So it begins. Days after Obergefell, a man, his wife and his girlfriend have applied for a polygamous marriage license in Montana.
I know this may offend some, but please do realize that we’ve been here before. Getting rid of practices like polygamy was one of Christian civilization’s great accomplishments. It liberated women from what amounts to slavery. It de-objectified them: it gave them husbands who were expected to be (and faced real consequences if they weren’t) wholly devoted to just their one wife. It protected her children — as Leah and Rachel, Solomon and Absalom could attest, the children of different wives get treated differently. To paraphrase Brown vs. Board of Education, different is not equal.
Oh we will do it better, the left always promises, and perhaps this time they will. But do the children of two men not need a mother? Do the children of two women not need a father? And who will actually be responsible for the children of three women, two men and a goat? Anyone? Anyone at all?
Yes, someone. The state.
In sexualizing everything, the left (and a few on the right) have succumbed to their own seduction. They have heard the siren’s song, that the only thing that matters is their own personal pleasure and expression, in each and every moment. It’s an easy song to sing. But in trade, they’ve cast off any thought of protecting the weak. We now hear voices condoning incest, saying “you can’t help who you love,” and increasingly, “the odds of birth defects from inbreeding are smaller than people say.” We know that the translation of this is “when there are problems, we’ll kill the baby.”
Just in the last month we’ve heard pediatricians calling for the right to euthanize children up to the age of 12. Barack Obama personally voted four times in the Illinois Senate to allow the killing of children born alive if the mother had wanted to abort but failed. The abortion industry has repeatedly been caught covering up child sexual abuse where an underage girl is forced into an abortion by an older man, all too often her father. ACORN was caught attempting to support a child prostitution scheme as a means of funding Democrat congressional candidates.
What about the girls? What about the women? The left says it’s for their “equality,” but is that really the result, of any of this? And what underlines that point more than the case of Bruce Jenner, who is supposedly a “woman” merely by dint of having some surgery, putting on a dress and “feeling” female. Is that really all there is to womanhood? And if so, why do we need feminism, or Mars and Venus books for that matter? Ladies, who knew that you were so without complexity, so completely undifferentiated from men, so … fungible.
Polygamy — all of this, really, this whole sexualization of all of life — is a reversion to barbarism, to a past we thought we’d transcended. It is entirely about self, and self-consciously so. This is not to say that self doesn’t matter: it certainly does. But it is to say that the same people who tirelessly condemn “corporations” and “greed” see no irony whatsoever in decrying that form of selfishness while subjecting all existence to how and when someone gets an erection.
And it is an erection we’re talking about. Make no mistake. Polygamy will make a woman chattel. Polyamory, poly everything, will certainly do nothing to make her cherished or special. Ubiquitous pornography objectifies her, and does so in a way that never, ever allows her to be good enough, often for a man whose children she’s borne and to whom she’s committed her life. A system that ceases constraining men into honorable, self-sacrificing behavior toward women, and actually encourages them to act like animals — toward women, toward each other, toward sheep — returns us to the old, tribal, violence-driven world, in which if I want I take, and anything that gets in my way must be destroyed.
These are the values and time horizons of children, very perverse children with enormous power in their hands and no conscience or wisdom in their hearts.
Individual women are special. Individual children are special. Crazy as it may seem, individual men are special too. No one contends that their specialness is always affirmed or nurtured, as it should be in traditional marriages and traditional families. Sin abounds, and flesh is corrupt, and if men were angels no government would be necessary.
But this new, old way? It makes everyone meat. The strongest will feast, all weaker will serve, and the older one gets the less valued they’ll be. And the government, having fully distracted them with their basest natures, will absolutely rule them all.
Rod D. Martin, founder and CEO of The Martin Organization, is a technology entrepreneur, futurist, hedge fund manager, and professor. Fox Business News calls him a “tech guru”, Britain’s Guardian labeled him a “philosopher-capitalist”, and Gawker describes him as a “brilliant nonconformist.” He was a senior member of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team and is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy.
