Buster Wilson, the General Manager of the American Family Association’s American Family Radio, yesterday on AFA Today told co-host Ed Vitagliano how marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples will ultimately lead to not just the legalization of polygamy but also legal approval of marriages to buildings, cars and dogs!
Wilson: So that’s why we are among many others who are fighting so vigorously for the traditional marriage, and it is because it is not just that we are—we’re not homophobic and we just hate homosexuals—but that whole mindset is being pushed upon America and the end result of America giving into it is that the door is flung open. And it’s more than just homosexual marriage or homosexual relationships that will come out of it, polygamy comes out of it, what’s the term?
Vitagliano: Polyamory.
Wilson: Polyamory, that’s gonna come out of it. We have talked about people who brought to the forefront their desire to marry—one guy had a desire to marry a building, another one a car, another one his dog. It’s just unbelievable, if you throw off the restraints and you say there’s no Christianity that’s going to guide how we look at this issue as a nation, then anything goes.
Many Religious Right activists consistently warn that legalizing same-sex marriage will lead to thing such as man-turtle marriage and woman-Eiffel Tower marriage, and have pointed to a court case brought by polygamous fundamentalist Mormons in Canada, where same-sex marriage is legal, in order to argue that gay rights will ultimately lead to polygamy. However, the judge ruled against the polygamous couple and maintained that unlike polygamous relationships, “committed same-sex relationships celebrate all of the values we seek to preserve and advance in monogamous marriage.” He went on to say:
The alarmist view expressed by some that the recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage will lead to the legitimization of polygamy misses the whole point. As Maura Strassberg, Professor of Law at Duke University Law School, points out in “Distinctions of Form or Substance: Monogamy, Polygamy and Same-Sex Marriage” (1997) North Carolina L.R. 1501 at 1594, the doctrinal underpinnings of monogamous same-sex marriage are indistinguishable from those of heterosexual marriage as revised to conform to modern norms of gender equality. This counters, as well, the argument advanced by many, that “in this day and age” when we have adopted expansive views of acceptable marriage units and common law living arrangements, the acceptance of polygamy, or at least the abandonment of its criminal prohibition, is the next logical step.
