Rick Santorum Was Right

The ink isn't even dry yet on Judge Vaughn Walker's decision to end several millennia of traditional marriage by overturning California Proposition 8. In anticipation of an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has stayed the judge's decision, but there will ultimately be a showdown.

A few years back, then-Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania got a big horse laugh when he suggested that polygamy would be the obvious next step after gay marriage became "normalized." He was ridiculed mercilessly by the left wing "anything goes" crowd. But we've come a long way, baby. And where did the gay marriage movement get its first major push outside the gay community? Answer: TV and Hollywood movies. Progressively sympathetic productions in specials, as well as in drama and comedy series, made the rubes in flyover country think they were out of step with mainstream America.

Tearjerkers about gay lovers kept apart by traditional marriage bigots became a staple. The TV and movie industries kept pushing the agenda. Over a period of about twenty years, we went from actor Perry King whining that playing a gay character had ruined his career to La Cage aux Folles, the blown-up (literally) gay marriage on Dynasty, and Will and Grace. There are now at least twenty mainstream TV shows which feature regular gay characters and couples.

Quite a transition, right? Well, laugh at Sen. Santorum if you will, but the same pattern is starting to emerge for polygamy. First, cable TV brought us polygamous Big Love on HBO. It is fiction, but presented as a forbidden practice that suffers from all the problems of traditional marriage combined with the deleterious effects of those bigots who also opposed gay marriage. For some reason, it doesn't rate any better in Utah than it does in, say, San Francisco or New York, but it has been a successful and ongoing serio-comedy-drama.

But fiction isn't enough. So in the tradition of 60s porn (pre-"if you show it, they will come" Supreme Court decisions in the Miller and Roth cases), polygamy will now be given the scientific, cultural and positive portrayal we all know it richly deserves. The Learning Channel (which now styles itself "TLC," since much of what they showed involved little learning and a lot of editorializing) is beginning a seven episode reality show called Sister Wives. It follows the daily lives of of the members of a polygamous family.

In the red-herring vein of gay marriage, this show follows the predictable pattern of establishing that polygamists are people too, with wants and needs just like everyone else. Co-producer Bill Hayes effused over the family he was chronicling: "Their children were so well behaved and polite and healthy and happy. Pardon the cliche, but the proof was in the pudding (he can't even get his aphorisms straight--the proof of the pudding is in the eating). What a bunch of great young people, and there was nothing strange about them. They have an unusual lifestyle, but for them, it was their lifestyle." Any guesses about which side of the issue he's on?

The show follows the family and particularly the patriarch, an advertising executive, as he seeks to marry his fourth wife. Says Hayes about the illegality of the multiple marriages, "while the family had been living in quasi-secret over its lifestyle for many years, Hayes said the Browns decided to do the series to show that polygamy does not have to be a world enshrouded in dark secrets." When criminal activity becomes a "lifestyle," hold on to your hat. Decriminalization then legalization will be the next step. And this TV show will help to promote that concept.

The patriarch, Kody Brown, actually did an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune in which he said "In the past, polygamists have had to be secret due to the threat of indictment or expulsion from work. Our civil rights got thrown out a long time ago. Even though society has evolved to the point of not knocking on my door with pitchforks and a lynch mob, that doesn't mean that they couldn't get away with it." Get it? The real miscreants here are those bigots with the tar and feathers who can't legally harm the polygamists, but they might do it anyway. That one is from Al Sharpton's Tawana Brawley handbook.

So just like gay marriage and illegal immigration, polygamy is being elevated from a crime to a civil right. Game over. In California, they'll probably have to judge-shop to find somebody willing to ignore the Constitution, history, and Western civilization other than Judge Vaughn Walker. He's likely to believe only in gay polygamy, and so far, the practice is largely heterosexual.

Back at the time that Sen. Santorum first suggested that gay marriage would lead to a flood of other presently-illegal marriages, he was lambasted by gay activist Dan Savage in an editorial in New York Times: "Striking down an insulting, discriminatory, unconstitutional law will not, as Santorum fears, open the doors to incest, adultery, bigamy, and bestiality. Straight people blew those doors off their hinges long, long ago." Another "gotcha." You see, straight people who opposed gay marriage were bigots and hypocrites and secretly participate in all those practices. All straight people, you know.

The previously ridiculous idea of two members of the same sex getting married used to be on that list of "insulting, discriminatory and unconstitutional law." Several state courts, a couple of legislatures, and now a federal court have taken gay marriage off that list against all logic and precedent. Santorum saw the inevitable parallel. Savage listed all those things that would "never happen," not realizing (or at least lying about) the fact that he had just produced the shopping list for the lawyers and activists who will follow the road map of gay marriage successes.