As some of us predicted, the next sexual frontier to be conquered after gay marriage is...polygamy. From the Netherlands comes this heart-warming news:

The Netherlands and Belgium were the first countries to give full marriage rights to homosexuals... Meanwhile in the Netherlands polygamy has been legalised in all but name. Last Friday the first civil union of three partners was registered. Victor de Bruijn (46) from Roosendaal 'married' both Bianca (31) and Mirjam (35) in a ceremony before a notary who duly registered their civil union.

‘I love both Bianca and Mirjam, so I am marrying them both,’ Victor said. He had previously been married to Bianca. Two and a half years ago they met Mirjam Geven through an internet chatbox. Eight weeks later Mirjam deserted her husband and came to live with Victor and Bianca. After Mirjam’s divorce the threesome decided to marry.
Victor: ‘A marriage between three persons is not possible in the Netherlands, but a civil union is. We went to the notary in our marriage costume and exchanged rings. We consider this to be just an ordinary marriage.’ Asked by journalists to tell the secret of their peculiar relationship, Victor explained that there is no jealousy between them. ‘But this is because Mirjam and Bianca are bisexual. I think that with two heterosexual women it would be more difficult.’ Victor stressed, however, that he is ‘a one hundred per cent heterosexual’ and that a fourth person will not be allowed into the ‘marriage.’ They want to take their marriage obligations seriously: ‘to be honest and open with each other and not philander.’

Sure thing! Here's responsibility indeed! What’s not to approve of? Across the pond, Charles Krauthammer has picked up the glad tidings:

With the sweetly titled HBO series ‘Big Love,’ polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline ‘Polygamists, Unite!’ Newsweek informs us of ‘polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement.'’ Says one evangelical Christian big lover: ‘Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle.'’ Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With ‘Big Love’ it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as gay marriage advocates insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice. This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I'm not the one who put them there.

All absolutely true. Krauthammer, however, sees all these developments merely as the symptom rather than the cause of the breakdown of marriage. As he says, marriage has certainly imploded from within. Some causes: the culture of radical individualism, breakdown of religious and moral norms, consumerism, rise of therapy culture, sexual revolution, erosion of stigma attached to out of wedlock births, and so on. But I think this process is more complex than he suggests. Both causes and symptoms are inextricably fused so that they all reinforce each other. The more alternative lifestyles become ordained as mainstream, with dissidents treated as social pariahs if they try to uphold traditional moral norms, the more those moral norms are undermined.

So now anything goes – and our society is steadily going, as a result. Polyandry, polyamory, polygamy, polymorphism – can paedophilia, necrophilia and bestiality be far behind?

Posted by melanie at March 17, 2006