Decline and fall in the Netherlands?

I know we have the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination and other important things going on, but in the past few days the right-wing blogosphere has also been abuzz with news of a polygamous marriage in the Netherlands. Here is the story, reported at the conservative site The Brussels Journal:

Netherlands and Belgium were the first countries to give full marriage rights to homosexuals. In the United States some politicians propose “civil unions” that give homosexual couples the full benefits and responsibilities of marriage. These civil unions differ from marriage only in name.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands polygamy has been legalised in all but name. Last Friday the first civil union of three partners was registered. Victor de Bruijn (46) from Roosendaal “married” both Bianca (31) and Mirjam (35) in a ceremony before a notary who duly registered their civil union.

“I love both Bianca and Mirjam, so I am marrying them both,” Victor said. He had previously been married to Bianca. Two and a half years ago they met Mirjam Geven through an internet chatbox. Eight weeks later Mirjam deserted her husband and came to live with Victor and Bianca. After Mirjam’s divorce the threesome decided to marry.

Conservative blogs were quick to jump on the story as a vindication of their predictions that legalizing gay marriage would put us on a slippery slope toward polygamy. Ace of Spades HQ asked, “Gay Marriage Will Lead To Polygamy? What Are The Odds Of That?” and replied, “Pretty f’n’ good, as it turns out. The first three-party marriage — well, ‘civil union’ — has occurred in the Netherlands.” More along the same lines at RedState.org (“Behold, the slippery slope in action”), Christian Coalition Blog (“Next time someone wants to ‘pooh pooh’ the notion that “civil unions” and/or outright gay marriage will create a slippery slope for degrading the institution of marriage even further, point them to this”), Tacitus (“Senator Santorum, I believe that’s your vindication”) and other places too numerous to mention. Last night, the story made Fox News as well: Bill O’Reilly, who has long argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would open the door to polygamy, delivered a gloating I-told-you so at the end of his program.

But wait a minute. As Tim Cavanaugh points out at Reason’s Hit & Run:

Victor, Bianca, and Mirjam are specifically not entering into a marriage but into a civil union, to which gay couples already have broad access. … If you’re upset that Victor and girls are free to set up their unusual relationship, you could just as easily argue that this shows the need to approve gay marriage and eliminate civil unions.

Actually, it turns out that it’s not even a civil union. Victor and his two wives have entered something called a samenlevingscontract, or “cohabitation contract” — which is not the same thing. Here’s what a Wikipedia article (helpfully translated by a Dutch friend) says on the subject:

A cohabitation contract is a written agreement which can to a certain degree be compared to a marriage. It settles the legal and financial arrangements between two partners in a relationship. Other things can also be arranged in this contract, such as agreements about possible children in the relationship.

Since the eighties the contract has become popular with two different groups of people: those who wanted a relationship but didn’t want to get married, and those who lived together and wanted to get married but weren’t allowed to at that time. Because of the introduction of civil unions and later marriage for gays and lesbians, the need for cohabitation contracts has been reduced drastically for this group.

(Apparently, one principal difference between the samenlevingscontract on the one hand, and marriage/civil union on the other, is that the terms of the contract — i.e., whether there will be alimony in case of a breakup — are pretty much set by the parties themselves, except for legal provisions to protect children.)

So basically, the kind of contract the trio has entered into predates not only same-sex marriage but gay civil unions in Holland. Apparently there is some confusion over whether a cohabitation contract can include more than two people, or whether someone who is married can also enter into a cohabitation contract with a third person. This is the loophole the de Bruijns and Geven used to legalize their menage á trois. (Were they the first to do so, or merely the first to go public? No one seems to know.) They could not have availed themselves not only of same-sex marriage but even of a civil union, which is essentially marriage in all but name. By the way, in the United States, the law in Vermont expressly states that the parties to a civil union cannot be married to anyone else; I assume the same is true in other states that have legalized same-sex civil unions.

So in fact, one might argue that if anything is being vindicated here, it’s the argument that Andrew Sullivan made more than 15 years ago: that domestic partnerships and other “quasi-marriage” mechanisms created to give some legal protections to gay and lesbian couples really do threaten the institution of marriage, and that it’s much better, and actually much more conservative, to simply legalize same-sex marriage.

Does that mean there’s nothing to the slippery slope argument? No, it doesn’t. While I strongly favor equal legal rights for same-sex couples, I have also concluded, as I have written here, that the reasoning used to justify the legalization of same-sex marriage (i.e., the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s assertion, in Goodrich v. Department of Public Health, that marrying “the person of one’s choice” is a fundamental right) could be used to support legalization of polygamy. For that to happen, however, there would have to be (1) a non-fringe political movement advocating for the right to multi-partner marriage, and (2) widespread social acceptance of multi-partner relationships. Of course, (1) and (2) are related. At this point in time, neither factor is present: the polyamory movement has about as much influence as the Flat Earth Society, and multi-partner relationships are almost universally regarded as either immoral or just plain weird.

A slippery slope scenario is possible in a cultural sense: once society begins to encourage full acceptance of unconventional sexual/romantic relationships, this acceptance may extend to “poly” relationships and marriages. Some gay rights advocates may be reluctant to take a “judgmental” stand toward any behavior, at least among consenting adults, that runs afoul of traditional morality. It is perhaps revealing that in the Dutch media accounts of the three-way “marriage,” the Rosendaal Three say that they rarely encounter negative reactions to their arrangement, except from a “deeply religious co-worker” of Victor De Bruijn’s. What’s more, so far the only demand for government action to close the loophole (and, if possible, have the trio’s cohabitation contract annulled) has come from a small and unpopular conservative Christian party, the SGP. So yes, perhaps once you’ve convinced people that it’s intolerant to oppose gay marriage, they may be more inclined to see opposition to multi-partner marriage as intolerant as well. But no slippery slope is inevitable. There are good arguments against multi-partner marriage that do not apply to same-sex marriage. For one, legalizing mutli-partner marriage would change the nature of heterosexual marriages; legalizing same-sex marriage does not.

Right now, though, I don’t want to get into a discussion of whether legalizing polygamy would equal the end of civilization as we know it, or whether banning polygamy, as some of my libertarian friends believe, is just as intolerant as banning same-sex marriage. The point is that the conservatives’ presentation of this story — “from same-sex marriage to polygamy in the Netherlands” — is substantially inaccurate. So much for the no-spin zone, Mr. O’Reilly.

More on the anti-feminist left

In a comment on my post yesterday on New York Times letter-writers who castigated Bush envoy Karen Hughes for having the gall to tell Muslim women they should have equal rights, Ampersand (who blogs at Alas, a Blog) writes:

Do you have any logical argument which suggests that those two letter writers are any more representative of the left than the two letter writers you agreed [with]? I think you’d easily recognize this mode of broad-brushing criticism (“one or two letter-writers said something dumb – therefore it’s a trend that indicates that the whole movement should be disparaged”) is illogical were it applied to your own beliefs.

As I pointed out in response, there’s no evidence that one of the letter-writers who supported Hughes belongs to “the left”; but let’s not quibble. Was I painting with a broad brush when I wrote that the erstwhile liberal belief in universal human rights has been “apparently, discarded by much of the left in favor of cheap knee-jerk anti-Americanism”?

I’ll be the first to admit that “much” is a rather nebulous term. There are certainly left-of-center feminists — Martha Nussbaum, Katha Pollitt — who have strongly denounced patriarchy-condoning cultural relativism. But there is indeed a strong strain in leftist discourse that regards liberal feminist condemnation of Third World patriarches as deeply suspect and tainted with Western cultural imperialism. Here is one essay making such an argument. In a critique of liberal feminist Susan Moeller Okin, the author charges:

Okin assumes that generally “Third World” men systematically abuse “Third World” women and this adds support to the stereotype that “brown” men abuse “brown” women more than white men. …. She also does not take into consideration the possible effects of her position which can be understood as equal to a colonizing gaze which treats “Third World” people as more barbaric than their Western ‘counterparts’ because the people of the “Third World” are less developed and uncivilized.

This argument is not unique or eccentric; it is shared by prominent feminist scholars such as Hamilton College women’s studies professor Chandra Mohanty, co-editor of the 1991 anthology Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism and a popular figure in academic feminist circles. (A summary of Mohanty’s argument can be found here.)

There are many other instances of such attitudes. In October 2001, Sunera Thobani, a professor at the University of British Columbia and former head of Canada’s National Action Committee on the Status of Women, delivered a vehemently anti-American speech at the Women’s Resistance Conference in Ottawa, Canada (funded by the Canadian government to the tune of over $100,000 and mainstream enough to be attended by Canada’s secretary of state for the status of women, Hedy Fry). In her diatribe against the U.S. war in Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy in general, Thobani dismissed “all this talk about saving Afghani women” (“Those of us who have been colonized know what this saving means”) and asserted that “there will be no emancipation for women anywhere on this planet until the Western domination of this planet is ended.”

While Thobani was criticized by some feminist commentators, she received a standing ovation at the conference. The Vancouver Sun reported that female students interviewed in the women’s lounge at the University of British Columbia were also overwhelmingly supportive of Thobani; one woman, a social work student, told the paper that “the same thing is being said on campuses and in coffee houses everywhere.” According to the article, while “a few conceded women have little freedom in Muslim countries like Afghanistan,” generally “the women at UBC appeared more critical of the U.S. than of Muslim regimes.” (Yvonne Zacharias, “Student Support Thobani’s Comments,” Vancouver Sun, October 3, 2001.)

Across the border, Village Voice writer Sharon Lerner came to Thobani’s defense, describing describing the backlash against her comments as evidence that “these days, it’s hard for anyone to stray from the political mainstream, and harder still for women.” Lerner’s article, “What Women Want: Feminists Agonize Over the War in Afghanistan,” was itself a testament to feminist ambivalence about appearing to endorse American power and American values while denouncing the brutal oppression of Afghan women by the Taliban. Lerner sympathetically quoted a Muslim feminist and peace activist, Hibaaq Osman, who bristled at the suggestion that Western men are any more enlightened about gender roles than men in Muslim cultures.

(This also brings to mind a comment I heard at a 1992 academic feminist conference at Radcliffe College. One one the panelists, Stanford Law School professor Deborah Rhode, pointed out that white men constitute only 8% of world’s population and added, to great mirth and delight from the audience, “That’s a very encouraging fact.” Because, of course, all those non-white men around the world are so much friendlier to women’s rights.)

More recently, when a proposed beauty pageant in Nigeria led to murderous riots by Muslim fundamentalists and death threats against a female journalist who irreverently commented that Muhammad might have approved of the contest, some Western feminists denounced the pageant. Jill Nelson, a former Washington Post writer and an outspoken feminist, wrote at MSNBC.com (which, unfortunately, keeps no permanent archives), “I don’t believe that Muslim or Christian men are really concerned about the rights of women. As far as I’m concerned it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.” (She conveniently forgot to mention that no woman has been forced to participate in a beauty pageant in the West.)

So what’s the bottom line here? I think a significant portion of the left leans toward some form of moral equivalency or cultural relativism when it comes to gender issues in the West and in non-Western countries. Even feminists who are sharply critical of women’s oppression in Third World countries often feel the need to throw in annoying disclaimers about how we really aren’t much better: you know, they have bans on women driving, the burka, forced sterilization and dowry killings, we have assaults on affirmative action and not enough women in Congress. Which is more or less what Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in a 1995 column on the U.N. conference on women in Beijing.

Shortly after September 11 and just before the strike against the Taliban, British Tory Boris Johnson, M.P and editor of Spectator magazine, wrote, “It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They are wrong about women. We are right.” How many people on the left would be willing to speak the truth quite so bluntly?