitutional ban on polygamy be enforced. Sound familiar?
Here's some history: When the federal government finally succeeded in pressuring the Mormons to abandon polygamy -- in exchange for Utah statehood -- many traditionalists refused to go along and faced arrest for their now-outlawed marriages. Others lost custody of their children, who were forcibly removed from their loving, multiple parents as surely as contemporary courts took away Sharon Bottoms' son from her "unfit" lesbian home.
The debate in Utah is still underway. Just last month, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that a Republican lawmaker wants the state to apologize to polygamists for staging raids to enforce anti-bigamy laws in the 1940s and 50s. Representative David Zolman from Taylorsville, Utah, says a state apology would erect a so-called "peace bridge" to isolated fundamentalist Mormon communities.
However the argument about polygamy isn't limited to the Mormons. At the 1998 world conference of Anglican (Episcopalian) bishops in Lambeth, England, conservative African bishops spearheaded a resolution condemning homosexuality as sinful. On the other hand, the same conservative bishops succeeded in preventing a resolution against polygamy from appearing on the final agenda -- thereby preventing polygamy from being condemned as unchristian, the way homosexuality was. This shouldn't be surprising. The practice of African polygamy remains common.
Throughout most of human history, in fact, polygamy has been the norm, and its prevalence in the world of the Old Testament Hebrews was hardly an oddity. There is no biblical prohibition against a man taking two or more wives. If the patriarchs had multiple spouses, why shouldn't we? Just who are the biblical fundamentalists in this debate? Moreover, if gay marriage poses a "slippery slope" that could lead to polygamy, why didn't polygamy ever lead to same-sex marriage?
These questions aside, when addressing religious hypocrisy the Mormons clearly are in the forefront. Despite the bitter persecution they faced over their own unconventional (by modern standards) form of marriage, their official church today is adamantly supporting the anti-gay marriage Knight initiative, which defines marriage as a one-man, one-woman relationship. Recently the San Francisco board of supervisors called for an investigation of the Mormon Church's tax-exempt status, citing evidence that the church has established a quota for member donations to support the anti-gay initiative. Maybe today's Mormon elders fear that gay marriage will be the "slippery slope" that will lead to the re-establishment of marriages like those of their revered great grandparents.
Or, more likely, the official Mormon leadership is using the Knight initiative to wage war against their own renegade, polygamist brethren.
Polygamy and same-sex marriages are not the same, but I'm enough of a libertarian to think that individuals should be free to enter into the type of matrimonial relationships that seem to suit them best. Nevertheless, I'm no fool. Arguing that the state should recognize polygamy and its variants can only be a losing political argument, and I'm not advocating that we do so.
But maybe the question ought not to be what sort of marriages the state should recognize. Maybe, instead, we should ask whether the state should ultimately be in the marriage recognition business to begin with. Suppose Washington stopped using the tax code's marriage benefits for social engineering. Then if, as some libertarians argue, the government allowed individuals to freely contract for the type of marriage arrangement they desired and left it up to religious institutions to support and solemnize those marriages which their particular flocks wished to sanction, it wouldn't be necessary to fight over whose relationships get the state's seal of approval. That, anyway, is something to think about.