Courant Promotes “Polyamory”
May 8th, 2008 by Peter
It’s also said that gay marriage will eventually lead to polygamy and worse. This argument is without even the barest shred of merit.
That didn’t take long. Barely a year after our opponents’ failed attempt to shout down the obvious truth that same-sex marriage could lead to polygamy, Connecticut’s most influential newspaper–and a strong supporter of same-sex marriage–is running a story promoting “polyamory.” From “One Woman, Many Beds,” a story in today’s Courant:
But Robyn Trask, executive director of Loving More, a Boulder, Colo.-based group, believes it is unfortunate that the public often doesn’t hear about what she believes are the positive aspects to having more than one partner.
While polygamy involves having more than one spouse, Trask’s group, which has 1,500 active members, including some in Connecticut, supports polyamory: having multiple loves of either sex with or without marriage.
Trask’s organization publishes Loving More Magazine and runs conferences and retreats that address topics that naturally arise, such as jealousy and envy, and provides support and education for people who wish to have “poly” lives.
Trask herself has practiced polyamory for 18 years and has three children. She has one primary relationship now with a man in Colorado and secondary relationships with a man in New York and another in Hong Kong, each of whom have relationships with others.
The Courant does not cite a single source critical of polyamory or the harm it can do to children. Instead, we get a firsthand account of the supposed strengths of the “multi-partner lifestyle”…though a careful reading of the Q and A suggests it’s not all it’s cracked up to be:
Q:So eventually you found polyamory?
A: We started going to [polyamorist] groups. In ‘99, we started a support group. … It was a coed support group put together by myself and my husband.
My husband started a relationship with a woman. I got involved; we had a triad. The three of us were involved. That was a total surprise. At the same time, I was also dating another man who was living with a woman. She was involved with another man.
Q:Was your marriage working?
A: I am actually now divorced. My husband and I split last year, pretty amicably. I’m now involved with somebody else who helps me run Loving More.
No doubt the same folks who were outraged by the same-sex marriage/polygamy connection will deny that this article lends credence to our argument. We can already imagine their weak attempts to deny it or change the subject: polygamy isn’t polyamory, a newspaper article isn’t a bill in the legislature…whatever.
But with this article the campaign for polyamory has now taken its first step in Connecticut…and it was the push for same-sex marriage that made it possible. Just don’t expect our opponents to ever admit it.
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Right. Polyamory is poligamy minus the marriage contract.
Despite your fear mongering, SSM would in fact solidify the bianary relationship, making it clear public policy that a two person relationship is in preferrable for a stable society. If we find that the current purpose for marriage is, as you insist, procreation there is nothing stopping polygamy since it is a far more effective means of achieving large families.
The true and genuine love, Agape Love is witnessed in the selfless giving of self for the sake of the beloved. This Love is most sincerely witnessed in a real and loving marriage between husband and wife. Dying to self, placing the spouse above the needs of self is the hallmark of this highest and attainable love.
Infidelity, adultery, etc, is the result of purposefully breaking a marital vow. Instead of forsaking all others, they forsake the spouse. This shows the opposite of the highest form of love and instead is the highest form of self love; pride. Instead of love, they seek the fulfilling of lustful pleasures and desires. Seeking out one’s own disordered desires can wreak havoc and devastation on a person, a spouse, not to say what disastrous results it can perpetrate on children in such a ‘marriage’. This is no marriage; in fact it is a sham. This isn’t anything new, this is a repacking of the “Free Love” of the Seventies. The result of free love, was a generation of messed up teens, who became adults and who had free and easy divorce and the resulting generation of men and women without the true example of genuine love a family is supposed to teach to their children.
Even these disordered desires of such persons, points to the yearning a person has to seek out true Agape Love. Wrongly they feel they can fulfill this desire by seeking sexual activity outside the safe and sacred bonds of marriage. Instead of lasting pleasure, they are left empty and unfulfilled. So they think more and more partners will satisfy the emptiness they feel. Their hearts remain restless for their hearts were made to rest in God.
This yearning for fulfillment can only be fulfilled in the personal and sacred Love that one finds and shares in God. God is the highest and greatest Good one can attain. When you are loved by God, and when you return that love, when you give completely of yourself to God, when you Love God above all, you are able to properly love another. God’s Love, re-orders all of mankind’s disordered desires. It puts right, all the sensual pleasures of the flesh and all the spiritual desires of the soul.
What these people do when they selfishly seek pleasure outside the lasting pleasure, is they then make themselves especially their spouses, vulnerable to abuse, use, sexually transmitted diseases and other disastrous results of using people, treating other dignified human persons without dignity, instead using them as mere objects, the objects of their sexual desires that they can use and discard at will.
I’m sure the Courant would have written something like that in response to such an article if they had room in their paper.
Okay, let’s stick directly to the subject. The subject heading of your post is:
“Courant Promotes “Polyamory””
Promotes:
pro•mot•ed, pro•mot•ing, pro•motes
1.
a. To raise to a more important or responsible job or rank.
b. To advance (a student) to the next higher grade.
2. To contribute to the progress or growth of; further. See Synonyms at advance.
3. To urge the adoption of; advocate: promote a constitutional amendment.
4. To attempt to sell or popularize by advertising or publicity: commercials promoting a new product.
5. To help establish or organize (a new enterprise), as by securing financial backing: promote a Broadway
Care to explain how the Courant is “promoting” polyamory by simply reporting on it? They make direct reference to the horrible situation in Texas so I would say the dark side of polygamy is very fairly represented in the media in general and in the Courant in the specific. This piece is a window on those that advocate for the polyamorous lifestyle, which is of significant difference to polygamy. A story addressing that is hardly promoting it. This is silly on the face of it.
Plus, your original contention is that same sex marriage leads to polygamy. You have two problems here, 1.) Polyamory isn’t polygamy. 2.) You want to ignore this by hand waving it away, so fine, but have not established any sort of correlation let alone any sort of direct causation between same sex marriage and polyamory (or polygamy for that matter). You need to establish the direct link for your argument to have any weight whatsoever. Without this your argument is just so much hot air.
One problem with your premise is that there is harm being done in polyamorous relationships that is unlike anything that happens in monogamous relationships. The truth is that people in polyamorous relationships must by necessity spend a lot of time communicating and growing and owning their own feelings and rising above pettiness and resentment in order to make their relationships work. The payoff is huge in terms of the health of these relationships.
The false assumption that gay marriage will lead to polyamory which will lead to the collapse of the family, and some would say society as a whole, is just that - false. No one is trying to destroy marriage or the family, and polyamorous families can be and usually are quite healthy. The only time they aren’t is when the people involved aren’t, and there is no greater incident of that than there is in monogamous marriages and families.
Another false premise is that polyamorous families are bad for children. There is not one shred of evidence to prove this. In fact, many families find that children flourish in an atmosphere where there are more adults to love them, read to them, take them to soccer practice, provide financial resources for the family, and so forth. As long as the family is stable, kids do just fine. It’s no different than having a large extended biological family. I know this may disappoint you.
By the way, Robyn Trask’s marriage’s end had nothing to do with it being an open marriage. I know her well. Things are not always what they appear (or what you hope they are).
I don’t live in Connecticut, but if I did and I were part of those you consider opponents, I’d be happy to make the truth very clear. You’ve wasted a lot of time and resources demonizing something that is just as ethical and honest as monogamous marriage, in some cases moreso, since we don’t lie and cheat on each other. The incident of cheating, i.e. breaking trust by violating agreements and commitments without a spouse’s consent, is virtually non-existent in committed polyamorous relationships. Can you say the same about monogamous marriages?
One can see why the Courant would feature such a wonderful role model of enlightened thinking. Here is a background of her talents. from a link on the Courant website
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QUOTE: Robyn Trask is the Managing Editor of Loving More® Magazine she owns and facilitates New Visions Center for Personal Growth and Intuitive Arts in Broomfield, CO near Boulder. She has been practicing polyamory for 16 years, a mom for 17 years, been a student of Tantra for 21 years, and Tantric teacher for 5 years.
Robyn facilitates workshops, teaches astrology, and does astrological, spiritual, and Tantric counseling. Her first book, The Last High Priestess, being published in the spring 2005, it is a historical fiction set in the ancient Minoan culture of Crete. Robyn will be available to do a limited number of astrology readings while in the Philadelphia area, contact her at “address intentionally deleted” for more information. :END QUOTE
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Isn’t that nice. New Age mysticism, Astrology incuding cult readings, Tantric sexual practices. This woman’s soul is in great, grave and mortal danger.. Please let’s pray for her deliverance from such demonic devices in the name of Jesus.
Isn’t polyamory really worse than polygamy, in the sense of causing societal disorder?
Consider this: You could draw a 2-dimensional matrix, with one axis being “mono vs. poly” and the other axis being “married vs. unmarried”. This would illustrate 4 lifestyle choices:
1. monogamous married relationship
2. monogamous unmarried relationship
3. polygamous married relationship
4. polyamorous unmarried relationship
Let me start by saying that in this matrix I’ve deliberately limited the model to the types of relationships people are saying (or have said at times, historically) should potentially be considered as legitimate within society; and that are capable of natural procreation. There are of course “married but unfaithful” relationships that might be considered, but we do not as a society consider this option worthy of being celebrated or enshrined as a social desirable institution. For the sake of argument, let’s set those aside and focus on this matrix model to explore some of its ramifications.
It seems that polyamory can be similar to polygamy - but without any marriage commitment, and without any well-defined limit to the scope the “network” of sexually intimate persons. By “network”, I mean to describe the set of persons with whom you are sexually intimate (direct partners) combined together everyone in each of your sexual partner’s “networks” (indirect partners). In the monogamous relationships I’ve listed above, the network size is always 2, with one female and one male. In the polygamous relationship I’ve described above, the network size is always N+1, with N females and one male. But in polyamorous relationships, the network size is a potentially unbounded value X+Y, with X females and Y males.
Setting aside the usual religious and moral complaints (just temporarily for the sake of this discussion), at least in situations 1 and 2 any children would share a common father and mother; and in situation 3 any children would share a common father even if having different mothers (and mothers would therefore be certain of the father’s identity with respect to any child born). But in situation 4, the same mother can have children with different fathers; and the same father can have children with different mothers; and nobody really knows with certainty the father’s identity for any child born – wherever the polyamorous “network” locally includes more than one male. Not knowing one’s parentage can create problems later when future generations might potentially interbreed unknowingly with a close relation. Hence, situation 4 is potentially harmful to society in the larger sense, even while it may seem personally appealing to its practitioners.
As to the quality of permanence, in situations 1 and 3 the partners have a greater sense of family stability due to the more serious step of commitment taken in establishing marriage. I say this here not out of any implied sense of morality, but simply due to the fact that there a legal consequences in dissolving a marriage. Children with a family in situation 2 may be at greater risk that a parent leaves the relationship before they grow to adulthood. Likewise children with a family in situation 4 have a greater risk that a parent leaves the relationship before they grow to adulthood. Maintaining continuity among the parents who oversee a child’s upbringing is an important factor to the well-being of a child, and to their ultimately achieving adulthood in a well-adjusted way (e.g. more likely to have benefited from their education, more likely to be suited for achievements in a job/career, and less likely to be involved in criminal behavior). Consequently, situations 1 and 3 are more beneficial to society in the larger sense.
From the perspective of vulnerability to sexually transmitted diseases, situations 1, 2 and 3 are closed networks in which any STD would have to be passed through the single male within the family model. Therefore they have a lower inherent vulnerability to magnifying the occurrence of STDs. But since the network in situation 4 is potentially much larger, and has more paths whereby an STD can transit between two persons, it has a higher inherent vulnerability to STDs. This is yet another factor that is harmful to society in the larger sense.
Finally there is the suitability of these relationship models to the overall ratio of men and women born and surviving to adulthood within society. It’s roughly 50-50 in our modern world. Consequently, situations 1 and 2 are a good fit for our demographics. Situation 3 is not a good fit, because it tends to deprive males of an opportunity to participate in creating a family unit. Situation 4 may or may not be a good fit, depending on the ratio between X and Y; but since the network size and composition is not easily planned or controlled by all parties, it might tend to be a poor fit more often than not.
In writing these comments, I’ve tried to very careful to avoid injecting my personal religious or moral beliefs onto the debate. But I think that when it’s viewed objectively, in the sense of its value to society overall, the model of polyamory is actually the worst of all competing models!
Why then is it practiced? Quite simply, it is because those who partake of it are driven by their own selfishness. People do not typically stop to think of how their actions may affect society when they are driven by physical or emotional impulses. And this is why we found the need to collectively evolve our societal structures, over the span of thousands of years, to define laws and codes of behavior that would steer people to the more beneficial models. In essence it is the modern hubris of personal independence and freedom, epitomized by the “me” generation, that brings us back to exploring these faulty models of relationships once again.
Anita,
Do you even know what “monogamous” means? In a “monogamous marriage” the husband and wife have a *sexual relationship* ONLY with each other—NO ONE ELSE!
Thus, men and women in “monogamous marriages” do NOT “lie and cheat on each other.”
OTOH, polyamorists, who have “open” relationships and “agreements and commitments” to have sexual relationships with several people are simply rationalizing their promiscuity. It is still promiscuity, much as “swinging” is promiscuity.