Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Should We Legalize Polygamy? Why It’s Already Too Late.

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Cities and states are beginning to decriminalize polygamy and recognize it as a union. Last week, Andrew Solomon wrote a https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/22/how-polyamorists-and-polygamists-are-challenging-family-norms (long piece in The New Yorker) normalizing polyamory by telling real-life stories. What does the Bible say about polygamy? How should Christians respond? We explore the cultural genealogy that brought us to this point and explain why there is no hope to turn back. Christians should focus less on preserving existing laws, and more on living faithfully in order to show a better story with their lives. Do you follow us on https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter)? Now's a great time to start: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (@tmbtpodcast). Want to follow https://twitter.com/PatrickKMiller_ (Patrick) or https://twitter.com/KeithSimon_ (Keith)? Check them out here: https://twitter.com/PatrickKMiller_ (PatrickKMiller_) & https://my.captivate.fm/Do%20you%20follow%20us%20on%20Twitter?%20Now%27s%20a%20great%20time%20to%20start:%20@tmbtpodcast.%20%20%20Want%20to%20follow%20Patrick%20or%20Keith?%20%20Check%20them%20out%20here:%20PatrickKMiller_%20&%20https://twitter.com/KeithSimon_ (KeithSimon_) Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. If this podcast has been helping you in your walk with God, would you take five seconds to help us? Hop onto Twitter and follow our new Twitter accounts at TMBT Podcast. If you go there, you can see our latest episodes. You can also follow Keith and I and send us messages. We'd love to follow you back and see what's happening in your life.

Hey Patrick, a couple days ago I was listening to another podcast, which I felt like I was cheating on our podcast. But yeah, who were you with? There's other good podcast out there. Anyway, I heard a story and I couldn't quite believe it. Tell me his name. I went and looked it up just to verify it's true. And it was. And here's what I couldn't believe. Cambridge, Massachusetts has become the second community to legalize domestic partnerships of three or more people. And so I think that that's called polygamy. It's kind of confusing polygamy, polyamory. People use them different ways. Yeah, so polygamy is a male who has female partners. They usually aren't sleeping together. Polyamory is... Well, hang on a second.

The male's sleeping with the female partner. The male's sleeping with all the women. What's the point otherwise? The women aren't all sleeping with each other, whereas in polyamory. It's like a free-for-all? Yeah, there's just different kinds of configurations that might exist in any different relationship. That was a very diplomatic way of saying that.

I appreciate that. But we need to go back to your polyamory with other podcasts. Oh, that's so weird. So Cambridge, Massachusetts, second community, the other was another community in Massachusetts, has legalized domestic partnerships of three or more people. And one thing that came across my mind is, well, it wasn't that I should get married to another woman. I promise you that, an additional woman. It's just that the progressives have used polygamy against.

Christianity in the past. And maybe they're going to lose that stick. Yeah, I found this really interesting. I've chatted with many atheists on Twitter, and one of the things I'll often bring out is I'll say, look, the Bible is pro-polygamy. It's pro-polyamorous relationships. Now, I've always found this to be a little bit frustrating because I always want to say, have you actually read your Bible? The answer is no, they haven't. No, and that's exactly right. Because here's the deal. The Bible can be frustrating for people, unlike much modern literature, and rarely hits the nail on the head. It tends to make points by showing you the point, which is what a good author should do. And so the way that the Bible shows that polygamy is a deep, deep, deep problem is by showing

you polygamous relationship after polygamous relationship that go totally awry. Yeah, so let's be clear, the Bible does describe polygamous relationships. Just think for a second, David had many wives. And I think this makes your point. when you look at how that played out in David's life and how that played out in Israel, well, it was an absolute utter disaster. Yeah, the very first polygamous relationship in the Bible is actually in Genesis 4. And the character who has multiple wives is also the first murderer.

And by the way, he murders a child. I mean, it's not a good way to start off polygamy as you've got a guy who's murdering children. The next case is Abraham. And he's married to Sarah, but he has a concubine, Hagar, who's a surrogacy. Yeah, it's a surrogacy. situation, and he impregnates Hagar, and it causes awful, awful, awful, awful ruination in their family between Hagar, between Sarah, between Abraham. I mean, I can go on example after example after example.

Yeah, so all this is on our mind because we read an article in The New Yorker this week by a guy named Andrew Solomon, and he was talking about the issue of polygamy and polyamory and how they are on the rise. In a sense, what he was doing was making the case for all kinds of. of legalized domestic partnerships. Really quick, if you don't know who Andrew Solomon is, he is a writer, he's also a professor of medicine, and he's written several books, and I've read his book far from the tree. It's one of my favorite books. I don't agree really with any of it, but it's one of my

favorite books on homosexuality and what it was like for him to grow up as a gay man in America with his family, and now he's beginning to write a little bit more about a new social topic, as Keith said, which is polygamy or polyamory. Put yourself all the way back in 2015 when the issue of gay marriage was being discussed. It was because of Obergefell versus Hodges in the Supreme Court, but the whole country was having a conversation about it. I believe that Joe Biden, who was then Obama's running mate, had come out and said that he was for gay marriage. And so everybody is talking about it. And one thing people who are cautious or opposed to gay marriage brought up is that it would lead to polyamory.

It would lead to polygamy becoming normalized and legalized. Well, I for sure made this argument. In fact, I have a very distinct memory of talking to a very, very sharp guy on the far left. And we were debating this topic with each other as friends having a helpful conversation, in my opinion. But I brought this up. I said, look, if we legalize same-sex unions, what's to stop us from legalizing polygamous unions? And he shunned me down on the spot. He goes, look, if you want to have a conversation, that's fine.

But don't use this slippery slope stuff. Don't start bringing up these extreme bizarre examples in defense of why we shouldn't do something, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah, because people who are for gay marriage were bringing up to those who were raising this polygamy issue. That's insane. There's no way we're going to do that. Just because we legalize gay marriage doesn't mean that we're going to legalize throuples or multiple partners in a marriage. And yet, and yet, and yet that's exactly what is happening. And we're what, five, six years later? Yeah, it's taken a reminder.

remarkably slow amount of time. And it has everything to do with people's taste. Five years ago, it was not tasteful to be a polygamist. And today, I think it's becoming increasingly understandable to our culture. So enter Andrew Solomon in his New Yorker article. And what he does in this article, he's not just defending polygamy. He's telling the stories of polygamists in order to humanize them and normalize them. And on one level, I don't have a problem with that. I would guess that if I met a polygamous and talked with them, I would say, you know what, that person, that man, that woman is nice person. They are made in the image of God. We should love them. We should cherish them. We should do right by them. And yet, his goal is to normalize their lives so that we accept their lifestyle

as a normative way of being. So Solomon starts the article in The New Yorker with a story about a guy named Rich Hinkley. He and his wife are swingers. Now, I don't know exactly how you get into a swingers club. I've heard about this. I'm not to say I've always wondered how that happens, which makes it sound like I'm trying to figure it out. I'm not just like, really, how do you have that conversation? That seems so bizarre. Like you're with a couple for dinner or something and you say, I mean, how's it go? Right? I don't know. So Rich gets into this HBO show called Big Love, which is all about this guy who has multiple wives. And he apparently is already an expert at broaching bizarre conversation. So he tries with his wife to say, hey, would you consider bringing another woman? I can't even imagine. She does the rational thing and divorces him. She says, see you later. And he ends up. up dating another woman named Angela. And he wants Angela to know right from the start, this is where

he wants to go in his life. And Angela, as it turns out, is very open to this idea. They end up getting married, and they connect with a woman named Bridget, who was 19 at the time. They bring her into their family, and she kind of goes back and forth, but eventually he ends up impregnating Bridget and kind of realizes, whoa, this is serious. This is permanent. And eventually, he has as many as four wives. Now, he goes through lots of divorces, women coming in, women coming out, him and Angela are getting a divorce right now. But he, like he said, was a Navy vet who was drawing disability checks, doing odd jobs, making about $28,000 a year trying to support not just multiple wives, but multiple wives and their children. All this is taking place in Utah. Yes.

Which I think is important as some context because polygamy, bigamy is more popular in Utah. and that is owing to Mormonism. Fundamentalist Mormonism. Well, I think in 1904, if I remember, I can be wrong. 1904, the Mormon church outlawed bigamy. But up until then, it was legal. It was legal within the Mormon church. And that was part of what kept Utah out of the Union, out of the United States for so long. But right now, there are Mormon fundamentalists who still practice, bigamy, polygamy, whatever. You get the point. And so that's the context. These people have association. I don't know if they consider themselves Mormon fundamentalist for sure, but they have association with that culture, so it's a little bit more normal. Yeah, so again, Andrew Sullivan's

goal in the article is to humanize, and so he's describing these people living together in a tough financial situation. And he goes on to describe their relationship with the police. So I'll just read him directly. Their living arrangement attracted other unwelcome attention. Neighbors called the police and child protective services interviewed the children. Since there was only one merit certificate, the police couldn't file bigamy charges. They said, we don't like it, but there's nothing we can do, Julie recalled. But we had them at our door constantly. One of the kids would have an accident at school. We'd have them there again. They were constantly trying to find signs of abuse. After six years, the family moved to Medford, a small town in northern Wisconsin,

where they could afford a house that accommodated them all and where social services seemed to accept their setup. So in the article, Andrew Solomon is trying to lay out a narrative for why polygamy should be legalized. So one of the things he wants to say is that when polygamy is criminalized, it makes it underground. It pulls it down under the radar. And that ends up protecting abusers. You see, if you are in a polygamous relationship, you can't go to the police and tell them that there's abuse happening because, your polygamy is a criminal act, and therefore you're reporting upon yourself.

So there's similar arguments around immigration, for example, right? If you're an illegal immigrant and someone's abusing you or your child, who do you go to? Who do you talk to? Because if you go and talk, you're going to reveal your illegal status. And that's one of the risks. Another risk that he discusses is that a polyamory, which in Solomon's view is less abusive than polygamy, because it's not patriarchal, it's a more free form of having multiple partners, how do you navigate health care? How do you navigate insurance, for example, if you've got multiple partners that you are wed to, that you see as your wives or husbands? And in a sense, those were some of the same issues that were brought up back in the gay marriage debate.

Do you have hospital visitation rights? Do you have inheritance rights? How do you handle estate taxes? All that kind of stuff. Children, how do you handle custody? How do you have a legalized arrangement when what you're doing is illegal? How do you handle that? Well, you can't. You're left out to dry. And so Solomon ends up moving on to talk about a family of the Dargers. Joe Darger's the leader of that family. And he's a fundamentalist Mormon. And he saw it as his personal goal to decriminalize polygamy in Utah. But he took a different approach. He's a smart, smart, smart guy. He said he wanted to take a legislative, legal, and PR approach. He wanted to normalize polygamy. And so he writes a book in 2012. He's eventually actually put in prison for it. But the whole process is trying to show, look, we are good normal. people. One of the things he does is he makes an argument that is kind of novel. He moved away from the religious argument, and instead he built his argument on the freedom of speech. So this is Joe Darger quoted in the Andrew Solomon article. If we purported to be married, that was the felony. But I could call them mistresses, not a problem. Speech is our fundamental most important right.

Everything arises in language, and your identity is defined by, language. If you can't claim your identity, you grow up under a grave injustice. So you see what he's doing here is he's saying, look, a mistress and a second wife, they're the same thing. So now I have to call a mistress because the government has criminalized my speech. But my right to express who I am and what I'm like, well, that's a First Amendment right. So if I want to call myself a second wife, I should be able to do that, I shouldn't have to call myself a mistress. And it's interesting because he's presenting his polygamous desires almost as immutable. You know, I was born this way. It seems to be the premise under here when he's talking about my identity. You cannot take away my identity, my way of living.

So you fast forward a little bit, and there's a libertarian think tank that begins to take on his case. And the leader of that think tank, Connor Boyack, he says this. And by the way, Connor Boyack is a Mormon, but he's not a polygamous, and he has no polygamy in his family or in his family's past. But this is what he says. As a practicing Mormon, I don't think God has condoned polygamy, just like I don't think that it's okay to be injecting yourself with heroin. But that doesn't mean that I should support laws that punish other people who choose to do those things. I don't drink coffee, but I don't think Starbucks should be prohibited. Wow.

Comparing your preference in coffee to the preference of your marital or family arrangements, that's a pretty big leap, I would say. You say, wow, but this free speech argument in combination with this kind of libertarian, who are you to tell other people what they can and can't do argument, has been incredibly successful. In fact, in February of 2020, the bigamy bill was introduced in Utah, which decriminalized polyamorous relationships. That means it's no longer a felony. It's just a misdemeanor. And I think this is one of the reasons I can't be a libertarian is because I do think there is a role for government to play in these kind of relationships. I think there's something attractive about the live and let live. But when live and let live ends up doing cultural, societal

harm, and we're going to talk about that later, who gets hurt by polygamy and bigamy? It might not be the people that you expect. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Here's what we can underline in the Andrew Solomon article, and we're going to have one more quote from him. In his view, and I would say largely in the view of our culture, marriage, sexuality, the whole picture, it is fundamentally an issue of self-expression. Who you want to sleep with, who you want to marry. That is a matter of personal taste, personal preference. And it's a self-expression that should not be not just repressed, but if you try to repress it, you are actually oppressing someone else because you're taking away their ability to be true to themselves. And to be clear, this self-expression when it

comes to family relationships. It didn't start with polygamy. It has a long history. And when it gets to the family, one of the places that we see it hit our radar is no fault divorce. So it's this rise in people's beliefs that are then formalized in the law that you can get divorced for really almost any reason that you can imagine. There's no fault attributed to it. And the divorce rate climbs. Yeah. And the only reason why you have no fault divorce is precisely because you see marriage as an issue of self-expression. If it's an issue of what I prefer, what my tastes are, then I have the right to say this is no longer my taste anymore. So picking back up with Andrew Solomon, this is what he writes towards the middle of the article, but it's an interesting quote. He says, in 2015, when the Supreme Court's decision

in Obergefell v. Hodges established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote a dissent arguing that if a system denying marriage to gay and lesbian, being couples represented in assault on their constitutional rights, existing marriage restrictions must similarly disrespect and subordinate people who find fulfillment in polyamorous relationships. Wow, that's prescient. I mean, he, I mean, so much for the slippery slope, right? I mean, here's the chief justice in his dissent saying, look, this is where this is headed. I actually remember reading articles mocking him. You know, he's on his little slip and slide, and the rest of us are in reality.

Okay, let's keep going. Roberts continues. Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective two, because in this particular case they said that a marriage is between two people, which they repeated again and again, even though the majority randomly inserts the adjective two in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved, while the man-women element may not. He went on to emphasize that the prevalence of polygamy throughout history made it less of a radical leap than same-sex marriage. Yeah, so you get his point there that in history, we have plenty of examples. Like we talked about in the ancient near East that are recorded in the Bible, but lots of other places. Even today in some countries. Right. Even today there are some of those that you have polygamy out there. And so it has a history. We can see what its fruit is. But same-sex relationships doesn't have near that kind of history. Yeah, same-sex marriage specifically. I mean, we can find examples of same-sex relationships, but finding men and men or women and women who are getting married, that does not exist until 2015. That is a new, I shouldn't say until 2015, until it became legalizing Canada and some other places. But the point stands. Now, let's just keep reading along with Solomon. He says, many gay activists, such as Evan Wolfson, who founded the freedom to marry, dismiss comparisons between poly marriage and same-sex marriage as a scare tactic. But legal scholars take the argument

seriously. In an anti-Poly paper in the University of Pennsylvania Journal on constitutional law, John O. Hayward wrote, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriages nationwide, the only remaining marital frontier, at least for the Judeo-Christian nations of the West, is polygamy. Another law professor, Jack B. Harrison, wrote that the state bans against plural marriage were sure to be challenged, and that anyone who wanted to maintain them, in other words, anybody who wanted to say, we need to keep marriage to only two people at a time, they would have to develop a rationale for them, albeit post hoc that is not rooted in majoritarian morality and animus.

So what the law professor is saying is that there's going to have to be some kind of argument for only two people, and it can't be rooted in animus. In other words, it can't be rooted in the fact that you just don't like multiple marriages. You just don't like throuples. That word animus comes back to play over and over and over in this redefinition of marriage. Yeah, and, and Just to name the irony of what you just said, the reason why Andrew Solomon and many others might defend polygamous relationships is precisely a matter of taste. These people like to be in polygamous relationships. Who are we to stop them in their sexual expression? And yet there is an expression, a form of animus which is not allowed.

And that's that you don't like it. They are allowed to have their taste that they like it. You are not allowed to have your taste that you don't like it. Now, what I find interesting here is that the contours of the bigamy polygamy debate, they are following. exactly the contours of the gay marriage debate. It's the exact same pattern. It starts with decriminalization. So back in 2000, there was a court case that came out of Georgia that decriminalized homosexual behavior. And then the next step is to find aspects of our current law as being rooted in animus. What we were talking about. This happened in 2007, and we'll get into this later.

And then it will likely be followed by giving polyamorous couples legal rights that are currently only afforded to diads and finally concluded with the legalization. of polyamorous relationships. Yeah, at least that's how it went in the gay marriage debate. And we're on the same trajectory. Yeah, it seems like it's going to follow the same pattern. So what this is causing us to wrestle with is what is the purpose of marriage? Is the purpose of marriage to just satisfy our preferences?

Or is there some sort of bigger purpose of marriage that the state has a vested interest in and therefore should try to define apart from people's preferences? So you can always just ask the question, what is this for? It could be talking about marriage, but let's just take it out of that for a second. What is this corkscrew for? Well, I guess you could use the corkscrew in a lot of ways. You could use it as a hammer. You could use it as a drill and try to put things in the wall.

Would it work to a certain extent? Well, maybe some, but it won't function perfectly like a drill might. But you can use a corkscrew for that. And I guess you could take a drill and use it to open up a bottle of wine. If you like the taste of cork. You'd probably get a little cork in there, wouldn't you? But what is a corkscrew for? How should you use a cord screw? How should you use a drill? Well, if you just think for a second, all the way back to Aristotle, who taught us through the teleological argument that in order to know how to use something, you must know what it was

intended for. So here's the key question then. What is a marriage? What was it intended for? And who gets to decide the answer to those questions? Exactly. Cork screws are made to open up wine bottle. drills are made to make holes in things. What was marriage intended for? And that's the debate that we're having right now. What is its purpose? What is its goal? What is its end? And that's not often how this debate is framed. And the Bible actually has a lot to say about this. Jesus himself in Matthew 19 told us exactly what he thought about marriage and its goal and intention. So I'll just pick up in verse four. Haven't you read that at the beginning, the creator made them male and female? So he's quoting from Genesis 2 right here. And he's talking about Adam and E.

and God brings them together in a covenant union, just the two of them, so that they can have children. And so he's quoting their Genesis 2. And so when he's defining marriage, he's going all the way back to the way God created things. He's going back to the very beginning before sin entered into the world. And he's saying, this is the created order. Now, we just have to think for a second, if we take the created order and invert it, I bet you there's going to be a price to pay. Yeah, so you're making a great point there. If we start with where we are and make that normative, we aren't thinking the way Jesus does.

Jesus goes back to a world without sin and says, how did marriage function in that world? That's its purpose. And because this is at the very beginning, at the very creation of humanity, this applies to all people everywhere. This isn't sectarian. It doesn't just apply to Christians or to churches. If God designed the world with this definition of marriage in mind for every human being, Now, we can always reject that. I'm not saying the state should force people to believe the Bible or follow the Bible's teaching. I'm just saying that if you want to know what God thinks, if you want to know what Jesus thinks,

he believes that marriage is defined between a man and a woman for every human being, for every culture, in every century. So Jesus continues in verse 5, and he continues quoting from Genesis 2. And he said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate. And so what happens after this is Jesus is talking to some Pharisees and Sadducees, and they start asking him, well, if that's the case, Jesus, why did Moses allow us to get divorced? Now, what I find interesting is back in this day, they actually took a rather self-expressive view of marriage. If a man didn't like his wife, if she didn't make his soup the way that he wanted it, he had every right to just cancel the marriage. It was very patriarchal, right? Incredibly. The woman didn't have many rights, but the man sure did. And so they say, look, if God didn't want us to do that, then why did he and Moses's law

give us particular laws around divorce? Jesus responds, Matthew 198, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. Oops. The point is, Moses wasn't telling you what the ideal was, but he had to live in a sinful world. And so if you're going to live in a sinful world, sometimes you have to set up things to live in that sinful world.

And he goes on, he says, but that's not the way it was from the beginning. So Jesus expects us to find the normal, the pattern, the ideal, how we should live in the creation story. So the Book of Common Prayer, which is written in the 1600s, defines marriage this way. It says, marriage is for the procreation and nurture of children, mutual comfort, and support, and the context for legitimate sexual relations. that definition has described the Christian view of marriage since the time of Jesus really quite well, and it describes the view of marriage which has been held by most people in most places for most of time. Now, I can imagine that you might be thinking, okay, I get it. Whether I fully understand that or not, I get that Jesus defined marriage in a particular way

and that our culture and society has drifted away from that. But you might be saying, but should the government be involved and invested in this, kind of marriage and this definition of marriage. And I just want you to ask yourself, why do you think the state, why has the government given tax breaks or special benefits to married people? Why have they done that? It wasn't because they were trying to follow some religious order, although that existed, is that they believed that marriage was a common good that was good for society, good for families, good for culture, good for everyone. And that's why government has given preferential treatment to married people. I don't mean married as opposed to single. I being two people

united in a public commitment to each other exclusively. The government thinks that that is a valuable institution that we need to promote and give benefits to. Yeah, we take it as a given that the state should be involved in marriage. It's not a given. The state could decide tomorrow, we're done being involved in marriages. You can marry whoever you want to, but we don't have anything to do with formalizing it, and there will be no federal benefits for anybody who has this special kind of relationship. Why the state did it is exactly what Keith is saying. Marriage is a keystone of society. It holds everything together, because keeping sex and the right relationships, keeping families together, children inside of those families, that helps society function well. It is a benefit. It's for the common good that we

have marriages kept between two people, which are, like the Book of Common Prayer says, focused on the procreation and nurture of children. That's a common good, and that's why the government has historically been invested in marriage. But of course, the definition of two people in this lifelong covenant, that doesn't fit the new cultural emphasis on self-expression. Yeah, the whole reason that the government is invested in marriage is based on the old definition. It has nothing to do with the new definition. Now we have a brand new way of thinking about marriage, and we have to ask, this brand new definition that we have for marriage, and we'll get into then just a second, does it justify the government's involvement?

Does this new definition actually do anything for the common good? One of the things that drove me crazy back in the gay marriage debate was not so much the outcome, as much as that there was a refusal to recognize that marriage was being redefined. In other words, it was presented as these same-sex couples. they wanted to get the same benefits to the same institution. They wanted the right to marry. But what no one was willing to acknowledge is that that was a redefinition of the way cultures for thousands of years and governments and churches, religious institutions of all kinds,

had defined marriage. So it wasn't just giving same-sex couples access to something that heterosexual couples had access to. It was completely changing the definition. Yeah, it's like an employee saying, look, every human has the rights to be CEO of this company. And so I would like to become CEO. So I need you to redefine what CEO means that it can apply to my position as an employee of this company. Well, the debate here is over definition, not about whether or not they're actually a CEO. So where does all this start? It actually, we've been talking about gay marriage, but that's not where it begins. It begins with Protestants and Catholics in America who legalize no-fault divorce.

It begins with heterosexual couples. It begins with human beings redefining marriage in subtle ways to be about our desires, what we want out of life and our preferences for our mate, whether we are in love or not in love, how we feel towards someone. Yeah, so the assumption before no-fault divorce was that you had to prove that there was a legitimate reason for breaking ties with your partner. And part of this, again, was rooted in the concept that it was not good for society for families to break apart. And so there has to be a good reason. Society has a vested interest in this. There has to be a good reason for the dissolving of that union. So in 1969, California is the first state to adopt no-fault divorce. By 1977, nine states had adopted it, and by 1985, every state in the United States had adopted no-fault divorce. And again, the basic concept here is I don't actually need a legitimate good reason to have this divorce.

Why? Because marriage is fundamentally a matter of self-expression. I have the right to be married to whoever I want to be married to, and I have the right to not be married to whoever I do not want to be married to. Marriage became a matter of taste. And that's the key event. That's the key transition. It's not Obergefell versus, it's not Obergefell versus Hodges. It's not gay marriage. It's not polygamous marriage. The key thing is the redefinition of marriage that happened in the 60s and the 70s. And so now you have Eli Finkel, a professor at Northwestern University, talking about self-expressive marriages. Now, my guess is that when we hear that, most of us don't have a category for any other kind of marriage. I mean, that's what we've all bought into because we're,

we are a part of this culture. Yeah, some other sociologists, Catherine Eddn and Maria Kefellus, wrote this, marriage is no longer primarily about childbearing and child rearing. Remember, that's the old definition. Why does society have a vested interest in marriage? Because it's good for the common good to take care of children. But they say, look, marriage isn't about that anymore. Now, marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.

So the new definition of marriage is that marriage exists for personal fulfillment, and it can be legally dissolved without any gross. grave reasons based on the personal taste, preferences, and desires of either party. Well, and you can see that in the cohabitation rates, too, right? I mean, all people who are cohabiting, living together, are doing is saying that this satisfies me right now. Why would I want to get married? It's just a piece of paper. So in the new definition of marriage, it doesn't really make any sense for them to get married. Why take on that burden? What's the difference? Does it really make a difference? If we're just going to be committed to each other out of love,

in our personal preference at the time. And as soon as that changes, we're going to bail, then why does it matter if we're married or not? Because if we're married, then in order to bail, we've got to, like, pay attorneys and court fees. This way, we just move out. So as many of these sociologists, by the way, none of them are Christians so far. As I know, these are secular sociologists. As they've pointed out, this new definition of marriage, marriage for the sake of self-expression, marriage is a matter of personal preference. This is great for adults, it's really, really, really bad for kids. I don't even know if it's great for adults. No, I know, but I'm saying this is what they say. Like, they admit, hey, this is good for adults.

It's just not very good for the kids. Yeah, they admit that. I appreciate that. So, according to a 2003 study by Andrew Cherlin, he said that 12% of American kids had lived in at least three parental partnerships before they turned 15. And he did a study on these children. And he noted that these transitional moments, parents coming in and parents coming out, they caused, incredible anxiety, depression, and result in all kinds of negative outcomes, higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and poverty. And it's important to note here, if you read Andrew Solomon's article, one of the most common features of these polygamous relationships is this exact thing, parents coming in and out. Andrew Charlene calls it churn, and that's what happens in these

relationships. There's a constant churn of new parental figures coming in, and I would assume having very similar results on those children. Well, doesn't it just make sense? I mean, in my family, had plenty of divorces. And perhaps that's true in your family. I know it's true in a lot of families. And you just have to look at the kids or you've experienced it like I have. There are repercussions. And of course, you can always find abusive situations in which getting a divorce was for sure the right thing and best for the kid. Not saying that divorce is always wrong at all. What we are saying, though, is that the redefinition of marriage to make it more about parents' preferences instead of a safe, secure, loving environment for the kid, that has devastating impact on kids. And all of us can detest

to that, either in our own lives or what we've seen our friends go through. Yeah. And it's worth saying the traditional definition of marriage always understood that we lived in a sinful world. Jesus himself said that there were extenuating circumstances where a divorce might be the right thing to do. And so the point here isn't saying that all divorces are wrong or immoral. The point here is saying that a divorce as a matter of personal preference and taste, it's not just bad for the It's really bad for kids. Another study found that child poverty today would be reduced by 20% if the marriage rates just increased back to the levels of the 1970s. I mean, just think about that.

20% of child poverty reduced by one societal change. And we wonder why the government has a vested interest in these marriages. It makes me think of the success sequence. Perhaps you've heard of it, it's common fact, right? It's not controversial at all. if a person graduates high school, gets married, has a kid. In that order, that's why it's the success sequence. The chances of them living in poverty or their children living in poverty are exceptionally small. And so when we have the breakup of families, we end up with kids and adults

in poverty. Yeah. So this whole thing of self-expressive marriage, it starts with no-fault divorce, but it continues forward. I want to look at a little quote from a case in 1992, Planned Parenthood versus Casey. And we're not trying to talk about abortion right now, although that was what this particular case was about. What matters was what was written in the court's findings, because this is the first time that a therapeutic definition of personhood, this notion that I am whatever I want to be, and that my desires to express myself are a fundamental human right. This is the first time we really see it in law. And this is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion.

Yeah, so let's pick up. He says, at the heart of liberty, this is an amazing statement. I mean, you think about the Declaration of Independence and what our rights were to now, but here we go, at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence. So pause there. My fundamental right is to define my own existence. He keeps going, to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. I feel like I'm reading St. John of the Cross. This is mystical, so let's just keep going. Beliefs about these matters. could not define the attributes of personhood where they formed under the compulsion of the state. So I don't even quite understand what it means. And maybe that's the point. My right to liberty is to define my own concept of existence? I mean, I can define that I'm a pickle. What is that trying to get to? Is that something you think about? Were you a pickle in your dreams last night? But you can see this, this concept, this idea has permeated us because now we can identify our own gender, our own sex, our own pronouns, we can define ourselves in any way we want. Yeah, virtually anything but your race is in your hands to define and build your world around

right now. But here's what I find so interesting about this. This is exactly what the law is not supposed to do. The reason why we have laws is because we understand individuals may define their reality however they want to. They may define their ethics however they want to. But in a society, there's some rules we all have to agree upon. And that's what the law does. The law says it doesn't matter whether or not in your reality you want to make yourself into a serial killer. And you feel good about yourself and how you live by murdering other people. That might be your universe. That might be your reality, but you don't actually have the right to define reality that way. That's why we have the laws that when you start murdering people, you are held accountable for

your actions. So now, Casey v. Planned Parenthood is 1992. Fast forward to 1996. Under President Clinton, the Defense of Marriage Act passes. It's almost unanimous in the House and Senate. maybe not exactly, but very, very, very little opposition. And what that law did is it banned same-sex partnerships from the federal definition of marriage. So this passed with wide, wide support from both Republicans and Democrats. And it's not that long later, though, where the same people who voted for it are going to cheer the Supreme Court for overturning the law that they passed. It just shows the rate at which things are changing. So like he says, the Defense of Marriage Act, we'll call it DOMA for short, because I don't want to say that a million times.

That's 1996. Go forward 11 years, 2007. And a woman named Edith Windsor marries Thea Spire in Ontario. And they move to the U.S. And when Thea Spire dies, Windsor is trying to claim the federal estate tax exemption. So they were married in Canada, pre-Overgafel versus Hodges, right? pre-gay marriage being legal in the United States. Legal in Canada, just not legal here.

They come here. One of the spouses dies. The other one says, okay, then I get the estate because we're married, right? So I get that. I get that estate tax-free, which is what you get to do if you're a married couple. And they're turned down on that. So they file a suit. Yeah, they're actually denied under DOMA.

That's why they're denied. So they file suit. And the Supreme Court actually ends up overturning Section 3 of DOMA. Why? Why do they do this? Well, the court majority, again, this is Justice Kemp. Kennedy, they said the only reason why you would stop someone like Edith Windsor from having to pay these taxes is out of personal animus. It's that you were prejudiced against her. Listen to what

Kennedy wrote. He says, the avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the states. So do we catch what you just said? he says, there's no possible reason to say that she should have to pay the taxes. There's no, no, no possible reason except that you have a personal animus against her. You want to stigmatize her. You are prejudiced. So this word animus keeps popping up and it's going to continue in these court decisions and what we talk about in this episode. So let me give you a quick definition. Animus is ill feeling or hostility. In other words, animus is not rooted in reason. There's no really

evidentiary case to be made when the judge says or people argue that marriage between a man and a woman is rooted in animus. They're saying there's no grounds other than prejudice or hate or hostility to argue to make their case, to argue that it should be between only one man and one woman. Yeah, so there's lots of problems with this. The first is that there actually is a rational case to be made for why people didn't want marriage to be between same-sex couples. And we're not necessarily going to get into that here. But one reason might be, again, what we've said several times is that this is how human societies have function for millennia.

You don't just throw over millennia of how societies function without consequences. That has nothing to do with animus. But the bigger problem here is that it's saying your taste, which they describe as animus, you must be hateful towards someone else, those tastes aren't allowed. But the reason why we have to allow Edith Windsor to not have to pay these taxes is precisely to protect her feelings. And that's what Judge Scalia pointed out, of course, the late Judge Scalia now, but he pointed out in his dissent, is he's saying, look, you're allowing emotivism to be used in one place, but not the other, that you're allowing this emotional argument to be used to say she should have these rights, but you're discounting it when somebody else says, No, they shouldn't. Yes, so the fundamental question is whose tastes get written into law. And there's no moral logic as to why one is right and one is wrong. And so what ends up happening is we use

polemics to defend one position, but the polemics, the argument that we're making really has nothing to do with why we're arguing it. We're just trying to keep the power in our camp. My tastes are the taste that matter. And this finally takes us to Obergefell v. Hodges, the case where same-sex marriage was legalized. So again, Justice Kennedy writes the court's findings. I would encourage you to read the entirety of the section that we're talking about right now, but just in case you're mowing your lawn and can't track a lawn, we'll keep it limited to the real juicy parts. He makes four different points. I want to go to point number two. He says a second principle in the court's jurisprudence is that the right to marry is fundamental

because it supports a two-person union, unlike any other in its importance for committed individuals. Now, you might remember back to Justice Roberts, and we quoted him, earlier in his dissent, is he said there's no real reason to keep it to two people. That seems pretty arbitrary. Yeah, it's absolutely arbitrary. Again, this is all smoke and mirrors. The reason why we need to allow two people to get married actually is nothing to do with a fundamental right for two-person unions. It has everything to do with people's personal preference and their own self-expression. That's the reason why we're saying that we should allow men and men to be married, women and women to be married.

But eventually, people aren't going to have a preference for two-person relationships. And once that happens, if marriage is based on self-expression, then what's the point of limiting it to two people? And again, it shows the lie of the argument back in 2015. These are all just words to make a point. Really, the two-person thing doesn't matter. And by the way, don't talk to me about slippery slopes. Because just to be perfectly honest here, if we legalize polygamy, that's not the end of this

slope. Not at all. You're going to have pederasty, where you have adults having sex and maybe even marriage with children. And people are going like, oh, here we go. We're going down the crazy time. Let's just pause for a second. If you think that a child has the right to determine not only his gender and his sexuality, but to go get hormones, to go get surgery, if you think a child has a right to do that, without a parent's permission in many cases, if you think a child has that right, Why in the world would you stop it saying that a child doesn't have the right to define their own sexual preferences, even if those preferences are, do you have sex with adults? And by the way, in the history of polygamy, it is incredibly common for polygamous men to take on child, teenage lovers. So again, we can say, oh, well, it's not slippery slope. This is not a slippery slope. I am not on the slip and slide. I am taking the logic of the argument where it's going to go, which is if marriage is self-expressive, if sexuality is self-expressive, then there are no limits. There's not limits on two.

There's not limits on anything. So let's jump to the last point that Justice Kennedy makes in the majority opinion. He said this again, Obergefell v. Hodges. Fourth and finally, this court's cases and the nation's traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of our social order. Really? Are you kidding me? After you've thrown out all the traditions and all the social order that countries, nations, churches, religious institutions have banked on for millennia. Now you're going to tell us that marriage is the keystone of our social order. You've thrown all that out, completely redefined marriage. It takes a lot

of gall, hutspa. I would say to now come back and tell me it's the fundamental... To use the word tradition, when you are throwing out the normative definition of marriage, which most humans have believe for all of time is a remarkable bait and switch. And to call it the keystone, you know, the keystone is the center stone. So when you make an arch and the blocks all kind of have to lean against each other, the keystone is the one that goes at the top and holds everything together. The reason why marriage holds everything together is precisely for the reasons we've talked about. It is for procreation. It is for child nurturing. It's for the stability of the family. It's for keeping sexual relationships limited because when you have sex with lots of people, it has lots

of consequences. There's all kinds of traditional reasons to say that marriage should be kept in the traditional bounds, but you've thrown them all out. You've said, no, marriage is all about self-expression. This has nothing to do with tradition. And notice that those arguments that Patrick is laying out for us aren't rooted in the Bible. They're rooted in the common good of the culture. So it's not trying to hold people to a Christian standard, a specifically Christian standard, although clearly that's what Jesus in the Bible and God teaches. It's also rooted in natural law and what is best for societies in general. What's best for kids? What's best for people? But eventually, polygamy is going to be legalized, right? And we all see it coming. Yeah, it is 100% going to be legalized. I don't need a

crystal ball to make this pretty good. Because there's no reason to resist it. There's no way to resist it. Yeah, there's nothing in our cultural value system that can resist. The minute you start saying that marriage is self-expressive and that it's for personal fulfillment, then at that point, from that point forward, marriage can be anything. I have good friends, Christian friends, mature Christian friends, smart, good, mature Christian friends who would say, yeah, why not? I mean, why should we try to force people to live out a Christian lifestyle? So why should we just let everybody do whatever it is they want to do? Okay, you can, but don't pretend that it doesn't come with costs. And a lot of the people, paying that costs are going to be children and people who are in lower economic classes.

Those are the people who always get stuck with a bill. So the people who have more resources at their disposal and the people who are older in the adults, they get to, quote, unquote, have their fun. And the people who pay the price are the vulnerable. That's absolutely right. I mean, one of the great ironies here is, first of all, let me say this, self-expressive marriage. This is how almost all people, myself included, see marriage. And you see that in the fact that divorce rates between conservatives, liberals, they're virtually the same. This is the way the church thinks. It's the way everybody thinks. We all think that's the purpose of marriage. And yet, we all have this intuition that it's probably not the best thing. I find this really fascinating. Right now,

progressives really are calling the shots when it comes to marriage and how we define it. I don't know who could disagree with that. But here's what I find interesting. There was a study that was done of the children of progressives. So these are college students, their parents are left leaning. And 62% of those college students said that there's nothing wrong with having a child out of wedlock. So they say, look, I wouldn't judge someone. I wouldn't see a problem with them having a child out of wedlock. There's probably not any major consequences that come with that. It's just a different way of living. But then catch this, those exact same students, 97% of them said that their parents would freak out if they personally had a child out of wedlock.

So here's, for everybody else, oh, live and let live, but they are very, very strict with their own families. Because it seems like there's like their own conscience, their own worldview, their own moral sense of right and wrong, their own moral sense of how the world works best. They know there's a consequence that comes with having kids out of wedlock. And so they don't want that for their kids and their family. That's why they have the freak out. That's why they have kind of rules or family values that they practice. But they don't practice what they preach to other people. So they create a climate, a culture, a media culture that says, oh, this is great, of course, do it, no big deal, live and let live, self-expression, do your preference. But they're not going to live themselves

that way because they know it doesn't turn out well. And like you said, who's left with the bill? It's often people in poverty. It's often children. It's not the elite, wealthy, well-to-do families who can have their kids go to college. They're not left with the bill here. And the great irony to all of this is that right now, the people who are calling the shots on marriage, who the media, is following and listening to that our Supreme Court is following and ruling in favor of, they completely lack a philosophy of family and marriage. They completely lack a definition. That's why they can have one set of rules for themselves and then say it's a whole different set of rules for everybody else because who am I to judge? They don't actually know what marriage is for.

They fundamentally lack it. And yet here they are calling the shots for society. And we all get to be guinea pigs in the experiment. So Andrew Solomon finishes out his article, New Yorker, by referring to a community, a compound, a community. I'm not exactly sure what you'd call it. And he refers to it as the rev. That's what the people who live there call them their own community. And it's made up of people who have relationships with each other. But they've created this kind of sexual free-for-all environment.

Some of them are straight. Some of them are gay. Some are trans. And they can have whatever sexual experiences they want. and there are people coming through it. So people might bring in a friend or a visitor. And in their own words, they're trying to create kind of this utopian society where they can be a, quote, safe place, close quote, for people who are in need. And so they imagine a society that teenagers could come and spend a little bit of time there.

But you have to realize this is a highly sexualized community? And you have to wonder, is this the future? Is this what is best for these teenagers? Is this best for the kids involved? Is that the society that we want to legislate around? In other words, do we actually want our legal structures to not just facilitate, but perhaps possibly encourage and at a minimum allow this kind of lifestyle to continue? That's actually what's best for society.

Because it's kind of what we're doing is we're making a rev, that kind of community, as a city or as a nation, where it's this free-for-all. And, you know, I hear myself talking, and I'm sure that. that you're going to say that maybe we're being a little bit extreme here. But what we're trying to do, what Patrick said earlier that thought was really good, is what we're trying to do is show the logical outcome. We're not saying this is where we are. We're not saying that we're going to be there in five minutes, but we are saying that given the culture of self-expression and given the culture where I get to define my own existence, my own meaning, to quote Anthony Kennedy again,

this is the logical outcome. Why have two people? Why not? be polyamorous, why not be polygamist, why not involve children? There's no logical reason because we've said that this all comes down to people's preferences. Yeah, and again, we've probably said it too many times, but think who foots the bill in these communities, the rev, you have people who are coming in at various levels of commitment to one another, and those can be defined in different ways, but they're bringing their children with them. And remember that study that showed that churn, changing parental figures, is one of the most psychologically destructive to things that can happen in a child's life, we are working towards legalizing something that

is apparently great for these adults, but probably awful for their children. So, you know, the question Christians are left with in our cultural context is, should we try to overturn things? Should we try to reclaim the tradition? And I tend to be, maybe I'm a pessimist, a bit of the mentality that says, look, this ship has sailed. I'm not sure that we're going to change the cultural conversation and begin to redefine marriage. I think the question that Christians have to answer for themselves is how will we live? How will we talk about marriage? How will I see my marriage? Well, I talk to my children about my marriage as being primarily about me, my self-fulfillment, how I feel about your mom or how mom feels about dad? Or am I going to talk about it as a committed

relationship that's for the sake of each other and that we're going to hurt and have hard times? There's going to be days where we don't want to be in this family for each other, but it's not about self-expression. It's about committing to each other for the long haul. I think you're right, Patrick. I'm not sure that we should expend our energy trying to to change the culture. I'm not even sure that would be something we could do if we wanted to. But I think the best thing for us to ask is how do we approach marriage? How do we approach family and try to have influence in our local communities, our small group, our church? Because if we can show another way, a better way, a way that provides for children, a way that protects the

vulnerable, a way that shows commitment in the middle of problems, then maybe somehow over time, We really will change the community because all these choices that our society makes, they all have a cost. Eventually people's life crashes on the rocks of reality. Eventually cultures crash on it. And they'll be looking for a new way. Maybe we could show them that Jesus had the best way from the very beginning. Thanks for listening.

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