Margaret Somerville asks in the Globe and Mail “If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy.”

The Globe and Mail

Somerville, the great social conservative hope, argued that by allowing people of the same sex to marry each other, marriage would go from being a "child centered institution" to something based on love and that change would violate the natural order of things for reasons only most doctrine scholastic would appreciate. Now, I will not discuss the ridiculous metaphysic she raps around her arguments to obscure their superficiality. What I want to point out is that when it comes to the nature of marriage Somerville got things hopelessly ass backwardness. SSM did not open the door to marriage being based on romantic love. On contrary, it is because marriage is an institution based on romantic love that opened the door to same sex marriage.

In the Globe and Mail article, she again makes this same mistake again. Believing that SSM is a transformative change and not an outflow from what marriage has evolved into being, she mistaking believes that there is a straight line from SSM to polygamy. As she sees it, if marriage is based on romantic love, as she thinks was established with the passage of C 38, there is nothing to say why one person, at least in principle, can not be married to two or more people at the same time. (What matters is that they love each other and with regard to traditional polygamist marriages that it flows from their partners religious beliefs.

“Gay marriage advocates successfully argued that the primary function of marriage is to publicly recognize two adults' mutual love and commitment. But why shouldn't three or more adults, just as much as two, have their love and commitment publicly recognized and whether they are in same-sex relationships or opposite sex ones?”

There is no reason to deny this kind of living arrangement so long as it produces no social ills. “PC” opposition to polygamy is rooted in a dislike of religion.

“And, as to use of the Charter's "notwithstanding clause" to continue to prohibit polygamy, it seems those who decried employing it to veto same-sex marriage (indeed, its very existence) would approve its use to prohibit polygamy were the courts to find that the present prohibition is a breach of the Charter right of freedom of religion. In short, politically correct people would use the clause to suppress an institution they find abhorrent (polygamy) the prohibition of which transgresses a right they think is of limited importance (freedom of religion), but not an institution they approve (same-sex marriage) which they see as required to condemn discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”

The problem with such an argument is that not only is it historically wrong, it skips over virtually all current debate about polygamy. Most educated people think the institution of polygamy does produce a whole host of social ills and Somerville can make the voluminous literature on the subject go away with following bit of hand waving dressed up in the language of as careful analysis.

“Also, we need to be careful to distinguish under-age sex, forced marriage, spousal abuse and child abuse from polygamy, itself. These horrible crimes do occur in polygamous marriages - and monogamous ones - and must be dealt with severely. But are we being fair and just in retaining one alternative form of marriage, polygamy, as a crime, when we have legalized another alternative form, gay marriage?”

She can also not pretend, as she does below, that no research exists on same sex parenting and polygamous parenting and thus both share the same flaw, viz., they are both “experimental&rdquo ;.

“Same-sex marriage, polygamous marriage and opposite-sex monogamous marriage are three different family structures. Family structure has a major impact on children. Gay marriage supporters argue that "genderless parenting" is just as good for children as opposite-sex parenting. With gay marriage, we are experimenting to see if that's correct. Should we try a parallel experiment with polygamy and study its impact on children as compared with both gay marriage and opposite-sex monogamous marriage?”

Plenty of research has been done on both and needless to say, the former has been favorably reviewed assessed and the later negatively assessed.  Hell, her Conservative budies even suppressed a government commisssioned review of the literature on gay parenting when the results were not what they had hoped for.  http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/stor y.html?id=38cc20ce-7f14-44e a-b4d9-d4cd16d7a269&" title="http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/stor y.html?id=38cc20ce-7f14-44e a-b4d9-d4cd16d7a269&" target="_blank"http://www.canada.com/theprov...;k=9378

As for Somerville herself, perhaps it is because I am a consequentialist and so do not have the time of day for “natural law”, but I think the press is far too deferential and I think that at best she is an average thinker.