Gay Marriage, Polygamy and the Victory of 'Contemporary Radical Individualism'

Charles Krauthammer -- who strikes me as mostly made of purely evil things that are many times worse than puppy dog tails -- has a surprisingly good column today on polygamy and gay marriage. It's a slippery-slope argument, for sure, but it's not one that mounts real opposition to either.

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

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I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage has needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you. Astronomical rates of divorce and of single parenthood (the deliberate creation of fatherless families) existed before there was a single gay marriage or any talk of sanctioning polygamy. The minting of these new forms of marriage is a symptom of our culture's contemporary radical individualism -- as is the decline of traditional marriage -- and not its cause.

A cheer for Krauthammer, and three more for "contemporary radical individualism"! More here.