Today Rick Santorum was in Concord, New Hampshire speaking to a group of college students. The event was a town hall meeting and so members of the audience were allowed to ask questions of Mr. Santorum. It was an interesting view into the workings of his mind.
Mr. Santorum was asked how two men or two women getting married affected him personally, a question which he never answered. He instead wound up on a rhetorical path that at first glance might seem rather interesting, that is until you realize where this path leads. Mr. Santorum asked the students, if they are OK with two men getting married were they OK with three men getting married. This swift switch from gay marriage to the unrelated question of polygamy is a common tactic among those who are opposed to gay marriage, as they see it if you start letting 2 men get married then you have to let everyone get married no matter how the relationship is structured and who it includes. This is a completely ridiculous argument but I rarely hear people explain why it is so ridiculous.
If allowing two men or two women to get married means that you automatically have to allow polygamy then polygamy must already be legal in the US. You see, if allowing two men to join in marriage raises the question of, if two men why not three men then you have to ask, if a man and woman can get married then why not a man and two women? Obviously if you allow heterosexual couples to get married then you have opened the door for heterosexual polygamy. To carry the Christian conservative's argument all the way out I suppose you would have to ask, if a man and woman can get married then why not a man and a female dog? Don't forget that Rick Santorum has compared gay sex to bestiality before and so it is only fair to use the same arguments he does. Also Mr. Santorum, in his argument, stressed that heterosexual marriage is special because it leads to procreation. Guess what heterosexual polygamy leads to procreation too. Seems that Mr. Santorum is pretty good at arguing for the form of "traditional" marriage most represented in the Bible, one man and many women.
Yes, heterosexual polygamy must be permissible in the US because heterosexual marriage is legal in the US, at least that's what the right wing Christians seem to believe. Of course polygamy isn't legal in the US, we have laws preventing more than two individuals from entering into legal marriage. Read that again carefully. We have laws to prevent more than TWO people from entering into legal marriage. Polygamy laws are not about gender, they are about numbers. Gay marriage is about gender, not about numbers.
For once and for all these two arguments are not related and if you hear anyone making the comparison between gay marriage and polygamy ask them why they support heterosexual plural marriages. You might not get a good answer out of them though, after all they must have failed math since they can't tell the difference between numbers and genitals.
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