I have nothing against gay men, I just wouldn't want one to marry my daughter.
(DISCLAMER: that was a JOKE. I don't even HAVE a daughter and I'm fully supportive of homosexuals. I just thought it was just too good a joke not to make.)
Sampler said:
So we're pretty much all fine and dandy with homosexuality, but what about polygamy? How do people feel about someone's ability to have more than one true love and how would they feel if their significant other proposed the idea?
If you think about it for a moment, the bias against polygamy has its roots in the same bias against homosexuality- the insistence on rigidly defining what a "proper relationship" is allowed to be. The same way the homophobes insist that marriage must be between a man and a woman, most normal, fair-minded people are perfectly willing to lose the gender limitations and let it be "between two people"- but still insist on sticking to the number.
Let's break it down into a series of points, shall we?
1. Unless you're some kind of sappy romantic who believes there is one and only one perfect "soulmate" out there who is "meant for you", most people will accept that it's perfectly possible for there to be more than one person in the world at a time that you're capable of loving.
2. Now, say you meet two of these people at the same time. They're both the kind of person you can fall for- maybe not necessarily the same kind of person, but both right for you.
3. So what do you do? Conventional wisdom (and the laws of love-triangle melodrama) insist that you have to "choose" one of them to be with and the other can only be a friend at best, or a "second love" when your first chosen one dies in a tragic car accident halfway through the third act.
4. But why is that? There are two people near you that you're in love with, so what's preventing you from simply being with both of them? "Because that's not how it's done." Apparently you only have a finite amount of love (not counting between family members) and you aren't allowed to split it between more than one person.
5. So the excluded party gets to be unhappy (at best they get to be a friend of the person they love) and you get to be less happy than you could otherwise be, because you're not getting to be with one of the two people you love. But that's alright, because at least you're not breaking societal taboos.
Personally, if I knew that someone I loved who loved me back and was in a relatinoship with also had someone else they loved enough to want to have a relationship with, why would I want to deny them? OK, she'd have to split her time and attention between us, but between me and the other man we could only make her happier than either of us could make her alone. Insisting she choose would only result in one of us being unhappy and her being less happy than she could be, and wouldn't that be awfully selfish of me (not to mention arrogant to assume that I can make her happier alone than two men she loves at once)?
Of course there is always the possibility of extenuating circumstances to take into account- if two of the "corners" in a love triangle can't stand each other, or if one of them is visibly bad for the 3rd party. And of course there's always selfish people who just take and take in a relationship who want it all for themselves (but they appear in monogamous relationships as well). But I think this argument I make forms a strong basis to start from.
I'm just an agnostic (not to be confused with atheist) lesbian who believes that love is stronger than human blindness or willful ignorance.
