IGF CultureWatch

[Author's note: My wording left some readers under the impression that the modern Mormon church may endorse or practice polygamy. It does not. I should have made clearer that I was referring to certain people who claim to be Mormons, not to the church or mainstream practice.]

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"And now, polygamy," sighs Charles Krauthammer in a Washington Post column. It's true. As if they didn't already have enough on their minds, Americans are going to have to debate polygamy.

And not a moment too soon.

For generations, taboo kept polygamy out of sight and out of mind in America. But the taboo is crumbling. An HBO television series called "Big Love," which benignly portrays a one-husband, three-wife family in Utah, set off the latest round of polygamy talk. Even so, a federal lawsuit (now on appeal), the American Civil Liberties Union's stand for polygamy rights, and the rising voices of pro-polygamy groups such as TruthBearer.org (an evangelical Christian group) and Principle Voices (which Newsweek describes as "a Utah-based group run by wives from polygamous marriages") were already making the subject hard to duck.

So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is thinking about polygamy as social policy.

If the coming debate changes that, it will have done everyone a favor. For reasons that have everything to do with its own social dynamics and nothing to do with gay marriage, polygamy is a profoundly hazardous policy.

To understand why, begin with two crucial words. The first is "marriage." Group love (sometimes called polyamory) is already legal, and some people freely practice it. Polygamy asserts not a right to love several others but a right to marry them all. Because a marriage license is a state grant, polygamy is a matter of public policy, not just of personal preference.

The second crucial word is "polygyny." Unlike gay marriage, polygamy has been a common form of marriage since at least biblical times, and probably long before. In his 1994 book The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Robert Wright notes that a "huge majority" of the human societies for which anthropologists have data have been polygamous. Virtually all of those have been polygynous: that is, one husband, multiple wives. Polyandry (one wife, many husbands) is vanishingly rare. The real-world practice of polygamy seems to flow from men's desire to marry all the women they can have children with.

Moreover, in America today the main constituents for polygamous marriage are Mormons and, as Newsweek reports, "a growing number of evangelical Christian and Muslim polygamists." These religious groups practice polygyny, not polyandry. Thus, in light of current American politics as well as copious anthropological experience, any responsible planner must assume that if polygamy were legalized, polygynous marriages would outnumber polyandrous ones-probably vastly.

Here is something else to consider: As far as I've been able to determine, no polygamous society has ever been a true liberal democracy, in anything like the modern sense. As societies move away from hierarchy and toward equal opportunity, they leave polygamy behind. They monogamize as they modernize. That may be a coincidence, but it seems more likely to be a logical outgrowth of the arithmetic of polygamy.

Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.

For the individuals affected, losing the opportunity to marry is a grave, even devastating, deprivation. (Just ask a gay American.) But the effects are still worse at the social level. Sexual imbalance in the marriage market has no good social consequences and many grim ones.

Two political scientists, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, ponder those consequences in their 2004 book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. Summarizing their findings in a Washington Post article, they write:

Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages-money, skills, education-will marry, but men without such advantages-poor, unskilled, illiterate-will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population.

The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly intersocietal, violence."

Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."

Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females: in other words, when one-sixth of men are surplus goods on the marriage market. The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives-numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while. In particular communities-inner cities, for example-polygamy could take a toll much more quickly. Even a handful of "Solomons" (high-status men taking multiple wives) could create brigades of new recruits for street gangs and drug lords, the last thing those communities need.

Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street-literally. The sect, reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than 400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness."

True, in modern America some polygynous marriages would probably be offset by group marriages or chain marriages involving multiple husbands, but there is no way to know how large such an offset might be. And remember: Every unbalanced polygynous marriage, other things being equal, leaves some man bereft of the opportunity to marry, which is no small cost to that man.

The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands.

By this point it should be obvious that polygamy is, structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it.

As the public focuses on a subject it has not confronted for generations, the hazards of polygamy are likely to sink in. In time, debating polygamy will remind us why our ancestors were right to abolish it. The question is whether the debate will reach its stride soon enough to prevent polygamy from winning a lazy acquiescence that it in no way deserves.

As laws protecting gay Americans from discrimination proliferate, they increasingly conflict with important liberties. The latest example of this clash comes from Massachusetts, where Catholic Charities of Boston has decided to stop providing adoption services rather than comply with a state law prohibiting discrimination against gay couples.

Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has proposed a special exemption from this law for religiously affiliated adoption agencies; gay groups have responded that this would amount to discrimination that places politics before the interests of children. While Romney's motives may be self-serving (he's thinking of running for the GOP presidential nomination), his proposal is defensible on principle and sensible as a matter of politics.

Private agencies contract with the state to provide adoption services. The state pays them money and strictly regulates their operations, including the criteria they use to find homes for children. For the past 17 years, Massachusetts has prohibited such agencies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. This means that Massachusetts adoption agencies may not refuse to consider same-sex couples as adoptive parents.

This is sound public policy. First, gay couples can provide children with very good homes. Indeed, research so far tends to support the thesis that gay parents are comparable to similarly situated straight parents. They're at least competent to raise children.

Second, there's a shortage of good homes for children. In Massachusetts alone, some 682 children now await adoption. It would be cruel to shuffle them from foster home to foster home while turning away perfectly good prospective parents simply because they're gay.

Until recently, Catholic Charities coexisted peacefully with this anti-discrimination policy. During the past two decades, the group has placed 13 children (out of 720) with same-sex couples. Last December, the 42-member lay board of the group voted unanimously to continue the practice.

But there is a chill wind blowing from the Vatican now on all subjects related to homosexuality. The church hierarchy has evidently decided to root out all internal manifestations of opposition to its longstanding belief that homosexuality is "intrinsically disordered." Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, Vatican head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, recently said that allowing gay couples to adopt children "would destroy the child's future, it would be an act of moral violence against the child." Catholic Charities is reluctantly bowing to this pressure.

When Gov. Romney proposed a narrow exemption for religiously affiliated adoption agencies, many gay groups reacted angrily. "Denying children a loving and stable home serves absolutely no higher purpose," said HRC's Joe Solmonese. "These bishops are putting an ugly political agenda before the needs of very vulnerable children. . . . What these bishops are doing is shameful, wrong and has nothing to do whatsoever with faith."

In most respects, this statement is wrong. Allowing an exemption would not deny children loving and stable homes. They will get good homes through Catholic Charities, just not good gay homes. Gay couples could still adopt through dozens of other private agencies or through the state child-welfare services department itself, which places most adoptions in the state.

At most it could be argued that allowing Catholic Charities to discriminate would make it very slightly more difficult for gay couples to adopt (since one private agency would not be available to them). If numerous other agencies also began barring gay couples, a real difficulty might arise. But that problem is nowhere in sight in Massachusetts.

While gay advocates may strongly disagree with church doctrine, there's no basis for saying that the Catholic Church's objections to gay adoptions have "nothing whatsoever to do with faith."

Exempting Catholic Charities would serve the "higher purpose" of respecting the deep religious convictions of a major faith tradition, without hurting children or appreciably affecting the adoption prospects of gay parents. That is what we'd ordinarily a call a win-win situation.

I don't think religious objectors should always be completely exempt from anti-discrimination laws (such exemptions are not constitutionally required). If, for religious reasons, a large employer refused to hire gay people or a huge apartment-complex owner refused to rent to gay couples, the harm caused by their actions would potentially be great. It would literally foreclose many important opportunities.

Exemptions to laws of general applicability inevitably raise slippery-slope concerns. All kinds of exemptions exist in all kinds of laws. Each is an invitation to slide down a slope, but we seem to manage it. Title VII is understood to exempt the Catholic Church from having to hire women priests, for example, but that hasn't gutted employment-discrimination protection. There are particular line-drawing problems about what would constitute a "religious" exemption, but those problems aren't peculiar to this case.

If we can grant religious exemptions with little or no burden placed on others, we should presumptively do so. Yes, this allows people to discriminate in ways that seem irrational or even invidious to many of us, but our resulting discomfort is an acceptable price for living in a religiously pluralistic and free society. When there are plenty of alternatives for those discriminated against, continued objection to an exemption seems pretty abstract and illiberal to me.

If we can't respect others' exercise of religious conscience in a case where it costs us nothing to do so, can we really be said to respect religious liberty in a meaningful way at all? In an age when government regulation encroaches on every area of life, to say that we can't make an exemption under circumstances like this is really to say that religion has no place in the public square. I'm not ready to say that.

If respect for liberal principle is not enough, there is also political self-interest in magnanimity. Some opponents of gay marriage have been using this episode to claim, "Aha! This proves that gay marriage will erode religious freedom. Massachusetts has had gay marriage just two years and already Catholics are being forced out of adoptions."

The claim is unfounded, since the conflict here is based on an anti-discrimination law that predates the recognition of gay marriage in Massachusetts. But it is a potent political argument. This episode may unnecessarily fuel not just the backlash against gay marriage but the senseless and cruel drive in some states to ban adoptions by gay parents altogether.

So let them discriminate, but don't let anyone forget what they're doing.

Four years after the assassination of gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, his warning of the threat posed to the rights of European gays and women by intolerant, anti-assimilationist Muslim immigrants is increasingly vindicated by events.

Muslims have migrated in large numbers to Europe, have more children than ethnic Europeans, are disproportionately involved in crime, and increasingly insist on being governed not by the prevailing civil laws but by Muslim Shari'ah law. Many Muslim clerics in Europe look to the day when Europe will become a Muslim caliphate. Scholar Bat Ye'or has dubbed that future Europe "Eurabia." Already, Muslim leaders in France, Britain, Denmark, and Belgium have declared certain Muslim neighborhoods to be under Islamic jurisdiction.

A prime target of Fortuyn's criticism was the European establishment, a mutually reinforcing collection of political, academic, and media elites who are given far more deference by the public than in America, and who are largely accountable only to themselves. A new book by gay author Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, describes how these elites, with their lax immigration policies, welfare subsidies, politically correct suppression of dissent, and collaboration with Arab governments, have imperiled the very freedom and tolerance in whose name they deny the problem.

Bawer describes private Islamic academies, subsidized by European governments, that teach hatred of Jews and America and contempt for democracy. Muslim children are frequently sent to Qur'anic schools in their parents' home countries to cleanse them of Western ideas. Muslim girls are forced into marriages with men from the homeland, who are then allowed to immigrate, reinforcing Muslim separation from European society. Girls who date outside approved circles, stay out all night, or marry contrary to their families' wishes, are routinely murdered in so-called honor killings, as are rape victims.

A judge of the Shari'ah Court of the UK signed a death order against Terence McNally for depicting Jesus Christ (who is revered in Islam) as gay in his play Corpus Christi. Muslim gangs commit savage assaults on busy streets while crowds look on passively. Researchers don't dare gather statistics on the rise in gay-bashings lest they be seen as criticizing Muslims. Describing his awakening to the threat, Bawer wrote, "Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me." If current trends continue, European imams will have the votes to do it in a few generations.

Bawer writes:

Fortuyn's opponents claimed that he called for an end to immigration and the expulsion of Muslims from the Netherlands. What he proposed, in fact, was a firm policy of education, emancipation, and integration. The Dutch government, he argued, should stop issuing residency permits to imams who preached that Dutch women are whores and gay men lower than pigs….

For this, officials demonized Fortuyn as a fascist bigot, ignoring the majority of Dutch citizens who shared his concerns. Rather than face the danger portended by Moroccans in one Dutch town dancing in the streets on 9/11, and a mosque selling calendars showing the New York skyline on fire, Dutch officials pilloried Fortuyn as the dangerous one.

As Bawer reports on his blog, on February 10 in Oslo, Velbjørn Selbekk, a magazine editor who had reprinted the Muhammad cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and who had withstood pressure from Muslim extremists and the Norwegian establishment for several days, suddenly appeared at a press conference beside the head of Norway's Islamic Council and abjectly apologized. In response, the Muslim leader pledged his protection, and Norway's foreign minister praised Selbekk's "integrity and courage." The death threats against him and his family had apparently taken their toll. Submissive infidels are known as dhimmis, a role tacitly embraced by those Westerners who call any criticism of Muslims racist.

Fortunately, some are refusing to surrender. On March 25 in Trafalgar Square, British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, a self-described "left-wing Green," joined a crowd including humanists, libertarians and liberal Muslims in a rally to defend freedom of expression. The organizers stated, "The strength and survival of free society and the advance of human knowledge depend on the free exchange of ideas. All ideas are capable of giving offence…." Notwithstanding such progressive aims, the rally was denounced by many on the left.

Tatchell wrote:

Sections of the left moan that the rally is being supported [by] the right. Well, if these socialists object so strongly why don't they organise their own demo in support of free speech? The truth is that some of the left would rarely, if ever, rally to defend freedom of expression because they don't wholeheartedly believe in it. Mired in the immoral morass of cultural relativism, they no longer endorse Enlightenment values and universal human rights. Their support for free speech is now qualified by so many ifs and buts. When push comes to shove, it is more or less worthless.

Unilateral disengagement leads not to peace but to subjugation. If the Enlightenment values that made the gay rights movement possible are to be preserved and extended, the heirs of those values need to overcome their post-colonial reluctance to fight for them. We write our own destinies. Nothing is guaranteed to us. As T.E. Lawrence said blasphemously to his Arab friends 90 years ago, "Nothing is written."

The debate over whether Moscow will witness a Gay Pride parade in May carries important implications for Russia's future.

How the Moscow authorities respond to the threats of violence issued by Talgat Tajuddin of Russia's Central Spiritual Governance for Muslims is important in its own right. According to Mr. Tajuddin, "The parade should not be allowed, and if they still come out into the streets, then they should be bashed."

Such threats have no place in a society governed by law. No one should be subjected to violence for holding hands in the street or walking peacefully in a parade. That much should be clear.

But the question of whether the parade should be allowed also raises a bigger question about whether Russia will be a leader in industry, technology, art, culture and science, or will retreat to insularity and backwardness. It is a question of whether to be an open society or a closed one.

And how it is answered has implications that go far beyond whether someone likes or dislikes gay people.

Studies of American and Canadian cities have demonstrated quite effectively that the more open and welcoming a city or region is to peaceful diversity, the more economically productive, prosperous and commercially and technologically advanced it is likely to be.

In a pioneering study of urban life in America published by the Urban Institute in 2001, Richard Florida of George Mason University and Gary Gates of the Urban Institute created a measure of homosexual presence in an urban population and then correlated it with the presence of high-tech industries and economic growth.

They concluded that:

gays not only predict the concentration of high-tech industry, they are also a predictor of its growth. Five of the cities that rank in the top 10 for high-technology growth from 1990 to 1998 rank in the top 10 for the "Gay Index."

They also found a strong correlation between the presence of artistic and creative people-writers, photographers, sculptors, actors-and high-tech industries. Of especially great importance to Russia, which faces a long-term demographic crisis, they discovered a robust correlation between the percentage who are foreign born and the success of high-tech industries.

It seems that it's not a case of the old cliche that "those people" are creative, but instead it turns out that places that exhibit lots of creativity are places that are open to creativity.

How does toleration of gay people figure into economic success? It is a good proxy of the openness and toleration of a society generally. And such openness and toleration is conducive to the flourishing of a society.

As Gary Gates put it during an Urban Institute conference on "The Demographics of Diversity," the presence of a gay population is important because

They add to a social climate of tolerance toward diversity in cities, and that has specific positive economic outcomes for various regions and cities. The argument here is that a vibrant gay and lesbian community provides one of the strongest signals of diversity and tolerance, both within neighborhoods and cities.

It's rather obvious that welcoming talent is an essential condition for attracting it.

This is not a new issue. The relationship between toleration and prosperity has been known for a long time. The Netherlands emerged in Europe as a leader in commerce, the arts, technology and industry many years ago because of the greater degree of toleration it afforded minorities.

The decision about whether to allow a Gay Pride parade down Tverskaya Street in Moscow is not merely approval or disapproval of seeing gay people in public. It is much more a decision about Russia's future.

Thirteen years ago, Russia's democratically elected leaders made the right choice by decriminalizing homosexual love. In doing so, they advanced into the front ranks of modern, progressive, open societies.

The debate over whether to allow a Gay Pride parade in Moscow is a proxy for the much wider debate about whether Russia will choose to be counted among the nations known for creativity in technology, science, art, culture and wealth, or among those known for insularity, prejudice, poverty, and backwardness.