Family scholar Patrick Fagan has come up with an elegant schema contrasting “monogamous” culture with other kinds of sexual culture which he calls, collectively, “polyamorous”. Speaking at the World Congress of Families recently in Amsterdam, he highlighted the gulf that exists between the two cultures in terms of values and practical consequences. And he proposed a solution.
Fagan, who is with the Family Research Council, argued that these cultures can only co-exist in once society if parents in both are given control over the programs that cause conflict: education, adolescent health and sex education.
At present, he said, the polyamorous culture is expanding through its control of these three areas by means of the public bureaucracy, snatching children away from their parents by drawing them into sexual activity. Each time this happens, the polyamorists have won several “victories”:
* 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.
They -- the polys -- even fight any attempt by monos to defend their kids, through abstinence education, for example, or home schooling. And all this while the poly culture is being subsidised by the mono through tax funded welfare. As Fagan says, it’s simply unjust; the polys should have to pay their own way.
One way to progress in this direction and to make the behavioral bureaucracy to serve both cultures is to give all parents, parents of both cultures, and control over the program money set aside for their children. That is giving parents vouchers, in one form or another for all three program areas
The social welfare safety net will still be in place but the parents (be they monogamous or polyamorous) will choose who holds the net in place for their children.
Fagan admits it will require a huge political effort. And this is where the monogamous men come in. It’s their job, above all, to protect the family, he says.
Monogamy men will be expected to fight for control over is what is his and his family’s just due, what his taxes fund, and what he can use in raising his children: control over the three big programs of childhood education, sex education and adolescent health programs, so that they can be carried out in a way that supports the norms of monogamy culture. In this rearrangement polyamory parents have the same control to do as they wish for their children.
Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan
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