As one Catholic commentator put it last week, “it had to happen sooner or later, and now it has.”
The “it” was a call by an Islamic leader in Italy for polygamy to be legalised. Now that Italian law recognised same-sex civil partnerships, argued Hamza Piccardo, leader of the Union of Islamic Communities, there was “no reason” for polygamy to be forbidden.
This sort of argument was precisely what critics of gay marriage laws predicted; redefine marriage to incorporate the union of two men or two women and soon there will be calls for other types of union to fall within this definition as well.
As Thomas Peters, cultural director at the National Organisation for Marriage, once said: “Once you sever the institution of marriage from its biological roots, there is little reason to cease redefining it to suit the demands of various interest groups.”
For example, after the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Canada the Toronto School Board introduced a curriculum denouncing “heterosexism” and released posters stating “love knows no gender” depicting gay and polygamous relationships as equivalent to marriage.
So, if Canada and Italy are flirting with polygamy, who is to say the same won’t happen in the UK? You might believe that it is far-fetched to think that polygamy might one day be permitted here but actually it is already happening.
Polygamy may be illegal in the UK, however, last year it was reported that two thirds of Sharia marriages in Britain were polygamous. Aina Khan, a solicitor who specialises in cases of Sharia law, said at the time: “Probably a quarter of all the couples I see involve polygamy issues.”
There are websites encouraging polygamous arrangements too. Earlier this year, Catherine Bennett at the Guardian wrote about entrepreneur Azac Chaiwala who has launched SecondWife.com and Polygamy.com, for Muslims and non-Muslims respectively. Bennett reported: “Chaiwala plans not only to make money but also, he has been explaining in a remarkably effective publicity campaign, to remove the local taboo and spread understanding of the benefits of wife collecting.”
Demands for legalised polygamy from Muslims may also be bolstered by some quarters of the sexual liberation movement which sees polygamy as the final frontier.
As journalist Ed West noted in an article for the Spectator online last year: “Whenever social justice warriors want to make a radical change to society, they first prepare the ground by changing the language, making it difficult to argue against them. So note how there has been a slight decline in the use of the word polygamy since the mid-1960s and a huge increase in polyamory. Polygamy strictly speaking means marrying more than one person, while polyamory refers to simply being attracted to or in love with more than one, but clearly the acceptance of the latter makes way for the former.”
Ross Douthat of the New York Times agreed in an article he wrote last year: ‘“Polygamy’ is just the uncool, biblical-sounding term of art. Call it ‘polyamory’ or ‘ethical nonmonogamy’ and suddenly you have a less disreputable demographic interested.”
Douthat concludes that through our creeping acceptance, “polygamy will not be legally recognised, with fanfare and trumpets, in 2025. But it might be recognised in 2040, with a shrug.”
But come 2040 some people definitely will be celebrating if the latest Gallup poll is anything to go by. It revealed that support for the practice in America more than doubled between 2001 and 2015.
How can this rapidly expanding support possibly be resisted? As consulting editor of the Catholic Herald, Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, noted in a recent blog post, the “overwhelming reason” to oppose polygamy is that it is “intrinsically” opposed to human dignity. He adds: “However, I do not expect many of our contemporaries to take up that argument, as, though it is the best one, they sadly cannot ever agree among themselves what human dignity means.”
This vision of what human dignity constitutes is one that the Church in England and Wales must start articulating urgently, especially if no one else will. It may be alarmist to make statements on the dangers of polygamy in 2016 but it never can be too late to preach about the importance of the sacrament of marriage, its undeniable benefit for civil society and its complementarity with the dignity of both man and woman.
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