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We live in a supposedly free and equal society. Arguments of personal freedom and choice pervade the interest in gay marriage, and the removal of legislating social norms on society as a whole.

If we take the principle, that marriage is simply a contract between people for mutual benefit, and therefore the gender requirements of traditional marriage, particularly within a religious or cultural context, should be ignored and sacrificed on the alter of universal rights, maybe we should extrapolate that to also apply to bigamists and polygamists.

Personally, I don’t think polygamy is ethical or right, for reasons of faith and my perceptions and beliefs around the order of nature. However, the law in free and secular societies cannot be bound by the traditions of the past, but should rather reflect the norms of the society it inhabits as well as leading the society into new fields of greater rights of the citizen.

With marriage being divorced, excuse the pun, from the ’shackles’ of traditional conformity, and becoming nothing more than a civil union, it follows then that in the same way a business partnership or any contract can be entered in upon by multiple parties, it then also follows that there should be no limitation of number, on the legal persons entering into a mutual assistance union, something which is commonly referred to by the state as marriage (read in my previous post as to why I suspect civil unions aren’t perfectly valid marriages for a myriad of reasons).

There will be some who will point out that polygamy is confusing for the children of the unions, but then children’s rights are not taken into account when children are born of un-unionised partners (makes partnership and child rearing sound a little Red doesn’t it?). Opponents might also look to the fact that women in polygamist partnerships are often abused and coerced, but then this can also be the case in invalid marriages.

If our society wishes to remove itself from the basis of Judeo-Christian ethics which has bound modern free societies since their inception, upon which freedom of religious expression and belief is predicated, then we cannot be upset when the baby is thrown out with the bath water: when the moral norms of western society are placed into a maelstrom of relativism. If we don’t recognise a supreme natural law, if everything is subject to reduction and the exposition of rights without responsibilities then we can no longer in good conscience allow ourselves to be prejudiced against those who choose unions and lives different from our own.

It comes down to the difference between freedom and licence. When we are free to do things, we can rationalise and explain from first principles the value and innate goodness of our actions, but if we license our behaviour irrespective of the cause, we cannot then expect to close Pandora’s box. The genie of personal will over the moral and ethical basis and needs of a rational human has been released from the bottle: mankind has become Nietzsche’s superman. We are no longer subject to God’s laws, but rather the licence and parameters of our own making.

Soon, when others make their own licences in conflict to ours, we will discover that reason without faith is a boat on an endless ocean without anchor; destined to drift endlessly on the changing currents of human opinion and whim.

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Filed under: Commentary, Gender, Ideas, Language, Law, Philosophy, Religion, Society, ethics by Andrew la Grange