Monday, July 23, 2007

How far are we going to take the group marriage thing?

Now that the group marriage debate has been opened by The New York Times and the Weekly Standard, exactly how emboldened are the polyamorists? Now, I think this is a great idea. As Governor Dukakis pointed out in his presidential campaign (was he paid off by Massachusetts-based defense contractors to put Bush 41 in the Whitehouse? OK, that was a crazy baseless canard of a conspiracy theory. It's not like I can't identify them) it's impossible to raise a child in a 2-earner family. You've simply got to have more parents than that to make a family work.

As a country, we're tied to an old standard which expects a family to be supported by a single earner. But, with the theft of value by the rich continuing unabated and the collapse of the social safety net, that's simply not tenable.

So, the polyamorists are having a dinner Thursday, and the "poly curious" are welcome. Maybe I'll drop in and report back.

3 comments:

Beth said...

These are old ideas... every generation thinks they have reinvented the wheel. :)

http://www.polychromatic.com/fiction2.html

Rionn Fears Malechem said...

Wikipedia actually prevents us from such folly ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_marriage
The cultural forces that put us in dual marriage, I think, are being stressed to the breaking point by the economic realities of living in America. So, while, no, the idea of group marriage is old and well-articulated by 18th century German Utopians, the reasons for it have changed.

Rionn Fears Malechem said...

I did, by the way, stop by, but I chickened out and slunk away instead of joining the group. I saw two men and a woman in late middle age, and I didn't really know how I'd start a fruitful conversation -- there were too few of them to passively observe.