Our culture loves love. We sing of it, dream of it, and sell things with it, so it’s easy to believe that love is universal. A quick glance through history, though, shows that it’s actually relatively new.
At one time people tended to marry within their clan to ensure their family benefited. Your parents chose your spouse, and that was that. When society became safer and thus freer, we were finally able to explore this idea of romance. Families didn’t need the same protection, so we could marry someone wholly separate from us, because we chose a spouse ourselves.
There’s more to love than just individual choice, though. Equality is also inseparable from love, since in our notion of romantic love, you can’t truly love someone you don’t respect. Monogamy’s pretty central to our definition, too. Can you really love someone if, at the same time, you’re cheating on them?
But these characteristics don’t just form the basis for love; they also form the basis for our entire culture. Individualism, for instance, is key to our economic freedom. Movies like Dead Poet’s Society rightly denigrated the idea that any child should be forced to follow in a parent’s footsteps. Instead, we’re encouraged to figure out what we’re good at and dream big. But we’re able to choose our careers only because we’re also able to choose our spouses and thus separate from our families. And if we can decide for ourselves whom to marry, and what we want to do with our lives, it’s not too far a leap to decide who we want to govern us. Romantic love and democracy really are inevitably intertwined.
Recently our country slogged through the same sex marriage debate, but another one is just around the corner, and that’s about polygamy. The previous Liberal government commissioned studies into it, some of which claimed that legalizing polygamy would be advantageous. Only people in ivory towers could come up with something so inane, but let me elaborate. Polygamy involves devaluing romantic love, which in turn undermines our deepest values.
In polygamous cultures, the family is more important than the person. It’s all about making one’s clan bigger. So much for individual freedom. And what about equality, another key to our democratic institutions, as well as to marriage? It will be thrown out the window, too. Saying that a man can take more than one wife, and that this is okay as long as he treats the others “equally”, shows that these groups have no idea what gender equality really means. You cannot argue that you are treating your wife well when you are also in bed with another woman. I’m not sure what such a relationship comprises, but it certainly isn’t romantic love, and we should never pretend that it is.
I think that’s why most of us react with such visceral disgust when we think of polygamy. It isn’t just because it oppresses women and children, though it invariably does. It’s because it goes against something that epitomizes our culture—the desire to love romantically, and be loved in return. Britain already allows recognizing polygamy for inheritance purposes. Different groups are now vying for it in Canada. And it seems as if the legal arguments we had for denying it are becoming shakier. The Ontario Court of Appeals has already agreed that a child can have three legal parents. How soon before someone takes this to its reasonable conclusion?
Of course, some may argue that allowing the very small percentage that would be interested in this practice to marry whomever they want can’t affect society as a whole. But if we allow it, we’re intrinsically saying that individualism, freedom and equality aren’t absolutely necessary for our society. And that, despite what ivory tower intellectuals may feel, is dangerous indeed.
If we allow polygamy, we will certainly be doing women and children a grave injustice. But we will also be rejecting the primary bases for our culture and thus our freedom. How long can a culture survive when it continues to deny the central importance of what defines us? In allowing polygamy, our society will not be advancing, it will be retreating. And who knows where that retreat will end?
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