Categories: Mark Steyn

We’re in the fast lane to polygamy

Remember same-sex-marriage proponents rolling their eyes at talk of what might be next?

by Mark Steyn on Thursday, April 9, 2009 11:10am - 1,417 Comments

I’m not myself persuaded that there’s any correlation between polygamy and “skills,” but it’s easy to see the appeal of such shameless multiculti pandering at the Supreme Court. Since this magazine and I were ensnared in the “human rights” machinery, I’ve come to regard Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms as—what’s the legal term?—oh, yeah, a worthless piece of crap. The quiet lifers will doubtless coo that, after this one minor retreat, we’ll be able to hold the line. But, to return to the elusive pursuit of “da Canadian value,” if there is a core Canadian value, it’s that there is no line, and nothing to hold. You can hold a gay wedding, you can hold a polygamous marriage, you can hold your child bride’s clitoridectomy party, but you can’t hold the line.

So what? We uptight squares just need to get with the beat. A couple of years ago, Nicole Langlois of the London Free Press went to see Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-winning gay cowboy movie, and found herself oddly distracted. “I watched it—the lush, majestic beauty of mountains and streams; the struggle and surrender between the two men,” gushed Miss Langlois, “and I thought of Stephen Harper.”

Each to her own. When I saw Brokeback Mountain, Stephen Harper was the last thing on my mind. At the moment of “struggle and surrender between the two men,” I don’t remember looking at Jake Gyllenhaal and thinking, “The West wants in.” But to Miss Langlois, brooding on the Prime Minister, the scene underlined “how truly powerless he is . . . against the rising tide of cultural acceptance for gays.”

Rising tides lift all kinds of boats: if we’re “redefining marriage,” gay nuptials will be the least of it. Last year, Aly Hindy, a Scarborough imam, told the Toronto Star that he’d performed 30 polygamous marriages just in the last few weeks. Madame L’Heureux-Dubé and her fellow progressives think that women’s rights and gay rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet plane—that once you’ve invented them they can’t be un-invented. Yet tides rise, and then ebb. Forty years ago Nigeria lived under English common law. Now half of it lives under sharia, and the other half’s feeling the heat. Go back to Martha Bailey’s pitch for immigrants: how many highly skilled polygamists and their legions of wives have to emigrate to Canada before “the rising tide of cultural acceptance for gays” begins to ebb?

We could use some “Canadian values” right now. As it is, multiculturalism has stripped us even of the vocabulary to argue against obvious provocations. If by “Canadian values,” you mean a half-millennium of settlement and constitutional evolution, forget it: you lost. But, if by “Canadian values,” you mean the already cobwebbed disco-era Trudeaupian mumbo-jumbo, make the most of it: it’s a moment, and moments pass. And you might not like what follows.

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Tags: Mark Steyn, polygamy, same-sex marriage

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Hal

I’m not certain which is worse, this author’s rhetoric or his opinions. Did any of this rambling make much sense to anyone else? Whatever your stance, make an argument and back it up, rather than wasting space with homophobic ranting.
I don’t appreciate the knock against Elizabeth Taylor and the late Roddy McDowall. Both have done more good in their lives for social groups of all sorts than you’d ever consider.
Tel

Made sense to me.
Steven

Hal : you don’t like his opinions – too bad. How about actually rebutting with facts what you think is so objectionable about Steyn’s argument rather than trotting out the usual claims of “homophobia”. Steyn is right – multiculturalism seems to have brought the worst of all worlds to Canada (apart from ethnic restaurants). As usual, people like you respond with unsupported vehemence in direct proportion to the strength of arguments such as those made by Steyn.
edeast

His argument is there is no line to stop the marriage definition. There are no Canadian values that would justify not allowing polygamy. Unless you trusted a HR commission to determine what would be allowed or not. And why this matters is because of the multi-spousal welfare benefits. So a change in the legal definition of marriage has implications for resource allocation. And I argue over here that gay marriage could open up a challenge on the cloning ban, as an impingement of reproductive rights.
Rob

Homophobic ranting?!? Where is there anything that could be construed as anti-gay in the article? That Steyn opposes gay marriage is clear inasmuch as if you’re busy re-defining marriage what so magical about the number two? If your believe that polygamy is culturally beyond the pale and could never be legalized as a result, well a generation ago gay marriage would have been unthinkable. Polygamists doesn’t have the same caché as gays in Hollywood (except perhaps Big Love) or the media but so what? Polygamy is far more widely accepted and practised around the world than is gay marriage.

In my view, Steyn makes a strong argument that polygamy is the thin edge of the wedge in terms of the erosion of rights won by gays. When you take a close look at the broader outlook of those who practise polygamy for religious reasons, do you think they’d be more or less hostile toward gay rights? Too bad Steyn’s polemics often overshadow his arguments becasue there’s a lot more at stake here than whether or not we give a damn if a bunch of consenting adults want to get hitched.
Joan

A very well constructed argument.Unlike the whining of gay activists and their liberal friends about the cruelty of denying them a piece of paper to showcase their love, Steyn’s arguments follow a logical progression.Of course when liberals gush over having “discussions” , it is always about others listening while they discuss and never the reverse.
lightduty

I resent that. I routinely consider all sorts of good for social groups…
Dark_rose

Just because some one has some real morals about certain things like gays for example (I would use a different word for gays by the way, just to be honest) doesn't mean they are "homophobic" you can stuff that crap. Some of us are simply a little clearer on whats right and wrong.
Mike T.

You were funny when you were more of an obvious parody. This is just not cool.
Bill Simpson

Fortunately he contradicts himself to zero:

“The Catholic Church”
“A tendency toward individualism”

Ah, indeed, Catholicism and individualism – just like peas and carrots. And science too!

Lib Fail – you’ll have to do better than this. It really is not worth typing out.
Terry

Yep, a faith of 1 billion people, or a 1/6 of the earth’s population is definitely a monolith.
Bill Simpson

I think you’ll find that individualism, science and representative government have developed DESPITE the Catholic Church and not because of it.
Terry

Uh huh, because as every historian knows, there was a big black hole in scientific development, democratic government, and legal recognition of individual rights for 1500 years.

Oh, except for of course the fact that you now use lowercase letters and punctuation. Oh, and the discovery of new elements unknown to the ancients. Oh, yeah, and the pesky university system with titles such as “master” and “doctor” that started out as cathedral schools. Oh, and the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” which is pretty much cribbed from neo-Thomistic philosophy. Not to mention the encouragement of the empiricism of Aristotle that was unknown in the west, which made the birth of the scientific revolution possible.

And countless other advancements in ethics, humanism, legal theory, and science undertaken under the patronage and approval of the church, because it has existed for 1500 freaking years. So take your revisionist history and shove it.
John.K

You have to admit though, that the rapid acceleration of all those things in the 16th century occurred more-or-less simultaneously with the development of the first successful challengers to the Catholic church in Western Europe. Which could be an argument that the slower development in the first 1500 years was in spite of, not because of the institutional church.
Terry

I dispute you on two fronts. First, the advance of the rapid development of technology and society does not correspond with the protestant reformation. In fact, the protestant reformation was in many ways disastrous for learning in Europe. There was a great mistrust and backlash against scholastic empiricism at this time, and various centers of learning were purged of intellectuals. The protestant authorities clamped down on various intellectuals who disputed the literal interpretation of the bible, and the catholic authorities clamped down on ideas that they saw as threats to their ecclesiastical authority. This is in contrast to the relative freedom scholars had to argue many positions and even debate established truths in previous centuries. It was considered important that arguments against the faith were articulated properly for example, so your arguments in support of the faith would be equally strenuous. There was also a genuine belief that religion, as truth, had nothing to fear from empirical study of the natural world.

No, the rapid acceleration of science and technology occured long after the protestant reformation was settled, and largely did so in areas where empiricism as a viable philosophy was preserved. The flowering of the scientific method in the 18th century and the rise of private capital are what ensured that miracle of rapid technological progress, not the opposition of the Catholic church. Unless of course you can explain to me how the 16th and 17th centuries were such bastions of scientific progress as compared to the 13th to the 15th centuries.
John.K

“This is in contrast to the relative freedom scholars had to argue many positions and even debate established truths in previous centuries”

Tell it to the Cathars….
Terry

Sure, if you mean a sect that essentially disrupted the entire order of the region, assassinated and drove various ecclesiastical officials out of the region, and engaged in various tit for tat skirmishes with the established religious and secular officials over a couple of generations.

Yep, nothing but an academic disagreement there.
John.K

I think you are conflating the suppression of the Cathar heresy with the civil war that raged in the Languedoc in the latter part of the period. Count Raymond was a Cathar, but it was the French coveting his lands that was the reason for the war. Of course at that time the Church was a temporal power and thus involved in the war. The wholesale massacre of peasants who adopted the heresy, and those who preached it was something else, and started well before the assassinations of which you speak.
Hal

My apologies! Turns out it was an eloquent, well-constructed article. I’d just forgotten to take off my glasses, turn the magazine upside down, and read it in the dark.
Hal

Did you just suggest that the only upside to multiculturalism is the food?
Charming.
Ruffian

Not abnormal behavior. Between gays there is a true attraction of opposites but gays are oriented in reverse before birth. Do you follow. Gays are capable of attraction, commitment and lifelong devotion the same as anyone else. Many species are capable of pairing for life in the same way and they don’t need a church or piece of paper to enforce it.
I have always felt that the description ” same sex” was misleading because despite appearances, the orientation is opposite and attractive. Most people don’t see this but they see the terminology and say yuk this is abnormal.
sf

Whether or not it is normal or abnormal, it is certainly different.
sf

There’s also the music.

Frankly, I don’t mid having lots of people coming to Canada from all over the world. Bring them in. But I don’t see what culture has to do with it. I hope that they all show respect to the institutions that have been built in Canada, including marriage.
Hal

I agree. The law of the land is law.
You’re assuming, however, that the people wanting the changes are from outside the country. I don’t agree with the isolation and arranged marriages of minors to elders, but the Mormon polygamists are home-grown pioneers. I’m a fourth generation Canadian and a supporter of same-sex marriages. It’s hard to tell someone to play by the House Rules when factions of the house are divided.
Chuck80

I agree with Hal.

Poor old Markie is always good for a giggle is ! Yet, eternal optimist that I am, I still live in hope that one day I will see a column, an article – anything – by him that is not hysterically anti-Muslim and projects some or other amusing or ridiculous quirk of that religion or its followers (as though nothing similar could be found on the Christian side) as representative of the world’s billion-plus Muslims.

Against the background of today’s economic problems, I doubt whether Canada or any other Western country faces anything like a real problem if a few people practise polygamy – and even if they claim benefits. The sums of taxpayers’ money involved are “a fart in the Sahara” in the overall scheme of things.

Naturally, I’m always a bit sceptical of devoted gay-bashers like Markie – always feel uneasy when I’m around them, as I think homophobia is often an indication that its source is a bit dodgy himself. I won’t be inviting Markie to my sauna any time soon. LOL