How Will the Polygamy Camel Get Its Nose in the Tent?
02/13/2015
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camels-nose[1]There has been discussion for years of how polygamy might follow gay marriage,  although that seems like an overly literal interpretation of what’s been going on: gay marriage isn’t really about marriage, so World War G has given less momentum to plural marriage than it’s given to World War T.

Various vectors have been proposed for how polygamy would become lawful in America:

- Fundamentalist Mormons almost certainly won’t be the entry point for obvious reasons (whiteness, patriarchalism, Mormon Republicanism, fly-overness, etc.)

- Arab Muslims are a better possibility. You wouldn’t want to be Islamophobic, now would you? But there remain plenty of Jews and Jewish-led Christians who keep their eye on Arab Muslims.

- African immigrants have long struck me as the most likely candidates. They are Africans and they are immigrants. Polygamy isn’t necessarily some anti-Semitic Muslim thing with them, it’s just blacks doing what comes naturally. How can some straight white man dare tell a strong, beautiful black woman she can’t join her twelve sister brides in marriage to a Big Man? The immigration system must become sensitive to family reunification of polygamous families. If one wife legally immigrates to America, then all the other wives should get to come to so the family can be reunified.

Still, the notion of a man having more than one woman married to him seems kind of anti-feminist.

- So, maybe some Tibetan refugees who engage in chain marriage or where one woman is married to three brothers will get legal privilege first, opening the doors for the others.

But, today’s news got me thinking about a wholly different dimension than religion/ethnicity, one with a very strong track record recently. From the Daily Mail:

Oregon gets America’s first openly bisexual governor as Oregon’s embattled John Kitzhaber Resigns over scandal involving fiancee’s consulting contracts

Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown rushed back from a conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday to succeed John Kitzhaber, only to be told he was staying

But he admitted on Friday that ‘I have become a liability,’ and quit

Brown will be America’s first openly bisexual governor

By DAVID MARTOSKO, US POLITICAL EDITOR PUBLISHED: 15:05 EST, 13 February 2015 | UPDATED: 16:25 EST, 13 February 2015

Oregon’s new governor will be the first open bisexual to serve as a state’s chief executive when Secretary of State Kate Brown steps in for resigning Gov. John Kitzhaber on Friday.

The embattled now-former Democratic governor Kitzhaber, 67, has resigned his office amid allegations his fiancee used her relationship with him to enrich herself with contracts for her environmental consulting business.

‘I am announcing today that I will resign as Governor of the State of Oregon,’ he wrote in a media statement Friday afternoon. …

[Kate] Brown is married to a man but has made no secret about her sexual orientation – and has been embraced for it in one of America’s bluest states whose largest city has adopted the slogan ‘Keep Portland weird.’

- Look at this poor bisexual woman, the new governor, who is discriminated against by law from gay-marrying a woman, just because she’s already married to a man. That’s bigoted prejudice against bisexuals.

Clearly, Oregon’s marriage law is on the wrong side of history.

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