Wonder how much longer before it's legalized in Massachusetts:

By Mark Steyn

When it comes to social progress - hang on, where are my scare quotes? - social "progress" - that's better. Anyway, when it comes to it, Britain and America often wind up at similar destinations but by two very different routes.

In the US, big changes - on abortion, gay marriage - are ushered in by judges claiming to have discovered a hitherto unknown right to them lurking in the "emanations" of the "penumbra" of the constitution: the "right to privacy", for example, under which abortion was legalised coast to coast. In Britain, everything's much more incremental and utilitarian: there was no great constitutional principle or human right attached to the legalisation of abortion; it was just a practical approach to a political problem.

On the whole, I prefer the American way. If someone constructs a great epic principle as the justification for social change - "a woman's right to choose" - it's very easy to respond with a great epic principle of your own - the "right to life". That's one reason why the anti-abortion movement in America is a going concern - and, indeed, year on year winning the argument. In Britain, by contrast, it's very hard to argue a great principle in the absence of any on the other side: "right to life" works well against the "right to choose"; it's less effective when the other chaps are mumbling, "Yes, well, there we are. Difficult question, did the best we could, all in the past now, no point raking everything up again."

Likewise, gay marriage. The guys in powdered wigs who wrote the state constitutions of Vermont and Massachusetts never thought explicitly to prohibit same-sex nuptials any more than they thought to decree that the sun was only permitted to shine during daylight hours. So various activist judges have insisted that forbidding a man from marrying a man is "unconstitutional".

In Britain, on the other hand, redefining marriage is, like abortion law, much more pragmatic. According to Nicholas Hellen in this weekend's Sunday Times, "The Inland Revenue is considering recognising polygamy for some religious groups for tax purposes. Officials have agreed to examine `family friendly' representations from Muslims who take up to four wives under sharia, the laws derived from the Koran. Existing rules allow only one wife for inheritance tax purposes. The Revenue has been asked to relax this so that a husband's estate can be divided tax-free between several wives."

This wasn't news to me, because I'd spotted an item six months back in that invaluable publication Pensions News. Contracting marriage with more than one spouse simultaneously is a crime in the United Kingdom. However, if a polygamous marriage is entered into abroad in a jurisdiction permitting polygamy, that marriage is regarded as valid under English law. Hence, the interest of Pensions News: trustees of pensions funds were concerned that, under new anti-discrimination regulations which came into effect in Britain last year, they'd be obligated to pay out to more than one widow, thus doubling, trebling or quadrupling their liability.

But you see how easy it is to start talking about polygamy in a nuts-and-bolts, incremental, legal-harmonisation, partners'-benefits, insurance-agent kind of a way. Just tidying up a bit of the fine print, old boy. Nothing to worry about. But, once a polygamous union is recognised as such by the Inland Revenue for the purposes of avoiding 40 per cent death duties, how long can the broader British state withhold recognition? No lack of taxation without representation!

When I mentioned the Pensions News item in a North American column on same-sex marriage, I was besieged by e-mails from huffy gays indignant at being compared with some up-country Nigerian wives-beater. "It's not the same thing at all," they insisted. But why? If the gender of the participants is no longer relevant, why should the number be? "Don't be ridiculous," they huffed back. "There's no demand for it." Au contraire, recent investigations into de facto polygamy in Muslim communities in France and Ontario suggest that even in Western jurisdictions there'll be many more takers for polygamy than for gay nuptials.

And why should only practising Muslims be entitled to its tax benefits? If you're a travelling salesman with a wife in Solihull and a mistress in Stockport, why shouldn't your better halves enjoy the same equality of treatment from the Revenue as Mullah Omar's get? Polygamy could solve an awful lot of problems, not least among my colleagues at The Spectator.

Logically, one can be either opposed to both (as I am) or in favour of both, but activists who maintain that homosexual marriage is fine but multi-sexual marriage isn't sound awfully like those couples who build their dream home in the country and then want to stop anybody else from moving in.

The YouGov poll on Britons' lack of religious faith, reported in yesterday's Telegraph, confirms that this country is well advanced in its post-Christian condition. Whereas 44 per cent of Britons believe in God and 44 per cent don't, in recent American polls the number who believe is 92 97 per cent and the number who don't is around three per cent. Three quarters of Americans believe in Hell, which is more than the bishops' bench in the House of Lords can say. Most Britons, for good or ill, are content in their post-Christian state. The danger is in assuming it's permanent, rather than an intermediate phase.

Last year, I was strolling down the boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal and saw across the street a Muslim woman, covered from head to toe in black, struggling home with her groceries past a "condom boutique" whose front window was advertising massive discounts on a, er, item of useful gay-sex paraphernalia. I wish I'd had a digital camera: there, in a single image, were the internal contradictions of the multicultural society. It seems highly improbable to me that gay hedonism and creeping sharia can co-exist for long. As yesterday's dispirited poll results implied, the modern multicultural state is really a nullity, a vacuum. The question is what's likely to fill it.

Read the above article in The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/28/do2802.xml

This is the left's idea of social "progress?"  No thank you. 

And most on the left, who support gay marriage, oppose polygamy.  Wake up in smell the hypocrisy, how can you say allow marriages for all consenting adults, and say no to polygamy.  How can you say we can redefine marriage for a small minority, but now for another small minority?

When do I get mine?  I wanna marry that parking meter outside my favorite cafe.  That way, she'll always be mine, and never charge me a dime!
;D

When do I get mine?  I wanna marry that parking meter outside my favorite cafe.  That way, she'll always be mine, and never charge me a dime!
;D

;D Don't be too sure.  You know wives have a way of making you pay one way or another. And how are you going to feel when another man (or a woman) tries to use her?  And, just out of curiosity, how do you go about determining the gender of a parking meter?

;D Don't be too sure.  You know wives have a way of making you pay one way or another. And how are you going to feel when another man (or a woman) tries to use her?  And, just out of curiosity, how do you go about determining the gender of a parking meter?

Yeah, I'd have to worry about her being tempted by some playboy in a Lexus.  Parking meter gender?  Oh it's a question of slots and knobs...
:-X
Shouldn't matter anyway, right?  I oughta be able to marry a male OR female parking meter, or both at once!