They do say that bigamy is the only crime which comes with its own punishment. And of course I include bigandry in that too.

But jaylex is right, of course. What business in all the flaming hells does the government -- and much less the Church -- have to take any interest at all in whether I cohabit and/or have regular sex with one woman, ten women, four men, or two goats and a sheep, as long as they are all consenting adults and we don't frighten the horses? Once we pry the cold dead hands of the religious right off the reins of power, all reference to anyone's personal predilections should be struck from the legal codex forever, and replaced with a single query:

"Is it hurting anyone? How do you know? Can you prove it?"

"The usual Western Christian puritanical double-minded sexual script is full of essentially sex and body negative presumptions, and essentially contains NO Wisdom at all re sexuality."

And you live in the West because? In any case, I’d encourage you to study art history.

Christianity and sex are good friends. The “sex-positive” activist talk is code for adults-only libertarianism or male-first libertarianism. So Christians have boundaries, deal with it.

They didn’t sacrifice their children to the sun gods in G-strings. I’m okay with that.

And by the way, what happened to all those mythical rainbow sex-positive cultures? You’re welcome to live in Saudi Arabia though. I’m not stopping you. (There are even sex-positive cannibal cultures for the peckish.)

The great social problem of the present time is not the fragmentation of the family, which is only a symptom of the ruling zeitgeist - namely the zeitgeist created by 24/7 TV, and wall to wall advertising.

The great social problem is the fragmentation of all forms of community and the destruction of the intimate and Spiritual culture of community, in favour of the domination of humanity by the abstract and dehumanizing Power of the State (both via government, and corporations which now rule the world), and all the media of popular indoctrination, the primary, now all powerful vector of which is TV, especially commercial TV.

When did you ever find commercial TV, or Fox "news", inviting or encouraging any one to exercise informed discriminative intelligence about ANYTHING?

The usual man conceives himself in isolation and dramatizes his life in those terms. What is the image of the "good" life? Having your own self-enclosed castle, your own husband or wife, your own kids, your own everything. Everybody having his "own" same thing. His own car, his own house, his own TV set. And dreadfully fearful that they may lose it all.

Everybody "living" the "good"-life in their little boxes of ticky tacky - ALL THE SAME.

As a result, we do not make use of what we gained after thousands of years of struggling at the vital survival level. Which is the possibility of consciously creating a truly human culture in which we do not have to always live on an emergency basis relative to the life-processes anymore.

A culture in which we can freely share the life-force, the collective responsibility of life, so that we can survive and prosper without great negative dramas. By doing that we can make our energy available for greater activities, the creative process altogether.

We do not have to be over-whelmed by all of the NOW culturally mandated salt of the earth horse manure all the time.

There is no need to legalise polygamous marriage.

A man or a woman can have several “partners” and have children from each, and no one is married to anyone else.

It now requires two or more incomes to run a family, and polygamous arrangements with many children would likely require taxpayer funding to adequately support the children.

What is most concerning, is the feminist system of de facto relationships, and about 30% of children are currently being born outside of marriage in this country (about 50% in the UK), and most of these children will not have a father in a few years, and most will eventually be living on some type of welfare payment, and many will be living in poverty with little chance in life.

There is little to fear of gay marriage or polygamous marriage.

There is much more to fear with the feminist system of de facto relationships that is now widespread.

Ben, your arguments, or more accurately rants, are as subtle as a sledge hammer. You have not said one intelligent thing in the various postings that you have made over the years.

All of your rants would be given a F triple minus in any decent journalism school. Or University philosophy or sociology department. Whether at a secular university, or a Christian university, especially those run by the Jesuits which have always demanded rigorous philosophical argument and scholarship.

Nor would any of your rants be published in any newspaper,including lowest common denominator tabloids. Nor would, or could, they be published in any self-respecting PRINT magazine or journal.

By contrast many or most of the essays published on OLO would be acceptable to the above. Indeed a good number are published elsewhere.

Pornography is of course a world-wide problem and a source of the degradation of women and children altogether.

It is no accident that the USA is one of the biggest sources of pornography (maybe THE biggest). Both the pornography which abuses women and children, and the pornography of violence which saturates and now patterns every aspect of USA "culture".

Brought to one and all courtesy of the NRA and the military-industrial complex, or rather the merchants of death (for which you are obviously very fond). It is course the sixtieth anniversary of Eisenhower's famous warning re the military-industrial-complex. As it turns out it was a most prophetic warning, which of course was ignored.

This wall to wall pornography of sex and death is an INEVITABLE manifestation of the sex and body negative puritanical double-mindedness that now saturates all of USA "culture" - that supposedly most "religious" of countries, or so the hype and lies tell us.

This is the most spectacular example of the slippery slope fallacy we've seen on OLO in some time.

Marriage is a social construct. It reflects society's norms and values. Our society's norms have changed so most of us no longer think discrimination against gay people is acceptable. Allelujah for that.