We're worse than Warren Jeffs! And we steal children!

The American Spectator, Touchstone, Catholic Insight

In The American Spectator, a magazine of the far right, a columnist discovers the upcoming Canadian polygamy test case and the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association — and decides that polys are worse for society than breakaway-Mormon cults of alleged child abusers. Because at least cults are orderly, while allowing freedom for secular modernists leads to confusion unthinkable. Or something.

The More the Merrier?

By William C. Duncan

While the United States is occupied with the federal challenge to California's Proposition 8, Canada has its own pending marriage case, which is likely headed for the Canadian Supreme Court....

Recently, the case has been uniquely complicated by an intervening interest group called the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association. The Association is seeking an adjudication of sorts that the Canadian laws regarding polygamy (one man with more than one wife) do not apply to polyamory ("multiple conjugal relationships"). "Polyamory," by contrast, is strictly egalitarian and consensual, according to CPAA, and thus does not involve or promote one gender over the other.

Affidavits filed in court detail (1) a woman and her male partner who live and have relationships with two other adults in the household (they also have a child living in the home) and who have agreed that each can pursue relationships with others, (2) a woman who lives with two other men (two of her teenage sons also live in the home), (3) a husband and wife who live with another adult (and the married couples' two young children and the third person's teenage children), and (4) a man who lives with a woman and another man (with whom he is raising a two-year-old child). Polyamory advocates also tout a lack of social science evidence showing any harm from its practice. In other words, the CPAA is arguing that since you can't prove that polyamory is bad for society, it must be good. By this rationale, we can all rest assured that Jimmy Hoffa is alive and well.

He seems scared of what scientific studies may find and warns readers to ignore them in advance:

Any study of polyamorous "families" is likely to be plagued by methodological difficulties — large holes in data, voluntary samples, reliance on self-reporting, small sample sizes, poor comparisons, and misplaced focus.

...The proposed distinction between multiple-wife polygamy and polyamory in terms of social harms is spurious. In fact, it may be the case that acceptance of polyamory would, if possible, be more harmful.... Both traditional polygamy and polyamory promote types of infidelity (though the former is of a more orderly variety), of course, but the chaos of polyamory blurs distinctions of parenthood more significantly than does a setting where a child has an established set of parents and lots of half-siblings....

Read the whole article (Sept. 2, 2010).

Meanwhile, the CPAA gets a more-or-less favorable mention at the end of a column about the polygamy case, written by the lady who's been crusading against the British Columbia polygamist group for years (Vancouver Sun, Sept. 2, 2010).

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You think that first item was nuts? Check out the one below. It first cropped up a year ago from a conference of the religious right. Sometimes the progression of an extremist is to grow more and more extreme until he goes pop, or gets laughed off the scene with not-the-Onion tags.... Or invades Poland.

Patrick F. Fagan directs the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion at the Family Research Council. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Family and Community Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for President George H. W. Bush. Vote Republican, and this is who you're voting to be reappointed into government.

There's some word confusion here. By "culture of polyamory" he's not actually referring to us. He means anyone who has more than one relationship in a lifetime, including remarriage after divorce — meaning most Americans.

Domestic disturbances: The rising polyamorous culture is out to get your children

By Patrick F. Fagan

The culture of the traditional family is now in intense competition with a very different culture. The defining difference between the two is the sexual ideal each embraces. The traditional family of Western civilization is based on lifelong monogamy. The competing culture is “polyamorous,” normally a serial polygamy, but also increasingly polymorphous in its different sexual expressions.

...The culture of monogamy and the culture of polyamory differ profoundly in their assumptions of the way society functions. Here are some of the differences:

• First and foremost, religion has a very different place in each culture. The culture of monogamy is infused from top to bottom with the sacred, in personal, family, community, and national life. Worship of God is frequent and assumed. The culture of polyamory tends much more to hide religion, even to suppress it in all things public. It worships God less and demands that religion be private....

• The laws of the culture of monogamy protect by forbidding—outlawing certain actions. The culture of polyamory protects by prescribing programs and ensuring outcomes....

• The constitutional state was the product of a monogamous culture. It could never have emerged from a culture of polyamory because it assumes responsible citizens....

• In the culture of monogamy, all human lives are sacred and protected, including those of the unborn, the handicapped, and the elderly. In the culture of polyamory, about one-third of unborn babies are aborted, and the handicapped and elderly are unwelcome and increasingly vulnerable to early “termination.”

• In the culture of monogamy, gender roles are more differentiated, with women more likely to devote their time to the tasks of motherhood and the men more likely to be the sole or main source of family income. The culture of polyamory is much more androgynous, its main focus being equality of outcomes for both men and women in the workplace and in the home....

The “Janissary” tactic

...The culture of polyamory has figured out its way to survive and even thrive: by controlling three critical areas of public policy, which yield big gains in “converts” from the culture of monogamy to theirs. These three areas are childhood education, sex education, and the control of adolescent health programs.

Controlling these three areas enables the polyamory culture to reach into the traditional monogamy culture and gradually dismantle it....

Through its domination of the education of children, sex education, and adolescent health, the culture of polyamory diminishes the influence and dismantles the authority of parents and so impedes parents’ efforts to form their children as members of their own culture. In a polemical vein, one could say the polyamorists “snatch” children away from their parents and from the culture of monogamy just as the Ottoman Turks of the fourteenth century raided boys from Christian nations to train them as their own elite warriors, the Janissaries.

Every time the polyamorists succeed in drawing a teenager into sexual activity through one of their anti-monogamy education programs, they have captured another “Janissary” and won a number of victories simultaneously: (1) They have initiated the adolescent into the polyamory culture (albeit without his knowing what is at stake); (2) with the out-of-wedlock births or abortions likely to follow, they have broken a family before it has started, solidifying the polyamorous status of the adolescent or young adult; and (3) they have pulled the young person away from participating in the sacred, since formerly religious teenagers who begin to engage regularly in sex outside of marriage tend to stop worshiping God.

All this the polyamorists achieve without any overt, direct attack. Their programs are conducted “under the radar” and are all the more effective for it. They know this, and are fierce in protecting their control of the Big Three programs (childhood education, adolescent health, and sex education), with a fierceness nothing in the culture of monogamy rivals in intensity or success.

Time to act

By its very make-up, the culture of monogamy organizes itself from the bottom up, not top down, in social (and thus political) matters. It solves its social problems by forming its own private “platoons.” A significant aspect of the family is that men have the special role of being the primary protectors. Thus, it is husbands and fathers especially who need to engage the increasingly hostile state and the polygamy culture whenever they attempt to “raid” the territory of the family’s domain.

Every man in the monogamy culture needs to find his way to be actively engaged in the protection of his children, and, given what is at stake, other men and women of the culture of monogamy will increasingly expect this of every man, and will do what they can to help him.

...In all of human history, the culture of monogamy has never encountered the type of competition it faces now. We must engage. We can wait no longer; we need men of courage and energy. We are looking for the first few.

Read the whole article in Touchstone magazine (Jan.-Feb. 2010) or Catholic Insight (April 23, 2010).

Sound familiar? At least we're not drinking the blood of Christian babies (yet) or controlling the world banking system... but remember the "first few" who put on the armbands.

Once again: vote Republican, and this guy is who you're voting to be reappointed to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Update March 12, 2013. New from Fagan: FRC: No Right to Have Sex Outside of Marriage, Society Should 'Punish It'.

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