Speaker For The Diodes - May 14th, 2009

bjk:  

"Americans might have a poverty of imagination when it comes to practices like polygamy. The initial reflex, which I shared, is that polygamy is a canard . . . but the more I thought about it, I'm not so sure. When I lived in an Islamic country, my family's maid left her husband after he took a second wife. He called it polygamy, she called it divorce. I remember being horrified at the time, but what is to stop that from happening here? And plenty of reasonable policies are based on slippery slope arguments. I think Christians recognize that nuclear family--Christianity--monogamy go together, which is why they're drawing the line in the sand at gay marriage."

politicalfootball:  

"This is exactly right. If we let people insist on traditional marriage -- only allowing marriage forms with thousands of years of history behind them -- then polygamy is pretty much inevitable.

"I'm in favor of the gay marriage thing for a lot of reasons, but mainly because we can't let ourselves be put on this slippery slope toward polygamist depravity."