The slippery slope doesn’t slope that way

Creepy bastard Rulon Jeffs poses with his newly acquired wives shortly before he died of old age.

William Saletan has two posts up about the slippery slope threats made by conservatives regarding gay marriage—basically, that if we allow that, then polygamy and incest are next. Saletan agrees with the slippery slope argument, but doesn’t think it’s a bad thing to switch from the taboo model of managing human sexual relations to the harm reduction/privacy model that he thinks is the groundwork for homosexuality. I’m not saying that he’s strictly wrong in his views on tolerance of cousins marrying or polygamy—consenting adults and all that—but I think his assumptions about the groundwork that made same-sex marriage possible is all off, and it taints his argument.

I don’t think that same-sex marriage is becoming more socially acceptable because people are more interested in privacy. I think it’s a matter of increasing egalitarianism and feminism especially. And so I strongly disagree with him that the tides are turning towards more social acceptance of cousin marriage and polygamy.

Cousin marriage doesn’t really seem to be a feminist issue, but the implication that Saletan is trotting out—that there’s some tide turning in favor of allowing it—goes against history in a big way. Saletan has got to know this, since he trots out cousin marriers like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. In half the states of the U.S., marrying your first cousin is legal, and those are the sort of laws that hang on from the past, and are not recent innovations that stem from increasing tolerance. The incest taboo in American and Western European cultures has recently expanded to cover first cousin incest,* and my sense of it is that it’s a result of people’s greater mobility and urbanity. We just meet a lot more people than in the rural past. We have high school, college, and internet dating now. Cousin marriage has become a marker of severe social isolation and backwardness.

The El Dorado raid tells me that society is becoming harsher on polygamy, not more tolerant. And it’s about egalitarianism—we’re more aware than ever, thanks to books like Under the Banner of Heaven, of how brutal and unfair polygamy is to women. It’s also unsustainable, because inconveniently, our species tends to produce equal number of men and women, so polygamy is going to create a huge underclass of men that can’t marry. Saletan admits that polygamy is pretty much inseparable from child marriage, but suggests that if there was a way for it to be adult and consensual, society would have to tolerate it. Maybe, but I don’t think it’s ever going to exist without the teenage brides aspect, because fully empowered women are going to say no to polygamy the vast majority of the time. And it’s not just about jealousy, as Saletan suggests. Polygamy is about the domination of women, about treating women like collectible totems, and there’s not a way to do that without reducing women to property.

Legally, we can’t step in and prosecute polygamists who keep it all adult and legal, not without ensnaring people that are into polyamory or just plain adultery, things that fall out of the scope of massive social issues and are private matters. But we can and we should pounce on the child abuse aspects to prosecute the hell out of polygamist cults. I highly doubt that they’re going to rethink the age at which they push girls to marry to avoid prosecution. Half of the reason these cults appeal is that they give their members reasons to feel persecuted for being true believers, and thus violating the social constrictions against raping teenage girls is just too delicious an opportunity. But of course by doing so, they give the government a reason to go after them with both barrels.

*In fact, it’s gotten a little ridiculous, with people having strong taboos against not just your first cousins, but second and third cousins, too. There was a frustrating episode of “30 Rock” where Tina Fey dumps a guy that’s perfect for her because he’s like her 5th cousin. I mean, I get that they had to hustle him out of sight because her wretched singleness is the source of many jokes, but I just didn’t buy that people would give a shit if distant cousins got it on.