Table of Contents

Monogamous versus Polyamorous Cultures

“Monogamous”1) and “polyamorous”2) cultures have very dissimilar approaches to life. Religious practice3) and monogamous marriage4) are the main differences in their contrasting approaches to the sexual act. Coexistence necessitates that the differences be observed by giving parents of both cultures control over the programs that cause conflict: education, adolescent health, and sex education.

In between these two cultures lies the welfare state and its operational bureaucracy. The question is how this state bureaucracy can serve these two very different cultures.

1. Coexistence

Is it possible for these two cultures to live together in the same political order? Two issues leap to the fore in their political consequences:

  1. Population. In population, the culture of monogamy is fertile and expanding, while the culture of polyamory is below replacement and contracting.5)
  2. Money. The culture of monogamy is inexpensive, while the culture of polyamory is very expensive.6)

2. Public Policy

In the tension between monogamy and polyamory, whether by happenstance or deliberate design, the culture of polyamory has figured out its way to survive and even thrive. It does so by controlling three critical areas of public policy, which yield big gains in “converts” from the culture of monogamy to the culture of polyamory. These three areas are

  1. childhood education
  2. sexual education
  3. the control of adolescent health programs.7)

Controlling these three expands the polyamory culture’s reach into the traditional monogamous culture and gradually dismantles it, especially when aided by the entertainment industry, which today especially, is a very powerful institution aligned with the culture of polyamory with a massive operative bias against the monogamy culture.8)

By controlling these three areas (education of children, sexual education, and adolescent health), the culture of polyamory diminishes the influence and dismantles the authority of parents in the culture of monogamy, particularly in their ability to form their children as members of their own culture.9) In a polemical vein, one could say they “snatch” children away from their parents and from the culture of monogamy.

3. The Sexual Ideal

This “snatching” is almost complete when these three program areas result in adolescents accepting and engaging in sexual intercourse.

Every time the polyamorous (anti-monogamy) programs10) and the media succeed in drawing teenagers into sexual activity they have won a number of victories simultaneously:

  • The adolescent has been initiated into the polyamorous culture (albeit without knowledge of what is at stake) by having his first sexual experience outside of marriage;11)
  • With the out-of-wedlock births or abortions that follow, they have broken the family before it has started,12) solidifying the polyamorous stature of the adolescent or young adult;
  • And, especially, they have pulled the young person away from participating in the sacred, because formerly religious teenagers who begin to engage regularly in sex outside of marriage tend to stop worshipping God.13)

4. Polyamory's Silent Attack

All this the culture of polyamory achieves without any overt, direct attack. It is silent, subtle, but very substantive in its outcomes.

For instance, in the United States in the last decade, the rise of abstinence education— monogamy education—immediately galvanized the institutions of the culture of polyamory in the U.S. into massive political counter-attack, culminating in their recent victory which eliminated federal funding for such programs.14) This came to pass despite all the good that came with abstinence, including reducing teenage abortions, out-of-wedlock births, and sexually transmitted diseases,15) while increasing educational attainment.

In Europe, where the culture of polyamory has greater sway, the clearest illustration of its continuing advance is the attack against home-schooling and home rearing, either in early childhood (up to six years of age) or throughout even longer periods of childhood. In homeschooling, the big three programs (education, adolescent health, and sex education) are all under the control of the parents, and, as shown by in-depth U.S. data, yield outcomes far superior to what the state-controlled programs can yield.16)

1)
Monogamous individuals only have sexual relationships with their spouse.
2)
Polyamorous individuals engage in a wide variety of sexual relationships with multiple sexual partners either at once or over the course of one’s life. Polyamorous relationships include, but are not limited to, serial heterosexual relationships, extra-marital relationships, bisexual relationships, homosexual relationships, polygamous relationships, and polyandrous relationships.
3)
Jennifer Manlove, Cassandra Logan, Kristen A. Moore, and Erum Ikramullah, “Pathways from Family Religiosity to Adolescent Sexual Activity and Contraceptive Use,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 40, no. 2 (2008): 105-117.
4)
Anthony Paik, “Adolescent Sexuality and the Risk of Marital Dissolution,” Journal of Marriage and Family 73, no. 2 (2011) : 472-485.
Tim B. Heaton, “Factors Contributing to Increasing Marital Stability in the United States,” Journal of Family Issues 23, no. 3 (2002): 392-409.
5)
Henry Potrykus and Pat Fagan, “Marriage, Contraception, and the Future of Western Peoples,” The Marriage and Religion Research Institute (2011), available at http://marri.us/research/research-papers/marriage-contraception-the-future-of-western-peoples/.
6)
Henry Potrykus and Patrick Fagan, “Non-Marriage Reduces U.S. Labor Participation: The Abandonment of Marriage Puts America at Risk of a Depression,” The Marriage and Religion Research Institute, available at http://marri.us/research/research-papers/non-marriage-reduces-u-s-labor-participation/.
Phillip Longman, Paul Corcuera, Laurie DeRose, Marga Gonzalvo Cirac, Andres Salazar, Claudia Tarud Aravena, and Antonio Torralba, “The Empty Cradle: How Contemporary Family Trends Undermine the Global Economy,” in The Sustainable Demographic Dividend: What Do Marriage & Fertility Have to do with the Economy?, The Social Trends Institute (2011), available at http://sustaindemographicdividend.org/.
7)
NCSL, Guttmacher Institute, “State Policies on Sex Education in Schools,” National Conference of State Legislatures, last modified February 13, 2015, http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-policies-on-sex-education-in-schools.aspx.
8)
Carol J. Pardon, Kelly Ladin L’ Engle, and Jane D. Brown, “Linking Exposure to Outcomes: Early Adolescents’ Consumption of Sexual Content in Six Media,” Mass Communication & Society 8, no. 2 (May 2008): 84 and 88.
9)
Bill Albert, “Parental Influence and Teen Pregnancy,” National Campaign to Prevent Teenage Pregnancy (February 2004), available at https://thenationalcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resource-primary-download/ss8_parentinfluence.pdf.
10)
Future of Sex Education Initiative, “National Sexuality Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K–12 (a special publication of the Journal of School Health)“ (2012), available at http://www.futureofsexeducation.org/documents/josh-fose-standards-web.pdf.
11)
Anthony Paik, “Adolescent Sexuality and the Risk of Marital Dissolution,” Journal of Marriage and Family 73, no. 2 (April 2011): 472 and 480.
12)
“Births to Unmarried Women: Indicators on Children and Youth,” Child Trends Data Bank (December 2015), available at http://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/75_Births_to_Unmarried_Women.pdf.
13)
James M. Nonnemaker, Clea A. McNeely, and Robert W. Blum, “Public and Private Domains of Religiosity and Adolescent Health Risk Behaviors: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health,” Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 57, No. 11 (2003), 2049–2054.
14)
Office of Management and Budget, “Discretionary Cuts, Consolidations, and Saving,” in Fiscal Year 2015 Budget of the U.S. Government, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2014), 155. Available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2015/assets/budget.pdf.
15)
Robert Rector, “The Effectiveness of Abstinence Education Programs in Reducing Sexual Activity Among Youth,” Heritage Backgrounder No. 1533 (April 2002), available at http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2002/04/the-effectiveness-of-abstinence-education-programs.
16)
Dr. Brian Ray, Strengths of Their Own: Homeschoolers Across America, (NHERI Publications, 1997).