At the most recent World Congress of Families in Amsterdam, family scholar Pat Fagan argued that the culture of the traditional family is now in intense competition with a very different culture :
The defining difference between the two is the sexual ideal embraced. The traditional family of Western civilization is based on lifelong monogamy. The competing culture is polyamorous, normally a serial polygamy both before and after the first marriage, but also increasingly polymorphous in its different sexual expressions.I hope there is an elegance in the simple distinction between the ideals that distinguish the two cultures: monogamy and polymorphous serial polygamy, or “polyamory” for short.
Some of the differences between the two cultures are:
First and foremost religion has a very different place in both cultures. The culture of monogamy is infused from top to bottom with the sacred, in personal, family, community and national life. Worship of God is frequent and assumed. The culture of polyamory tends much more to hide religion, even to suppress it in all things public. It worships God less and demands religion be private.[ . . . ]
The culture of monogamy, built on appetite constraint, has little need for a behavioral bureaucracy. The culture of polyamory, designed as a safety net not only for the unlucky but the unrestrained, increasingly relies on social welfare programs to rescue its adherents from the effects of its form of sexuality. Without its net the culture of polyamory would collapse of its own weight and disorder.
[ . . . ]
Most noteworthy for political discourse: In the culture of monogamy, men are anchored in their families and tied to their children and wives, through the free and deliberate focus of their sexuality . In the culture of polyamory, which treasures sexual freedom or license, such sexual constraint by men or women is not expected nor is any attempt to foster such acceptable , for such would be the antithesis of the main project of the culture of polyamory: polymorphous sexuality whenever desired. [emphasis in original]
Fagan notes that the polyamorous culture expands its control—with the help of governmental bureaucracy— by drawing children into sexual activity. The polyamorous culture wins a “victory” when:
•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;• With the out of wedlock births or abortions that follow they have broken the family before it has started, 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.
Fagan’s conclusions is that only one group can save the traditional family: monogamous men.
(Via: MercatorNet.com )
