pandora, unión homosexual y poligamia
[Charles Krauthammer] Si el matrimonio homosexual nos parece normal, ¿por qué no lo serían las uniones poligámicas?
Y ahora, la poligamia.
Con el dulce título de la seried ‘Big Love’ de HBO, la poligamia también sale del armario. Bajo el titular "¡Polígamos, Uníos!", Newsweek nos informa de la emergencia de "activistas de la poligamia en las secuelas del movimiento en pro del matrimonio homosexual". Dice un polígamo cristiano evangélico: "El derecho a la poligamia es la siguiente guerra en derechos civiles".
La poligamia era normalmente estereotipada como la provincia de paranoicos mormones, africanos primitivos y derrochadores árabes. Con ‘Big Love’ se traslada a los suburbios como otro estilo de vida alternativo.
Como observa Newsweek, estos agitaciones en pro de la poligamia tradicional (más precisamente, la poliamoría) tiene sus raíces en la creciente legitimación del matrimonio homosexual. En un ensayo hace diez años, señalé que era absolutamente lógico que tras los derechos homosexuales, siguieran los de la poligamia. Después de todo, si el matrimonio tradicional es definido como la unión de (1) dos personas de (2) sexo opuesto, y si, como insisten los defensores del matrimonio homosexual, la exigencia de género no es más que prejuicio, exclusión y la negación arbitraria de las opciones autónomas del individuo en el amor, entonces la primera exigencia -la restricción de número (dos y sólo dos) es igualmente arbitraria, discriminatoria y una negación indefendible de las opciones individuales.
Esta línea de argumentación pone furiosos a los activistas homosexuales. Puedo entender por qué no quieren ser confundidos con los polígamos. Pero no soy yo quién los confunde. Los confunde su argumento. El bloguero y autor Andrew Sullivan, que tuvo el coraje de defender el matrimonio homosexual cuando la causa era considerada absurda, la ha llamado la "diversión polígama", alegando que la homosexualidad y la poligamia son categóricamente diferentes porque la poligamia es una mera "actividad", mientras que la homosexualidad es un estado intrínseco que "ocupa un nivel más profundo de la conciencia humana".
Pero esta distinción entre órdenes superiores e inferiores del amor es precisamente lo que los activistas de los derechos homosexuales han rechazado tan vigorosamente cuando la cultura general "privilegia" (como dicen en los departamentos de inglés) las uniones heterosexuales sobre las homosexuales. ¿Giraba ‘Jules et Jim’ (y Jeanne Moreau), la clásica película de Truffaut sobre dos amigos enamorados de la misma mujer,
Para simplificar la lógica, eliminemos el complicado factor del género. Digamos que, por ejemplo, tres mujeres homosexuales están profundamente enamoradas unas de otras. ¿Sobre qué bases rechazarían los activistas homosexuales sus uniones como mera actividad antes que como amor auténtico y auto-expresión? ¿O sobre qué bases insistirían en la tradicional, arbitraria y exclusivista cifra de dos?
Lo que es históricamente torpe es que mientras el matrimonio homosexual gana en aceptación, la resistencia a la poligamia se hace mucho más fuerte. Sin embargo, hasta esta generación, el matrimonio homosexual, que sepamos, no ha sido aceptado por ninguna sociedad en ningún momento de la historia. Por otro lado, la poligamia fue aceptada, y en realidad era común, en grandes partes del planeta durante largos segmentos de la historia, más conspicuamente en el Oriente Medio bíblico y en gran parte del mundo musulmán.
No soy de los que ven al matrimonio homosexual o la poligamia como una amenaza o un ataque contra el matrimonio tradicional. El asalto vino desde dentro. El matrimonio no necesitaba ayuda para gestionar su propio lento y prolongado suicidio, gracias. Las astronómicas tasas de divorcio y paternidad soltera (la creación deliberada de familias sin padre) existían antes de que hubiera un solo matrimonio homosexual o cualquier intento de sancionar la poligamia. La acuñación de estas nuevas formas de matrimonio es un síntoma del radical individualismo contemporáneo de nuestra cultura -así como el decline del matrimonio tradicional- y no su causa.
En cuanto al matrimonio homosexual, he llegado a una estudiada ambivalencia. Creo que es un error que la sociedad haga esta declaración última de indiferencia entre la vida homosexual y la heterosexual, aunque sólo fuera por razones de pedagogía. Por otro lado, tengo amigos homosexuales y siento el dolor de su incapacidad de disfrutar del mismo nivel de la aprobación y confirmación sociales de su relación con un ser querido, de modo que no me voy a subir a la barricada de nadie para impedírselos. Sin embargo, es fundamental que todo gran cambio en la definición misma de matrimonio sea impuesta democráticamente y no (como en el desastroso caso del aborto) por una orden judicial.
Llamadme agnóstico. Pero no me digáis que podemos hacer cambios radicales a la regla de un hombre, una mujer, y no permitir que otros reclamen su derecho a ser tratados con el mismo respeto.
Y ahora, la poligamia.Con el dulce título de la seried ‘Big Love’ de HBO, la poligamia también sale del armario. Bajo el titular "¡Polígamos, Uníos!", Newsweek nos informa de la emergencia de "activistas de la poligamia en las secuelas del movimiento en pro del matrimonio homosexual". Dice un polígamo cristiano evangélico: "El derecho a la poligamia es la siguiente guerra en derechos civiles".
La poligamia era normalmente estereotipada como la provincia de paranoicos mormones, africanos primitivos y derrochadores árabes. Con ‘Big Love’ se traslada a los suburbios como otro estilo de vida alternativo.
Como observa Newsweek, estos agitaciones en pro de la poligamia tradicional (más precisamente, la poliamoría) tiene sus raíces en la creciente legitimación del matrimonio homosexual. En un ensayo hace diez años, señalé que era absolutamente lógico que tras los derechos homosexuales, siguieran los de la poligamia. Después de todo, si el matrimonio tradicional es definido como la unión de (1) dos personas de (2) sexo opuesto, y si, como insisten los defensores del matrimonio homosexual, la exigencia de género no es más que prejuicio, exclusión y la negación arbitraria de las opciones autónomas del individuo en el amor, entonces la primera exigencia -la restricción de número (dos y sólo dos) es igualmente arbitraria, discriminatoria y una negación indefendible de las opciones individuales.
Esta línea de argumentación pone furiosos a los activistas homosexuales. Puedo entender por qué no quieren ser confundidos con los polígamos. Pero no soy yo quién los confunde. Los confunde su argumento. El bloguero y autor Andrew Sullivan, que tuvo el coraje de defender el matrimonio homosexual cuando la causa era considerada absurda, la ha llamado la "diversión polígama", alegando que la homosexualidad y la poligamia son categóricamente diferentes porque la poligamia es una mera "actividad", mientras que la homosexualidad es un estado intrínseco que "ocupa un nivel más profundo de la conciencia humana".
Pero esta distinción entre órdenes superiores e inferiores del amor es precisamente lo que los activistas de los derechos homosexuales han rechazado tan vigorosamente cuando la cultura general "privilegia" (como dicen en los departamentos de inglés) las uniones heterosexuales sobre las homosexuales. ¿Giraba ‘Jules et Jim’ (y Jeanne Moreau), la clásica película de Truffaut sobre dos amigos enamorados de la misma mujer,
Para simplificar la lógica, eliminemos el complicado factor del género. Digamos que, por ejemplo, tres mujeres homosexuales están profundamente enamoradas unas de otras. ¿Sobre qué bases rechazarían los activistas homosexuales sus uniones como mera actividad antes que como amor auténtico y auto-expresión? ¿O sobre qué bases insistirían en la tradicional, arbitraria y exclusivista cifra de dos?
Lo que es históricamente torpe es que mientras el matrimonio homosexual gana en aceptación, la resistencia a la poligamia se hace mucho más fuerte. Sin embargo, hasta esta generación, el matrimonio homosexual, que sepamos, no ha sido aceptado por ninguna sociedad en ningún momento de la historia. Por otro lado, la poligamia fue aceptada, y en realidad era común, en grandes partes del planeta durante largos segmentos de la historia, más conspicuamente en el Oriente Medio bíblico y en gran parte del mundo musulmán.
No soy de los que ven al matrimonio homosexual o la poligamia como una amenaza o un ataque contra el matrimonio tradicional. El asalto vino desde dentro. El matrimonio no necesitaba ayuda para gestionar su propio lento y prolongado suicidio, gracias. Las astronómicas tasas de divorcio y paternidad soltera (la creación deliberada de familias sin padre) existían antes de que hubiera un solo matrimonio homosexual o cualquier intento de sancionar la poligamia. La acuñación de estas nuevas formas de matrimonio es un síntoma del radical individualismo contemporáneo de nuestra cultura -así como el decline del matrimonio tradicional- y no su causa.
En cuanto al matrimonio homosexual, he llegado a una estudiada ambivalencia. Creo que es un error que la sociedad haga esta declaración última de indiferencia entre la vida homosexual y la heterosexual, aunque sólo fuera por razones de pedagogía. Por otro lado, tengo amigos homosexuales y siento el dolor de su incapacidad de disfrutar del mismo nivel de la aprobación y confirmación sociales de su relación con un ser querido, de modo que no me voy a subir a la barricada de nadie para impedírselos. Sin embargo, es fundamental que todo gran cambio en la definición misma de matrimonio sea impuesta democráticamente y no (como en el desastroso caso del aborto) por una orden judicial.
Llamadme agnóstico. Pero no me digáis que podemos hacer cambios radicales a la regla de un hombre, una mujer, y no permitir que otros reclamen su derecho a ser tratados con el mismo respeto.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
17 de marzo de 2006
©washington post
©traducción mQh
1 comentario
Gulliver -
A naïve observer would be surprised when realizing that the West can accept every sexual practice among consenting adults, as it is said, (prostitution, lovers, single mothers, serial divorce, male and female homosexuality, wife swapping) but one: polygamy, which should be in principle the first to be accepted after the monogamous and indissoluble marriage. And not only for the sake of security for women and children and as a barrier against sexual diseases, but because the West, allegedly, takes its roots from the Bible and polygamy is the only of these practices, which was accepted in the Old Testament ad never rejected in the New Testament (and even accepted implicitly), what is not the case of divorce, accepted in the Old Testament, BUT directly rejected by Jesus. Not so in the Greek-Roman world, where all the former immoral practices from the Scriptural point of view- were admitted, BUT not polygamy. This simple fact should make suspicious, as to whether the West is really Christian or has simply gone on being pagan Greek-Roman.
Every time we meet an enigma or a contradiction, we should wonder why are the reasons not brought to the light and what or which interests dont want to be made explicit. In this case, we will try to know something about the history of polygamy ad to imagine what would happen in our western world if it would be admitted.
Most people are told that polygamy was permitted in the Old Testament, but abolished by Jesus and this is all they know abut its history, but this is outright false and, at the same time, it doesnt say anything about the rest of the world, which wasnt Old Testament.
The truth is that polygamy was prohibited about 2.000 years before Christ by Indo-Europeans when they left their original country present Kazakhstan- and started their conquests in Europe and Asia.
Unlike other conquerors, which used polygamy to assimilate conquered peoples, they preferred to maintain their victims submitted forever, so they kept their families closed to them. To this purpose, they also created the system of casts in India, forbid for a long time marriages with Spaniards in Visigoth Spain, across social classes in Persia and so on.
Women of conquered countries couldnt be wives, so they were used as sexual preys. This is the big difference between slavery in Semitic peoples and Roman-Greek slavery. In the first case, slave women had to become eventually wives or be liberated, so that slavery was a kind of domestic labour. In the second case, slaves were cattle and not persons.
Please use logic: you conquer a country and leave thousands of women without a husband. If you admit polygamy, these women will find a new husband and many of the conquerors will take may of them as their wives. This way, in two or three generations, there wont be possible to distinguish among the winners and the losers: all will be united by family ties and wealth will go back to the defeated ones. Now you prohibit polygamy: the widows of the defeated people and their children will make up a mass of slaves. Poor and ignorant people and slaves become an easy sexual prey for the conquerors.
The first formula was used by Moslems in their conquests, which explains why Islam spread so quickly and was so easily accepted: in a generation innumerable people of their conquests were really the conquerors children. This explains also why there has never been class discrimination in Moslem countries and why these countries have always been immune to communism. The same formula was used by the Spaniards in their conquest of America, only that, since polygamy was prohibited by the Catholic religion, but accepted in the practice, these children of the conquerors were illegitimate children, so that class discrimination prevailed there.
The second formula is the Indo-European Greek-Roman one and this is the reason why Roman-Greek slavery was so abusive slaves were cattle ad not people- and why social revolutions and attempts to establish communism have been a constant in Greek, Roman and western history.
Of course, there is nothing Christian about it, nor any intention of morality or protecting the dignity of women, as it is hypocritically said. The only intention is to keep other races and social classes apart and down forever and to prevent wealth and power from being redistributed and shared. Unless woman means women from upper classes and all other women are not considered women, you are not protecting at all the dignity of women by throwing poor women into destitution, prostitution or loneliness. In relation with rich women, what you are protecting, is their wealth from being shared or redistributed. By producing masses of street children without a father, you are creating social hate for the next revolution. That is why you have 3 million street children in a rich country like Brazil, but none in the poorest Moslem country.
There you begin to realize that greed brings trouble and that virtue has in itself its reward. Societies where polygamy is prohibited, become segmented societies, where races, nationalities and classes are separated. An abyss not only of wealth, but also of education ad mentality develops between the upper class and the lower one, and this abyss creates a vicious circle, where you can hardly anymore integrate social classes. Polygamy becomes this way very hard. How could you unite in a family two wives with conflicting mentalities? One educated and the other one rather primitive? It is very easy to enforce monogamy ad throw thousands or millions of women into prostitution, but is quite hard to make a wife out of a prostitute. From another point of view, it is easier to teach women that if they want a husband, they have to snatch it from another woman, to make them jealous out of fear of losing their husbands- and to foster this way a mass of serial polygamous men, but it doesnt go so easily the other way round: to teach women that they can keep a husband more easily together wit another woman.
I havent explained that polygamy forces social classes to melt, so I will do it now.
It is sometimes quoted that at birth, there is a small surplus of men over women and this is embedded in our genes. Yes, but it is also that men have a higher mortality rate than women, so that for one million years (or 50.000 years, it depends where you put the boundary of what you consider men), there has always been a surplus of 10-20% women, so that in bad times, the rate of polygamous marriages was of 5% of the total, causing the population to increase and in good times, this rate fell to, say 2,5%, making the population more stable. This small proportion of women over men, in each case, made polygamy very difficult to satisfy inside the own social class, race and nation, forcing men, who wanted to be polygamous, to look for difficult marriages, that is, outside their own social class, race and nation. The more difficult were the times, the higher was the mortality and poverty of a nation, the easier was to be polygamous, so that this automatic stabilizer united again rich and poor people and helped to overcome poverty itself.
If you eradicate polygamy and keep things this way for hundreds or thousands of years, not only have you destroyed this powerful egalitarian and redistributing mechanism, but you create enormous forces, which prevent polygamy from being accepted by the upper social classes.
Not only have you the cultural abyss I spoke about, but you have got upper classes, used to stay isolated, to keep wealth and power for themselves and to look down at the lower classes. They can accept women from lower classes as prostitutes, and in some cases as lovers as long as they dont inherit and as their children are branded as illegitimate- but never as wives with equal rights.
Women from upper classes get used to consider marriage as the ideal way to catch a big fortune, so that polygamy would be unacceptable for them, since it would mean that-since the richer is a man, the easier he could afford more than one wife-this endeavour would be self-annihilating. Imagine a wealthy man who has four wives and 16 children. Some of the wives have to be from lower social cases, other nations or other races-there are not enough women in the upper class- In the next generation, this wealth gets divided by 16 and a good part of it goes to other classes, races and nations. We have to understand that it is just this effect of redistributing wealth and access to the upper classes, what makes polygamy unpalatable to the leaders of the West. Homosexuality, serial divorce, lovers, everybody going to bed with everybody, prostitution, on the other hand, are for them absolutely harmless.
Not to speak of the way polygamy fosters interracial and international marriages: imagine a rich man saying: I prefer having two wives of another race or a third world country, rather than just one of my nation, race and class. Sexual tourism could be replaced with marriage tourism. Wars would be more difficult: you dont like to kill your in-laws. The lobby of arms industry would protest.
It is also a historical constant that rich nations with strong social and income differences have to resort to an aggressive imperial foreign policy to stop its lower classes from resorting to a revolution. Rome, Spain, Russia are clear examples. When this external expansion has failed or ended in a defeat, the revolutionary explosion is inevitable. In the case of Rome, after the failure of Spartacus, Christianity spread so quickly, because it was the next opportunity to dismantle a social order of upper classes, which oppressed the lower ones. Christians, at the beginning as the New Testament says- had everything in common, but this lasted only as long as the persecutions, 3 centuries, and we now through history, that Christianity admitted polygamy for several centuries in the Middle Ages. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire with Constantine, around 305, little by little, Roman laws had to be enforced and it is St. Agustin himself (one of the great theologians) who candidly confesses that polygamy is now forbidden, because we have to accept Roman laws.
Christian societies became this way also divided among social classes, and Churches had to resort to an increasing sexual and religious repression to prevent social and religious disintegration.
Nowadays, when sex cannot be repressed anymore and when the only political and social repression possible in the West is diverting pressure towards international wars, we are seeing the ridiculous situation, where, on the one hand, all possible sexual practices are admitted in the name of personal freedom of consenting adults, but polygamy, is even punished with prison (if it is so bad for women, why this threat?) and on the other hand, that the famous democratic freedom of assembly or meeting allows people to meet for whatever purpose, even for sexual purposes, provided that casual or payable sex is intended, but, prohibits with all possible means that more than two persons meet sexually wit love and with the intention of helping each other beyond a pure sexual or payable purpose.
It is so ridiculous and so oppressive at the same time, that we cannot imagine that our leaders and the political and social forces, which support them are so stupid or crazy, so that we have to try to imagine what would happen if polygamy ware admitted:
As we said before, the prohibition of polygamy has created a society divided in classes, with a high barrier between poor and rich and, conversely, polygamy would force rich men, who wanted to be polygamous, to look for additional wives in lower social classes, other races and poor countries, where, due to higher mortality and lower standards of living, there would be a higher imbalance women/men, redistributing this way wealth and income and making wars more difficult was among nations.
Whatever sexual practice, but polygamy, hasnt got these effects, so that it is easy to conclude that this is the very reason why polygamy is both so prohibited and why it is almost impossible that it gets admitted in the West: it collides frontally with the very root of the greed of our ruling classes, since it would erode the class-society itself.
The only possibility for polygamy in the West is that people, at grassroots level, get fed up with this ridiculous and oppressive fact: everything is admitted in sex but polygamy. Men and women can meet and be together in whatever number for each ad every purpose but for the purpose of combining sex with love and mutual care, when they are more that two. We get constantly taught that we shouldnt be jealous and envious in all aspects of life, but in sex when united with love and care- we are forced to be jealous and even threatened with prison if we arent.
But polygamy is oppressive for those many women, who dont like it! No danger for them: the ratio women men doesnt allow more than a maximum of 5% of men to be polygamous and polygamy would be, on the other hand, very good news for those women who dont like it. The more women like polygamy, the fewer men will available for those women who dislike polygamy.