Feb 24, 2006  |  By: RYAN LEE  | COMMENTS     

Each time Dani Eyer attends a forum to advocate marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples, she knows the first question to expect at the end of her speech.

“What about polygamy?” an audience member inevitably asks Eyer, executive director of the ACLU of Utah. “Will gay marriage lead to legalized group weddings?”

Each time, Eyer answers affirmatively — one of the rare occasions she is in harmony with the viewpoint of many religious and social conservatives.

“The ACLU of Utah has traditionally advocated that personal relationships between consenting adults are protected by the Constitution, and that freedom of religion and freedom of expression are fundamental rights,” Eyer says, citing the her ACLU chapter’s official stance on polygamy since 1989.

“Criminal and civil laws prohibiting the advocacy or practice of plural marriage are constitutionally defective,” she adds. “Neither the polygamists nor the proponents of same-sex marriage are wild about the analogy, but we do see the two as similar concepts.”

Mathew Staver, president of the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel, agrees that there is “an easy transition” from allowing marriage for gay and lesbian couples to legalized polygamy. But instead of considering them fundamental rights, Staver says neither gay marriage nor polygamy should be recognized by states.

“If you convert marriage to merely the placing of a license on consenting adults that are in a committed relationship, or who love each other, then there is no logical line that can be drawn between gay marriage and polygamy,” Staver says. “Gay marriage clearly opens the door to polygamy.”

But gay rights organizations have long refuted claims that acceptance of same-sex unions is a slippery slope toward marital anarchy.

“The right wing would love nothing more than for us to spend all of our airtime discussing distractions such as polygamy, bestiality and other — from their point of view — doomsday scenarios rather than engage the public about committed same-sex couples being discriminated against,” says Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, which advocates marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.

“The opposition to ending discrimination in marriage for gay couples does not turn on how you feel about polygamy,” Wolfson says. “And the people who bring up polygamy are not ready to end discrimination against gay people anyway. It’s just a diversion.”

THE FORM OF polygamy many people are familiar with is the structure that at one point was practiced in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism: polygamy, when one man marries multiple wives. But a more communal, egalitarian form of group love called polyamory — “many loves” — has increased in visibility during the past few decades.

Polyamorous relationships can include heterosexual, gay and bisexual individuals who believe it is against their nature to have only one sexual and emotional lover. They are composed of many blends of multiple partners: a heterosexual woman with four bisexual husbands, a trio of gay men living as a single unit, or pairs of married heterosexual couples who live as a tribe, just to name a few of the possibilities.

A Dutch polyamorous relationship recently ignited a firestorm among conservative pundits and religious organizations in the U.S., after a married heterosexual couple entered into a “cohabitation contract” with their bisexual female lover. The “cohabitation contract” does not include all of the benefits and responsibilities that accompany Dutch marriages, but the trio celebrated their union by donning wedding regalia and holding a marriage ceremony.

Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, considers a polyamorous contract as “an unmistakable step down the road to legalized group marriage.”

“The use of cohabitation contracts was an important step along the road to same-sex marriage in the Netherlands,” Kurtz wrote in the Dec. 26 issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative newsmagazine. “The popularity of cohabitation contracts among Dutch gays in the 1980s helped create laws in the early 1990s forbidding employer discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — including discrimination between married and unmarried couples in the granting of benefits.”

Kurtz argued that Dutch society is taking the same “small step” approach toward polyamorous nuptials as it did for gay marriage — offering symbolic recognition and limited benefits (such as domestic partnerships for same-sex couples) until the mainstream population is comfortable granting full marital rights to non-traditional relationships.

Kurtz’s treatise — the latest in a line of articles linking gay marriage and polyamory penned by the conservative scribe — drew a rebuttal from The New Republic’s Rob Anderson who wrote that opposition to gay marriage is based on two variables: the “ick” factor and the “slippery slope” ...