October 2011 – In August, Warren Jeffs, the leader of a polygamist Mormon sect, was sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting minor girls whom he had taken as “wives.” 

It was a bizarre case that focused attention on polygamy, one of those issues that only seems to crop up in “slippery slope” arguments against same-sex marriage. Most Americans probably don’t think it will ever be an issue in the real world.

Many legal scholars, however, believe it will become an issue, especially as more states decide to legalize homosexual marriage. New York, for example, became the sixth – and largest – state to do so in June.

The battle over polygamy will be a legal struggle over the nature and definition of marriage, with a potential sideline conflict over the First Amendment and religious freedom.

Underneath that momentous conflict, however, is something else – the war over sex. After more than 60 years of the sexual revolution, a pagan – that is, pre-Christian – view of sexuality has eroded social mores and the traditional models of marriage and family.

Down with monogamy
The latest manifestation of that revolution is called “polyamory,” or “many loves.” It refers to people who have more than one romantic relationship at the same time – with all parties fully aware of the arrangements.

Laird Harrison, who wrote an article cataloging the difficulties he experienced as a 9-year-old boy after his parents entered into a heterosexual “foursome” with another couple, explained, “The notion was that an adult could simultaneously maintain more than one intimate relationship as long as all the partners agreed.”

“Polyamorists,” as they call themselves, differentiate themselves from “swingers,” who are merely interested in casual sexual encounters while maintaining one main relationship.

“It is extremely important that people realize it is not just about sexual encounters,” Justen Bennett-MacCubbin, the founder of the group Polyamorous NYC, told The Observer, a London newspaper. “What distinguishes the poly community from swingers is that we want to make multiple emotional bonds. Most people in the poly community won’t have casual sex.”

But sex is certainly part of the equation. Freelance writer Jim Gerard, in a story about his investigation into the movement, gives an eye-popping description of the lifestyle of Linda and Stacey, one polyamorous married couple in Wisconsin. Once or twice a month they drive to the Minneapolis area “where Linda has sex with her lover, Steve Adams, while Stacey and Steve’s wife, Aleta – who’s involved with a man named Mark – go to the mall. Linda, who’s bisexual, sometimes also goes to bed with her friend Mary Anne. Also, she’s shopping around for another female lover. … [Stacey’s] currently in the market for another woman for both him and Linda to bed.”</nowiki>

Linda insisted that she loved her husband and would never leave him, but as for monogamy, “it wasn’t me.”

Self-centered sensualists
Should we really buy MacCubbin’s assertion, however, that polyamory is “not just about sexual encounters?”

Deborah Anapol, one of the leaders of the movement and author of the book, Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits, couldn’t even remember how many sex partners she currently had when asked by Gerard. “I haven’t kept count lately, but to round it off, I’ll say 12,” she said.

Is this what MacCubbin is referring to when he says polyamorists are after “multiple emotional bonds” – when you can’t even remember the names of sex partners?

After all, according to Anapol it is the freedom to have sex with multiple partners that puts polyamorists in a much better situation than all those poor monogamous folks. “If you’re married and your wife’s too busy for you, you could feel rejected,” she said. “But if you’re with 20 people and 10 are busy, there are 10 other people around who love you and who you can do things with, sexual or otherwise.”

The more polyamorists talk, the more the true nature of their lives becomes apparent: They are old-fashioned sensualists. They live their lives – sexually, at least – with a view toward doing whatever they feel like doing.

In an article on the movement for Salon.com, writer Liz Langley said one polyamorous sex therapist in New Jersey pointed to a prominent danger of the lifestyle: Chemical reactions begin in human beings when people who are looking for a new relationship actually find someone. 

That “initial love stage,” Langley said, releases a chemical called phenylethylalanine – which the therapist called a “chemical speedball.”

Much like a serial monogamist – or a person who goes consecutively from one monogamous relationship to another – the polyamorist simply enjoys the relationships concurrently. Both, however, are in love with being in love.

This is not to suggest that polyamorists don’t actually love the people they’re having sex with. It’s just clear that the whole point of the polyamory movement is to remove all restrictions on sexual expression – especially those represented by monogamy. It is sensuality writ large – and like all idolatries of the human heart, it is self-centered.

The polyamory movement is nothing more than the logical extension of the ideology behind the sexual revolution: If it feels good, do it.

“[T]o the extent that one is in the grip of sexual-liberationist ideology, one will find no reason of moral principle why people oughtn’t to engage in sexual relations prior to marriage, cohabit in non-marital sexual partnerships, form same-sex sexual partnerships, or confine their sexual partnerships to two persons, rather than three or more in polyamorous sexual ensembles,” Princeton politics professor Robert P. George told National Review Online.

Trouble in paradise
The polyamorist would argue in response that their lifestyle is at least honest. Paul Harris, a journalist who wrote a startling exposé of the polyamory movement in New York City in 2005, said polyamorists claim to be “honest about the human condition. It is monogamists, they say, who live in a fantasy land.”

But while it appears that polyamorists are honest about the human condition, they just aren’t honest enough. Just because something is human doesn’t make it valuable, noble or even harmless. Sure, sensuality and sexual desire exist in the human heart and are powerful forces – but that doesn’t mean we should accept and embrace them outside monogamous marriage. Racism also dwells in the human heart – and rage and hatred and greed; but no one seriously suggests we should just embrace such evils, simply because we’re being “honest about the human condition.”

From a Christian perspective polyamory is sin – sexual rebellion, nothing more. The fact that it has a hippified smiley face attached to it doesn’t change a thing.

But as sin it has consequences, not the least of which is the amazing amount of pressure it puts on the human, God-given drive to couple – that is to pair up. Just two and no more.

Dr. Susan Vaughan, a New York psychoanalyst, told Gerard that, in the ployamorist lifestyle, “the jealousy and rivalry is exponentially multiplied.”

Anthropologist Leanna Wolfe, who is sympathetic to the polyamorist movement, traveled to Africa to study polygamy there. She told Gerard: “The Africans had trouble with it, and they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Wives told me they had a hard time with jealousy and would get into physical fights with each other.”

There is no magic wand that can be waved over sexual rebellion in order to change the reality of human nature as God created it. True, some polyamorists can probably maintain their multiple relationships out of a desire to continue living selfishly, but others will continue to get burned. They will discover that, despite the warnings that monogamy will not be considered when you join the polyamorist community, the human heart still wants to couple.

Reality intrudes on the polyamorist fantasy world in other ways, too, namely the shadow cast by sexually transmitted diseases. Joel Spector, founder of the New York City-based Tri-State Poly discussion group, told Salon.com that polyamorists must jump through many hoops when it comes to their “safe sex protocol.” 

“Our condom contract about sex outside the group runs to six pages, and details what can be done with whom, when and under what circumstances,” Proctor said. “I’m not pleased with it.”

Precursor to polygamy?
The only silver lining appears to be that polyamorists are not a huge movement yet. One proponent of the lifestyle seemed to brag that there were 500,000 polyamorists in the U.S., but that only amounts to .002% of the total population.

Others put the numbers quite a bit higher. Gerard said, “Although no studies have been done, experts such as Ryam Nearing, who claims to have started the polyamory movement in the mid-1980s, estimate the number of American ‘polys’ to be from 8 to 10%.”

That seems unlikely, but the choice of the number should ring a bell. When it began in 1969, the homosexual movement claimed that gays and lesbians were 10% of the population. Now a thoroughly discredited number, at the time it was a potent tool for public relations purposes.

At least some polyamorists appear ready to begin gearing up for a political fight similar to that of the homosexual movement. Nearing’s partner, Brett Hill, who is editor of their magazine, Loving More, told Gerard that “[polyamory] is the next wave of human relationships. First there was blacks, women, gays, now us. When we started 15 years ago, there were no support groups; now there are at least 50, in almost every major city in the country.”

In a country where homosexuals have demanded that society recognize their right to marry the person whom they love, it is not a far cry to imagine polyamorists demanding the right to marry the persons whom they love.

George believes we are already at that point, since the sexual revolution has clearly shaped the way American culture thinks about sex.

“One will perceive people who wish to engage in conduct rejected by traditional morality (especially where such conduct is sought in satisfaction of desires that can be redescribed or labeled as an ‘orientation,’ such as ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual,’ or ‘polyamorist’) as belonging to the category of ‘sexual minorities’ whose ‘civil rights’ are violated by laws embodying the historic understanding of marriage and sexual ethics,” he said.

On the basis of the ideology of the sexual revolution, there are legal experts in America who are already arguing for the end of laws prohibiting polygamy. If the day ever comes when a federal judge does that, driving the final stake through the heart of traditional marriage, it will probably be the polyamorists leading the charge.