There’s been a lot of talk about how a conservatives will have to abandon their sexual witch hunts now that marriage equality is both the law of the land and something that enjoys broad support among the electorate. I think this is correct for conservatives who are Republican politicians, since politics is predicated on getting people to vote for you, and to some extent (though not as great an extent as most believe), people tend to vote for candidates who agree with them on the issues.
But there’s no way in the world this signals the end of social conservatives haranguing people about sex. Poking around in other people’s sex lives is just too much fun.
The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.
This culture war is more Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy Day than Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham; more Salvation Army than Moral Majority.
He wants Robbie George and the guys from First Things to stop yelling at gay people and go work with poor people? Fat chance.
Steve M. says conservatives just like scolding people, and while it’s certainly true that many are fueled creatively by their massive hatred of hippies, one shouldn’t overlook the sexual angle on this. Hatred is fun but combining hatred with sex is even more fun.
That’s why I think it’s not just that scolding will continue until morale improves, but that the scolding will be about something to do with sex. Chunky Bobo and Chunky Bobo’s emoprog doppleganger are both excited about legalized polygamy. Maybe Fox can find a few people in Humboldt County who are agitating to have their commune formally recognized as a group marriage or some excommunicated Mormons in northern Arizona with five wives. I think a more likely punching bag may be whatever despicable dating practices Tom Wolfe invents for young people in his next book.
Anyway, they’ll find something.
dubo
All conservatives have to do is start doing all the things they shriek about libruls doing because socialism
Ok
boatboy_srq
This. Because shaming f#gg0ts and Poors (to make indiscrimately breeding
richElect males feelgood about themselvesRighteous) is what Reichwing FundiEvangelist Xtianity is all about. There’s no way to simultaneously ignore Teh Gheys and help The Poors without admitting that teh secks is healthy and poverty isn’t the fruit of wickedness.catclub
That ‘could be’ is doing a whole lot of work. The people who do that work are not the ones you hear about as social conservatives.
HumboldtBlue
Fuck off, don’t drag us into it we already have enough anti-vaxxer crunchy dipshits to deal with and we don’t recognize the back-to-earth-commune-dwellers anymore.
DougJ
@catclub:
Yes, the kind of people who work in soup kitchens and counseling centers (socially conservative or not) aren’t usually shameless self-promoters.
DougJ
@HumboldtBlue:
Are there a lot of anti-vaxxers up there? Sorry to hear it.
JPL
There is a faction of the GOP that votes against their interests, in the hope they might live the american dream someday. Who helps them? Obviously there are inner city poor, but outside the cities, especially in GA, there are large pockets of poverty. I’m not sure who David is talking about helping.
boatboy_srq
@catclub: Bobo always likes to pretend that the vile Reichwing Xtian shriekers aren’t part of his club.
ranchandsyrup
I would go and help them but it would be a moral hazard. It’s a conundrum. Is Jesus instructive on this matter?
maya
You really need to update your demographic database. Fox, or anyone else, seeking free love communes in Humboldt (Gold) County, Ca will more than likely encounter puzzled stares, buckshot, or, worse, if they venture too close to any “communes’ ” multiple hoop cannibus grows. The hippies turned into free range capitalists a very long time ago. Robotic trimming machines have replaced indentured cleaner women, source of the free love angle, also, too.
Culture of Truth
I admit I had to click on that one.
I don’t particularly care about polygamy, but I doubt there’s a Constitutional right there.
Scolding your inferiors is easy and feels good, so yes that’s the go-to plan for the foreseeable future.
If they must go all Dorothy Day on us, they could start with the pathology on Wall Street. Their values are way messed up.
the Conster
What a bunch of bullshit. If social conservatives could be any of those things, they’d be liberals. Also, lost in all his apologizing for his fellow conservatives’ hateful tantrums is any acknowledgement that Loving v. Virginia’s holding could have been word for word the same as Obergefell’s, yet the return to miscegenation laws seem to be off the table unless I’ve missed some other GOP kook’s crazy train this week.
boatboy_srq
@ranchandsyrup: If by “help” and “them” you mean “succor” and “the poor” then there are a good few Beatitudes He gave us that would be useful, and several admonitions to wealthy would-be-followers to divest themselves of their wealth and donate it to those less fortunate, so yes. If by those terms you mean “educate” and “wingnuts” then there’s little beyond “you get further with a kind word and a 2×4 than you do with just a kind word” (the only instructive NT passage I recall was the scene with the money-changers in the temple).
catclub
@ranchandsyrup: Possibly.
Chris
They have a word for these kinds of social conservatives. It’s pronounced li-ber-al.
Seriously, these are the kinds of people that conservatives shit and piss on as “social justice churches” which are therefore not really Christian but secretly Marxist. This conservative shit about “I agree we should help the poor, it’s just not the government that should do it” is 110% horseshit; as soon as you’re off the topic of government and onto private and individual charity, they’ll find other reasons not to do it.
And on those occasions when conservative churches do get into social services, it’s usually done specifically to fuck over the poor, not to help them. Think Catholic hospitals going through all these mergers and acquisitions with other hospitals so that they can then turn around and tell the government “sorry, but we can’t do abortions or contraception in these hospitals! They’re Catholic now!”
Conservative social policy is as unlikely and contradictory as conservative science.
Brachiator
Sweet boneless Jebus, save me the sanctimonious BS. In the 19th century British Prime Minister William Gladstone attempted to rescue prostitutes from the streets and rehabilitate them in suitable employment, or by marriage, or by emigration, after a time of training. By January 1854 he had spoken, ‘indoors or out’, to between eighty and ninety prostitutes but ‘among these there is but one of whom I know that the miserable life has been abandoned and that I can fairly join that fact with influence of mine’.
The main thing that Gladstone got out of this was a hot thrill. He would rush home and scourge himself (and he kept diary notes of his punishments).
The main thing that the “underprivileged” need is opportunity and jobs, not asswipes hovering over them trying to impress them with their faux superiority and fake family values.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
This. That could be the new face of Evangelical Christianity, but it would involve the Evangelicals switching sides from conservative to liberal. I understand there are plenty of people who are no longer capable of distinguishing evangelicalism from conservatism, but this is exactly the case where the difference could become important.
catclub
@the Conster: Bobo has definitely converted. You read it hear first.
CONGRATULATIONS!
No.
Conservatives will have to abandon their sexual witch hunts because gay men have a shitload of money, hate paying taxes on it like everyone else in this damned country who’s made some cash, and are willing to give plenty of said cash to them just so long as said conservatives don’t go out of their way to shit on them in public.
Plenty of lesbians and trannys left to beat on, and those folks will never have money so that’s all good.
Amir Khalid
Surely there are not going to be a lot of Americans clamouring for legal polygamous marriage. It’s too much work for most people, who have enough to do in daily life; living with one spouse is challenging enough, let alone two or three. Traditional, one man many wives polygamy is practised by only a minority even where it’s legal and considered prestigious, as in some conservative Muslim societies, because only an affluent man can really afford it.
And I’m always impressed, if not favourably, by Bobo’s habit of viewing social conservatism through rose-tinted glasses.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: I wonder if he realized how financially lucrative prostitution can be for someone with no job skills?
schrodinger's cat
Boring Freddie has moved up in life, from Balloon Juice to Politico, not bad at all. His next move, Fox News Liberal.
HumboldtBlue
@DougJ: I think we have one of the highest rates of opt-outs second only to Napa
trollhattan
Speaking of People Worth Publicly Mocking, I’ve always loathed Jim Carrey for merely being Jim Carrey, and now have a whole new reason.
Jeffro
Granted, there are many, many options to choose from…but this is easily the dumbest thing Brooks has ever written.
Yes, David, why don’t those social conservatives give up their sex fixation and simply do as Jesus commanded: feed the hungry, house the homeless, etc etc. Why. Don’t. They.?
HumboldtBlue
@maya: What she said
Chris
@catclub:
Exactly!
I read this and was like, have you ever met the kind of people who will sacrifice years of their lives to do thankless and unprofitable work trying to help keep afloat the parts of society that no one gives a shit about? They’re not the kind of people who blather on about trickle-down economics, boostraps, absent fathers, and how everyone needs to lay off the police. They’re not conservatives.
Possibly more relevant, have you ever seen how conservatives relate to these kinds of people? They hate them. They think they’re the mollycoddling bleeding hearts who prevent our society from getting strong by “creating a dependency” among people who should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. These are the people who thought a background in community organizing was something to sneer at, “not a real job,” with no “actual responsibilities.”
Whether or not conservatives get over their hangups on sex, you are not, probably ever, getting a conservatism that does anything to the poor other than kick them and spit on them.
the Conster
@Amir Khalid:
Traditional polygamy treats women as property of the husband, so as I keep pointing out, mutliple party marriages would have to have all the parties to the marriage marry each other so that each would have equal claim to all marriage assets and liabilities. There is no legal framework to adjudicate claims to assets or liabilities that the various parties would bring to the marriage if one or more parties leave the marriage, especially custody issues. The only beneficiaries of trying to legally create, administer, and dissolve such arrangements would be lawyers.
Jeffro
@Chris:
Sounds like my mother, who thinks the government should leave welfare to be done by charities…then complains about all the solicitations she receives from charities…
Valdivia
That polygamy thing in Politico. Ugh.
Brachiator
@Paul in KY:
I’m certain that he could look at some of his fellow MP’s, political whores with no real skills, and work it out.
DougJ
@Valdivia:
I always knew Freddie was destined for bigger and better things.
trollhattan
@HumboldtBlue:
The last statewide map I saw had the highest rates in the farflung rural corners of the state. The landscape changed a lot from the early days of Marin and Orange counties.
HumboldtBlue
@Valdivia: Will Saletan of all people punched a bunch of holes in Freddie’s premise.
DougJ
@HumboldtBlue:
That guy can’t stay away from this kind of topic.
Valdivia
@DougJ: That kind of bigger and better is the kind I try to stay away from :)
@trollhattan: Isn’t he dating Jenny McCarthy? First thing I thought of when I saw him sounding off on it.
@HumboldtBlue: Oh boy. I might get popcorn.
catclub
@Chris: If you have not read the book “Help” by Garret Keizer, I recommend it highly.
HumboldtBlue
@trollhattan: I believe we were at 14% unvaccinated and I am just going off a very poor memory. Here is the data from the May study by the state department of health
We are at just over 15% unvaccinated so I was close
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Wow. Just wow. He often came across like a Bobo in training, often dead wrong on the basic facts and with an unerring ability to come to wrongheaded conclusions about everything. I recall seeing something he wrote in one of the Gizmodo related sites. Commenters took him to task over just basic stuff. And yet, somehow he has been able to convince people that he is some kind of pundit.
beltane
Wait, is David Brooks suggesting that today’s conservatives be more like Dorothy Day, leader of the Catholic Workers’ movement? The Republican voting religious right is not going to transform itself into a Republican voting religious left no matter how many verbal contortions Brooks is able to twist himself into. This is pure drivel meant for the consumption of idiot Totebaggers who have never met a religious nut or a labor activist even once in their sheltered little lives.
different-church-lady
I think “Combining X with Y is more [fun]” is a greatly overlooked key to understand the culture of resentment and violence.
It was odd to see the Roof shootings being debated as, “It was the racism! No, it was the guns! No, it was the mental illness!” It was quite obviously a deadly cocktail of all of those things, but people talked about it as though each item excluded the others. Why people are this stunningly incapable of keeping more than one item in their field of vision at one time is flabbergasting.
HumboldtBlue
@Valdivia: I engaged with Freddie over at Gawker last Friday regarding his insistence that polygamy MUST be the next step and I brought up immigration, the number of spouses allowed and a few other issues that don’t seem so simple.
Saletan argued that immutability is the big one Freddie is missing, gay people were denied benefits because of their homosexuality — an immutable trait — not because they chose to get gay married to six people.
different-church-lady
@schrodinger’s cat: Naw, just a bit of his signature pathetic whinging will see him hounded off Politico too. Those kids like to play rough, and Freddie doesn’t have the stuff for it.
shawn
@CONGRATULATIONS!: i have one true friend who is a lesbian and she is a highly educated, more or less wealthy (not high income but no kids – best investment strategy ever), Democrat but can tell you why, and not just because the right has been horrible towards gays – but the gay men (ok maybe 7 or 8 total so yeah this is fully anecdotal) i knew in texas were all what anbody except really rich people would call rich and would be dyed in the wool republican voters except for this one issue
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: He ran away from Balloon Juice and stopped posting here because he was taken to task by commenters here, he was like the “liberal” version of E D Kain.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
He says what the publishers want to hear, which is far more important for a pundit than any relationship to reality.
HumboldtBlue
@shawn: Male privilege doesn’t discriminate due to sexuality, selfish motherfuckers are selfish motherfuckers regardless of who they sleep with.
NonyNony
@beltane:
Brooks is making the same mistake that most non-religious or nominally religious people making when listening to religious people – taking them at their word that their beliefs are part of a larger belief system (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) when, in fact, most religious people’s beliefs are actually only a subset of the larger belief system. There are very few people who embrace the entirety of their religious system in the world – most will believe some if it, ignore the rest of it, and call anyone who doesn’t believe the parts they believe “Cafeteria” believers.
Brooks doesn’t understand religion any more than he understands Applebees.
Origuy
A few days ago, there was a poster, IIRC mike with a mic, who was in some kind of polyamorous relationship. He didn’t see what the problem was with making polygamy legal. When someone raised the issue of children, he shrugged that off by saying he didn’t want kids anyway. He never responded to other objections.
I think it would take a lot of legal unraveling to deal with the issues, as the Conster said.
catclub
Slate article. I agree. If they cannot do the job they were hired to do, they should resign and find someone who can do that job.
Amir Khalid
@Valdivia:
Carrey broke up with Jenny McCarthy years ago.
Punchy
Please add to rotating taglines, stat. Current ones are stale and out of date; this is some funny shit.
the Conster
@HumboldtBlue:
Here’s a thought experiment for anyone who thinks it’s just a bunch of people getting married together: One man has inherited wealth and three children from his first, late wife; one woman has two children by two different men, and was never married to either one; one man has three ex-wives he owes alimony to, no children and has been adjudged bankrupt, one woman owns her own successful business and is childless. How do you allocate the assets and liabilities, and custody among the parties if the successful businesswoman wants a divorce and lays claim to the wealthy man’s kids? Or if any of the other parties wants to leave the marriage?
Good luck with all that.
Valdivia
@HumboldtBlue: Sounds like him.
Am I remembering wrong that he had some outrageous things to say about rape? Is that someone else?
@Brachiator: I think that his desire to make liberals ‘uncomfortable’ is why he’s in demand. It’s his new niche.
shawn
@HumboldtBlue: i wouldnt ever call them that – my friends on the right (to include these guys) have always been more charitable than my friends on the left – they (sometimes we) have had our heads up some of the time, but selfish is not the right word – the lefties were more aware of causes and were better on the environment from a knowledge perspective, but the righties give much more in both cash and time – speaking locally (shelters, H4H etc) political donations and voting are a different animal…
Seanly
@catclub:
That was my thought. The Venn diagram intersection of the people who would do any of the uplifting portions of those activities and social conservatives is pretty f*king small.
Brachiator
@the Conster:
I guess if some people want this bad enough, society could adapt. And you wouldn’t just have traditional polygamy, but all kinds of group marriages.
And consider the situation of a group marriage, say 2 men and 6 women. Could someone divorce one or more people in the group, but still remain married to the rest?
HumboldtBlue
@the Conster: The best comment I read was from a woman commenting on Gawker, and she also happens to be a lawyer. She touched on a situation similar to the one you described and said that we always seem to forget that marriage is in the end a contract and that if polygamy is going to become a recognized institution then the contract law is going to need some serious amending.
the Conster
@Brachiator:
That’s the thing – NO ONE KNOWS. There isn’t any legal framework, and you just can’t make it up as you go along.
HumboldtBlue
@shawn: Fair enough, I have no business insulting your friends either.
ranchandsyrup
@boatboy_srq: @catclub: Oh yeah, I thought he was cool with helping the poors. But I can’t find it in this prosperity gospel Bible.
the Conster
@HumboldtBlue:
The laws we have are the result of 500 years of English common law, that contemplates two people in a marriage. Inheritance, property, family, tax, insurance, etc. etc. laws all have been established and developed over hundreds of years. SSM is easy – it’s a simple search and replace all the statutes and regs with “spouse” in every instance there is a reference to “wife” or “husband”.
NonyNony
@HumboldtBlue:
Start with something simpler – one of the benefits of marriage is that if I am incapacitated and I need someone to make decisions for my medical care, my spouse automatically gets to make the decisions (unless I specifically write up a living will saying that she doesn’t and someone else does). That right is easily extendible to a gay/lesbian marriage but it isn’t extendible at all to a polyamorous marriage. Which member of the arrangement gets that right? How is it determined? What if I want one of my other partners to have it? The law would have to be changed to acknowledge this new arrangement in a way that is completely unlike how the laws have NOT had to be changed to acknowledge gay partnerships as marriages.
(I’m actually all for allowing polyamorous partnerships set up somewhat like non-profit limited liability corporations if the folks involved want to do it that way, but lets not kid ourselves that these arrangements are anything like the extension of heterosexual marriage to gay marriage. Cause they’re not.)
beltane
@Brachiator: It would be easy to adapt the laws regarding business partnerships for this purpose.
the Conster
@beltane:
Except for custody laws. That’s where it all runs off the rails.
HumboldtBlue
@the Conster: I wish you had been on the Gawker and reddit threads I was on because I was inundated with a particularly virulent strain of online lawyering that pretty much is summed up by the statement — “we have plenty of contract lawyers who do this stuff all the time! It’ll be as easy as putting together a multi-person contract!”
catclub
@HumboldtBlue: Easy like sunday morning. or Easy like controlled fusion. Easy like juggling chainsaws.
Brachiator
@Valdivia:
He doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. He just bores or exasperates with odd and irrelevant points.
@schrodinger’s cat:
I confess that I think I made him cry once. He was easily proven wrong about the facts of some issue he was going on about, and still insisted that whatever policy prescriptions he preferred were not pointlessly irrelevant. After a while it was clear that he was a kind of modern Edward Casaubon (from Middlemarch), pompous and ineffectual, and lacking all self-awareness, but convinced that he was some kind of liberal oracle.
HumboldtBlue
@NonyNony: I hear ya, Nony, I also was caught by the simplicity of Saletan’s immutability point which I think is where Freddie’s train will run off the tracks.
catclub
@beltane: Somehow I think you skipped comment # 53 by The Conster. Maybe it had not posted while you were writing.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Origuy: That dude is a conservative troll, trying to either fuck with you or bait you into saying something stupid.
shawn
@HumboldtBlue: appreciated
Fabio
Has someone else pointed this out yet? The Salvation Army **IS** part of the Moral Majority that Bobo is tsk-tsking at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zinnia-jones/the-salvation-armys-histo_b_4422938.html
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator:
I may have been guilty of the same. Your Casaubon description is accurate! I hope there is no Dorothea in this story. I also found his obsession with the HBO show Girls rather tiresome.
different-church-lady
@Brachiator:
A #10 envelope could make that guy burst into tears.
trollhattan
@HumboldtBlue:
Good resource, thanks. Alpine County needs one kid, and then decide whether to vaccinate him/her. They can have the state record either way.
the Conster
@HumboldtBlue:
Yeah, get all those parties to that multi-party contract agree to a pre-nup, that EQUITABLY covers all the personal assets and liabilities past, present and future for each party to that contract, including custody. Good luck with that.
Valdivia
@Brachiator: The Middlemarch burn is the best burn.
And I agree, he just wants to think he is making liberals uncomfortable, truth is he’s just annoying.
Frankensteinbeck
I know it’s been said, but I have to pile on…
You mean Obama, the man you didn’t vote for?
No. You just want to claim your side embodies kindness and understanding, because that feeling of self-righteousness goes well with the self-righteousness you feel haranguing people about sex.
Brachiator
@beltane:
Yeah, I could see this as one line of reasoning, but human beings and their lives are more complicated. Hell, the laws concerning estates and trusts can be amazingly intricate.
But as I note, if sufficient numbers of people are hot to try various forms of group marriage, then the appropriate rules will have to be worked out.
By the way, I note here that I don’t know what the rules were regarding say, Mormon polygamy, and whether any this provides useful precedent for people into this kind of thing.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@maya: We tried watching that reality show about the weed companies in CO but got turned off after only a couple episodes. The ThirtySomething white, male business owner gave one of his young, female employees a lecture on why he couldn’t pay her more (despite pulling in LOADS of cash daily) and quickly led into Free-Market, this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you, and If-I-pay-you-more-you’ll-lose-your-motivation bullshit and we just said NOPE and changed the channel. I’ve worked for a couple of those assholes in the Solar energy field and I just can’t stomach that shit even as a viewer, anymore.
Iowa Old Lady
@the Conster: Or if any of the parties wants to divorce just one of the other parties.
mclaren
Of course conservatives are obsessed with sex. GOP stands for “Gay Older Pedophile.” What else do you expect?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Ouch. Who was that other pompous douche Cole brought on for reasons never clear and never explained? Edward Finkel? I think he might be posting comments under a nym these days.
PurpleGirl
The educational non-profit I worked for was not identifiably liberal but its work to recruit and supervise volunteers to help children in the NYC public schools was liberal. The organization was started by several upper middle class women and a few very rich women (among them a Harriman or two). It had for years a number of foundations and people who contributed very generously. But very few conservatives did contribute to us. After all we worked with poor people and children on the edge and in the public schools. One of those Harriman women worked at an East Harlem school 4 afternoons a week for upwards of 3 hours a day… until she died suddenly at age 79.
ThresherK (GPad)
@HumboldtBlue: When you’ve lost Lord Saletan…
the Conster
@Brachiator:
Mormon polygamy as I understand it runs one way – all in favor of the man. Women were/are property, and their property was his property. That can’t happen now, because women have equal standing under the law.
the Conster
@Iowa Old Lady:
Yes, there is no way to adjudicate these situations, at all, at this time. Think about how beneficiary language is, and who is considered to be a spouse and/or offspring for purposes of insurance policy coverages, Social Security payments, trusts. It’s impossible to sort out equitably, which is why it’s illegal.
catclub
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I think E.D Cain.
dogwood
Two of the behaviors that statistic show to be a hedge against poverty are completing a high school education and avoiding having children before marriage. I’ll believe conservatives are serious about this stuff when they quit bitching about and underfunding rural and inner city schools and when they stop pushing abstinence only education.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
IIRC, Mormon polygamy was pretty much the classic kind: one man was involved in multiple, simultaneous binary marriages. The wives had a social relationship- you couldn’t stop that even if you wanted to- but no legal relationship. A complicating factor was that the Mormon church had a huge say in all marriages. I’m not sure if they literally assigned women to their husbands, but certainly nobody was getting married without the church’s agreement. Again, going from memory, there was a tendency for spouses to be separated by at least half a generation. Young women tended to marry older, established men who already had at least one wife, while young men who were lucky enough to marry tended to wind up with widows.
sharl
Ah, a link to Freddie, who’s clearly movin’ on up.
It’s been mentioned before, but bears repeating: Freddie BONERS! was not appreciated by actual female-person feminists – neither in this post nor its sequel – when he tried to mansplain feminism at their ungrateful reading eyeballs. Thank goshness he found a place for his writing that is run by understanding people, at last.
Relatedly, I join Punchy (#52) in recommending that “Chunky Bobo’s emoprog doppleganger” be added to the list of approved taglines. Please propose it at the next B-J Standards and Practices subcommittee meeting. Thank you.
Roger Moore
@dogwood:
There may be a correlation there, but I’d love to see some proof of the direction of causation. Yeah, dropping out of school and/or getting pregnant before marriage (and those two can easily be related!) can have an obvious effect on your earning potential, but both can be a result of poverty as well as a cause of it. Reduce poverty, and I bet you’ll see the dropout and unmarried pregnancy rates decline, too.
nominus
I guess Brooks doesn’t actually talk to them, otherwise he would realize that doing something else means they would actually have to do something. Conservatives don’t want to actually put in the effort, they think things can be fixed by passing a law or by writing a check. Failing that, they say they’ll pray about it. You can’t actually expect them to work on those goals, I mean, there’s no reward for it.
different-church-lady
@nominus:
David Brooks has a well-deserved reputation for not actually interacting with the things he writes about. (See Salad bar, Applebee’s).
HumboldtBlue
@ThresherK (GPad): no shit
Felonius Monk
@catclub: I wonder why they didn’t resign when they were asked to issue marriage licenses to all the fornicators, adulterers, thieves, and all the other sinners that have undoubtedly come into their office seeking a marriage license? Seems like selective religiousizing to me.
Origuy
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I forgot about his trollishness. Occasionally he’s made some useful comments.
Here’s a minor issue on the subject of contracts: If you rent a car, most agencies in my experience will include your spouse as additional insured automatically. Anyone else must present a valid license in person at the counter. It was a pain when I wanted my disabled housemate to have a car for emergencies when I’m out of town. In a poly marriage, maybe you want one of your wives to be allowed to drive the car, but one of your co-husbands has a drinking problem.
PJ
@the Conster: Actually, here in the US, all law is just made up as we go along, whether by a legislature or by judicial rulings. There’s no reason laws couldn’t be constructed to deal with polygamy – they might be complex, but that’s no reason not to make them (see, e.g., ACA, the tax code, etc.)
PJ
@the Conster: I know of one polygamous situation where, in an apparent attempt to legitimize the situation, Jan Yoors (tapestry artist and author – his books on the Romany are great) the husband married one wife for a time, divorced her, and then married the other wife. But they continued living together for the rest of their lives.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I ran across this in a quick google search about polygamy:
Minimum of three wives. Relationship between the wives. Relationship of children to wives. Some of the anecdotal stories are messy and sad.
Even if someone wanted to have an egalitarian group marriage, all this would be very complicated. An interesting sideline. But none of this, potential complications and all, have squat to do with same sex marriage. I guess if Freddie and friends want to worry about this, they can have a good time.
the Conster
@PJ:
Marriage conveys special rights and obligations to each spouse that flows through every kind of law, the meaning of which is almost universally understood. I would say that developing a coherent equitable legal framework that accommodates all possible combinations of marriage to all areas of the law would take a massive commitment of legislator and legal scholarship. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime.
the Conster
@PJ:
That’s not polygamy.
PJ
@the Conster: Having two wives is not polygamy? My point was that simply because a legal framework does not exist does not mean that people won’t want to create one.
different-church-lady
What I’m not getting about all this is for years the argument was, “The next step is you can marry your dog!” I don’t understand why they suddenly decided the intermediate step of polygamy was a thing.
Chris
@catclub:
Never read it. Will put it on the reading list.
the Conster
@PJ:
He divorced one to marry the other – that’s serial marriage, not polygamy. They had an informal arrangement to live together, not a multiple marriage recognized by the law, which is what we’re talking about here. People live together in polyamorous arrangements all the time, but not with the legal recognition and imprimatur of the State.
the Conster
@different-church-lady:
That’s another stupid comeback I’m always fighting – dogs can’t give consent. Conservatives have a hard time understanding the whole idea of consent, since they’re obsessed with things being rammed down their throats.
muddy
@Brachiator: @Valdivia: The Middlemarch burn was especially sweet to me because I have not been able to read the book. Every time I tried my brain just shut down due to the tl:dr nature of it. And it’s the exact same when I try to read FdB.
muddy
@the Conster: They do seem to have difficulty understanding the concept of consent in a number of areas, not just sexual.
the Conster
@muddy:
I would say it’s a defining characteristic of conservatism. Hence, the gun humping.
different-church-lady
@muddy: The also seem to have difficulty understanding that the vast majority of people aren’t interested in bestiality. (I’ll leave it to others to draw the obvious conclusions…)
the Conster
@different-church-lady:
Yeah, this. Conservatism is a mental illness encompassing several pathologies – projection, cognitive dissonance, lack of empathy, infantilism, psychosexual disordering. IOW, they’re a bunch of fucking losers.
muddy
@different-church-lady: I got a nice reaction once years ago when some stupid gun nut misogynist was telling the “joke” about the lesbian with the peanut butter and the German Shepherd and then company came in or whatever, hur hur. All these assholes are snickering along. Now I can certainly be down for a rude joke, but it needs to actually be funny.
Anyway, I said putting PB on your junk and sticking it in a dog’s face did not sound like a good idea. I guess none of them had thought about it in that way, because there was a round of cringing and pelvis guarding.
Roger Moore
@PJ:
The complication may not be a reason for the legislature not to write those rules, but it is a very good reason for the judiciary to distinguish same sex marriage from plural marriage.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
You just have to read the Old Testament to get that. There are plenty of polygamous families, and they’re all full of petty jealousies and feuds. You’d think that people who want to base their families on the Bible would get that, but I doubt they read it with any kind of critical eye.
the Conster
@Roger Moore:
Now update that polygamous family to current day: sitting in a lawyer’s office trying to work out an equitable pre-nuptial arrangement amongst a potential family of six adults or four adults or more who all bring a variety of assets and liabilities who might end up divorced (from one? some? all?) – who gets the kids, who gets the furniture, who gets the inheritance, who gets the short sale judgment, who gets the unpaid tax obligations, who gets covered under the health insurance, who gets the dog that came with one of the parties, etc. etc. Not everything can be shared equally.
NonyNony
@Roger Moore:
It takes some really special folks to make polyamory work in the modern world. And I don’t mean that as a knock – I mean it honestly. I know one group of folks in a polyamorous arrangement and another that used to be in a similar arrangement but now are barely on “civil speaking terms” with each other. I don’t think most people could actually handle it, and so I don’t see it getting enough of a weight behind it to make it a political movement the way gay marriage has been.
(I do foresee a day when the retrogressive Mormon fundamentalist breakaway sects in the deserts of Utah and Nevada decide to sue the government for their “freedom of religion” to marry as many 12 year old girls as they want to, though. I’ll be surprised if one of those lawsuits doesn’t wend its way up to the SCOTUS in the next 10 or so years, but if that’s the kind of thing Freddie is talking about he can keep dreaming if he thinks my support for adult gay/lesbian couples getting legally married – or even my support for adult polyamorous groups to form some kind of contract amongst themselves for various marital rights – translates into thinking that those guys should win that kind of case.)
the Conster
@the Conster:
IOW, ten minutes of thinking the implications of multiple marriage through and no one would opt in. Which means Freddie deBoer is still an idiot.
Roger Moore
@NonyNony:
I’m less worried about the real nutball Mormon splinter groups than I am about more mainstream religions (e.g. Islam) that have a tradition of multiple marriage that they haven’t pushed to practice here in the US. I still think the detailed legal questions about exactly how those marriages would work are enough reason to distinguish same sex and plural marriage.
Waysel
Nice Tom Wolfe reference, DougJ.
NonyNony
@Roger Moore:
Hm. The INS process for naturalizing as a US citizen is going to weed out a lot of immigrants who are polygamists, so the challenge would likely have to come from a US born Muslim . It could happen, but for some reason I don’t expect to see it come from that route. Maybe it’s because I know too many US born Muslim women and I know exactly what they’d do to a husband proposing to add another wife to the marriage.
(Though maybe it’s more likely to be a naturalized Muslim being deported for lying to the INS about his multiple marriages suing over a first amendment freedom of religion issue to prevent deportation, but that makes the question a lot more complex than a native-born Muslim suing for the right to marry a second wife, I’d think.)
Splitting Image
@NonyNony:
I’m pretty much in the same position, except that most of the “poly” folks I’ve known are long past the point of being on speaking terms. The one triad that worked out rather well lasted four years and ended with one person being bounced but staying on relatively good terms. The other two are still together.
The “gay marriage will lead to polygamy” argument is correct in one sense, however. Same-sex marriage is a necessary prerequisite to polygamy, since at least two members of a three-way relationship must be of the same sex. For an egalitarian relationship to exist, the same-sex partnership has to have the same legal status as the two opposite-sex partnerships. Arguably, the reason Muslim and Mormon polygyny has historically been so exploitative towards women is that there was no legal enforcement of the multiple wives’ duties to each other. This allowed the men to play one woman against another.
That said, my overall impression of the “poly” people that I have known over the years is that they are more about reintroducing concubinage than about legalizing polygamy. A lot of polyamorous people seem to be libertarian douchebags first and foremost, and will drag out their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags if the standards for polygamous marriages start involving anything that looks like an obligation.
El Caganer
The David Brooks version: The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.
The El Caganer version: The defining face of phony compassionate conservatism could be this: Those are the people who shame and humiliate impoverished single mothers and set up fake health care clinics to hoodwink women seeking abortions. Those are the people who gentrify neighborhoods and kick the current residents to the curb. Those are the people who create ‘think tanks’ that provide propaganda to justify their funders’ economic piracy and racial caste system. Those are the people who are bullshit artists like David Brooks.
brantl
@Fabio: And they fuck with homosexuals, constantly.
bjacques
In the sidebar of the Politico article is a great rebuttal by Jonathan Rauch, as to why polygamy, unlike gay monogamy, has a track record of working against social stability.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/polygamy-not-next-gay-marriage-119614.html?ml=m_t1_2h#.VZUXZC61d4x
To the extent that polygamy has worked at all, it’s in places and at times where women have few rights, which simplifies things remarkably. For married men, anyway.
And, as Rauch points out, one of the legal pillars of the Obergefell is that homosexuality is not a choice (which law doesn’t care about) or the product of childhood abuse (which law tries to prevent or stop), which makes it different from polygamy (or polyamory), unless libertarian douchiness can be proven to be the product of childhood abuse.