Against Marriage: January 2005

Why We Should Support Polygamy

October 2004

Every so often, a heterosexual should be inducted into the halls of lesbian heroism. I nominate the Arizona polygamist, Ida Hunt.

The United States Congress banned marriage to more than one person in 1882, and its practitioners could spend five years in jail. Ida Hunt did not give a rat's ass. Two months after the law was passed, she became the second wife of a Mormon leader based in Arizona.

The liaison was considered gross and perverted. Hunt was called a prostitute outright in the local papers, and two years later, faced with imminent arrest and prison, Hunt fled. She was two months pregnant, and eventually gave birth alone. She traveled under assumed names for three years before finally sneaking back home. Hunt's husband, refusing to renounce her during her absence, did go to jail.

Sound familiar? Considered a sicko for the way you structure your private life, jailed for your relationship, harassed by the state for a victimless crime?

We have PBS to thank for publicizing this story: these details of Hunt's life are taken from the seventh episode of the American public television system's "The West," a 1996 documentary looking at the history of the western United States. (Mormon leaders eventually renounced polygamy because of the harassment.)

Ida Hunt's story reinforces why the gay and lesbian communities must support and fight for the right to polygamy.

Large swaths of liberal feminists hate this idea of supporting polygamy -- which merely shows how gay and lesbian liberation is antithetical to some of feminism's basic tenets.

This kind of feminism sees women as victims who can't speak out for what they want in their own lives. It's the kind of ideology that reinforces the idea that women have no agency. It reinforces inequality, rather than acknowledging and encouraging free thought and independence.

In fact, Ida Hunt knew exactly what she was getting into. "Today I have made the most solemn vows and obligations of my life. Marriage, under ordinary circumstances, is a grave and important step, but entering into plural marriage in these perilous times is doubly so," she once wrote.

And she fought what she saw as an injustice and an offensive intrusion into her private life by the state. That's exactly what we gay and lesbian folk do.

Certainly some cultists (they're always men, it seems) "marry" little girls. But it's not the multiple marriages that are the real problem, it's the sexual interest in little girls who are too young to know what they're actually getting into.

So we call polygamists pedophiles. That's what "they" say about homos, too. But they're different issues, aren't they?

Just as the complaints of grown women who say they've been manipulated into multiple marriages to some religious cult honcho are really complaining about unscrupulous nasty little mind games. It's not the polygamy that's the problem, it's the lies and the brainwashing by charismatic leaders.

There are unscrupulous polygamists. There are unscrupulous homosexuals and bisexuals! We certainly don't say that homosexuality should be banned because some people behave badly. (Married men cheating on their unknowing wives with other men, for example -- we don't demand jail for such adulterers.)

Polygamy, when practiced in an ethical and thoughtful manner, is just like homosexuality. There are no victims, everyone understands what's up and agrees to the relationship rules they've all drawn up.

If you support the right of gay people to live their lives as they wish, you must support the same right for others. Like polygamists.

Of course there's problems with polygamy: by definition, it only allows men to marry multiple wives. Once its female equivalent is adopted, and once its gay equivalent is adopted, then we'll have a measure of equality.

Careful readers of my columns will send me gently teasing messages about my past opposition to same-sex marriage. This whole column seems to be in favor of marriage.

I'm a pragmatist, and marriage is now a legal given in the majority of Canada's provinces. Nothing I yell out into the vastness of the Internet will change that, and I have no choice but to move on... and hope our vibrant and nascent culture can withstand the mainstreaming of our lives.

Marriage is set up for two people only. If we have to have it, at least let's fight to make it the kind of marriage that takes it completely out of the control of those damnable moralists who'll only accept a state-sanctioned twosome as legitimate.

We'll be helping out the heteros, too.