Here’s the text of an email I sent to Katherine Kersten of the Startribune, in response to today’s piece explaining that gay marriage leads to polygamy:

Ms Kersten,

In your recent column on gay marriage I believe you overlooked three points, and I look forward to hearing your opinions in a future column.

1. You neglected to explain exactly why polygamy is bad. I’m not convinced that it is bad, or at least that it is inevitably bad, but I think it’s poor journalistic form to warn us of an impending danger without telling us why it is a danger.

2. You also didn’t explain why your ‘thin end of the wedge’ represents a realistic outcome. The federal government is currently working on legislation that will reduce the unwarranted search protections of the Fourth Amendment. By your logic that means that they are working to overthrow the Bill of Rights, because one bad thing always leads to the next bad thing. I’m interested to hear exactly why gay marriage leads to polygamy, and for that matter why marriage isn’t the thin end of the wedge that leads to gay marriage.

3. Finally, and for me most significantly, you haven’t explained why the marriage amendment does not contain the additional words ‘for
life’ in defining a marriage. If the evidence shows that one man and one woman is the optimum for raising children, then surely the
existing prevelance of divorce is a much greater danger of polygamy? If we’re redefining marriage as a positive step, rather than as a
reaction to the idea that gays might be considered in some way normal, shouldn’t we concentrate on the larger threat of divorce first?

I look forward to any analysis you care to give of these issues.

A word of clarification: I don’t support polygamy, mainly because I don’t think it’s how humans are ‘wired’ to experience relationships, and hence leads too often to damaged participants. But it’s also a difficult practice to argue against because it can suit some people very well, and there isn’t (for me) a clear argument against it such as the informed consent argument that can be used against most relationships western society considers deviant. That’s reflected in the fact that it is so historically and geographically prevalent; I don’t know the stats, but I’d guess it’s the most common form of ‘marriage’ outside of the classical heterosexual monogamous ideal.

Update: Minnesota Politics has more.

I know I’m not the first to say this. It’s not even the first time I’ve said it. But I’m not going to let that stop me. Figure skating is enormously impressive, requiring a fine artistic mind and tremendous athletic ability. I have nothing but admiration for the countless hours of practice that the many competitors devote to it, and those men and women deserve the credit that should be given to all those who push the boundary of human ability.

BUT IT IS NOT A SPORT!

I thank you.

Take away our guns, take away our right to privacy, take away our very dignity, but there are some things you do not mess with.

The closing line from the BBC’s coverage of a woman who had 6 fingers reattached after an accident:

The operation to reattach a penis is the same kind of surgery to repair a severed finger, but far less common.

Amen.

I’ve been reading an excellent series about diabetes in New York in the eponymous Times. Today’s installment highlights a factoid that surprised me, even though it isn’t really odd when you think about it.

Even in China, the number of obese people has tripled since 1992 to 90 million, as Western food has become popular and prosperity has made it possible to eat more.

That means there are more obese (not just fat, but, erm, really fat) Chinese people then there are British people, fat or otherwise.

It highlights in a small way the incredible impact both China (1.3 billion people) and India (a paltry 1.1 billion) could have in the near future. Sheer weight of numbers (no pun intended) means that they only have to get things vaguely right, as they are beginning to do in manufacturing and somewhat in IT, to totally change how the world works. I know this might seem like a typical ‘the world is flat’ argument, but I’m not arguing about the technological aspects, or organizational, or even cultural. This is just from the numbers; close to half of the world’s population lives in two countries, so if either or both decide that they really want something, and can get even close to organized, whatever you or I want doesn’t really matter.

The reason I highlight this is because of an article I read by Mark Steyn, It’s the Demography, Stupid (hat-tip to Speckblog). The article makes some interesting points (though I dislike the reference to ‘Queer Studies’; Steyn should know that the correct term of witless dismissal is actually Ass-Bandit Studies, which might appear to exclude lesbians, but as our blessed Queen Victoria herself pointed out, women just don’t do that sort of thing).

Anyway, Steyn argues that the openness and tolerance of European nations to immigrants, particularly Islamic ones, combines disasterously with the relatively low birthrates among those nations compared to those of Islamic peoples. This seems to ignore the fact that it isn’t necessarily the ‘Islamicness’ of these people that makes their populations grow, but their economic condition, and that if the latter is fixed the former declines. Nonetheless such a correction can take many decades, in which time immigrants might gain the critical mass necessary to rest the democracies of Europe, and indeed the notion of democracy itself, from traditional Westerners.

While some of the arguments he makes are interesting, on reflection it seems he has missed the bigger picture. Yes, Islam could roll over the West like a scary tide of this-is-not-what-we-had-in-mindness, but assuming that the idea of Democracy isn’t strong enough to defend itself against that, it’s certainly not up to dealing with even a benign expansion from China or India. The point of democracy isn’t that it’s what white men do, though credit to them for coming up with such a system and making it stick. In fact there isn’t actually any ‘point’ to democracy at all, except for its inherent attractiveness. As a many-generation Western European I find it very difficult to understand how anybody would want to live in something other than a democracy, as comforting as a paternalistic dictatorship might appear, and I hold this belief so dearly that I’m not afraid to say that I’m right and anyone who disagrees is wrong. But conviction doesn’t equal correctness; democracy’s strength has to assert itself, has to be picked up by people across the world, not because I say it’s right but because they can see that it’s right.

That may happen to the wave of Middle Eastern immigrants arriving in Europe, and if it does not things will surely change. But worrying about them is like worrying about getting asbestosis from the building that’s falling on you.