Further on Communion

I included Levertov poem in the UUCF communion (previous post) for a reason: because it speaks to the skeptic in all of us who questions the morality of God who allows the innocent to suffer etc.

I think that this is an important question for many UU's. The poem is about the necessity of confronting the reality of suffering before it can be moved beyond, or redeemed. For over 10 years, I have reading and re-reading this poem because it shows, but does not explain, the redemption of suffering without explaining it.

The reality of the world is that there is much unjust suffering, some at the hands of human beings and some at the hands of fate.

Somehow, that suffering can, in some situations, be redeemed: creating compassion in others, gratitude. Witness the many nurses who deal with death and suffering all the time, but become even more compassionate as a result, and not more callous, which might well be a more probable result. The fact is that some suffering is redeemed -- Mandela comes out of prison not seeking vengeance -- people forgive their parents' shortcomings and even cruelty and are better parents to their children. Why does this happen some of the time and not all of the time? There is no adequate explanation for it, but that is the reality we are dealing with.

The communion story is one that says that God is present in the redemption of suffering.

I don't think (nor do I think I have ever preached) that God is in the suffering.
I don't think (not do I think I have ever preached) that believing that God is present in the redemption of suffering causes more suffering; that would be like thinking that ambulances cause heart attacks and life-threatening accidents.

Denise Levertov's Poem about Thomas

There has been some discussion on blogs and email lists about this poem that I read at the UUCF communion service in Portland, OR this spring. Much has been said about its content and tone. Read it for yourself.

Denise Levertov

St. Thomas Didymus

In the hot street at noon I saw him
a small man
gray but vivid, standing forth
beyond the crowd's buzzing
holding in desperate grip his shaking
teethgnashing son,

and thought him my brother.

I heard him cry out, weeping and speak
those words,
Lord, I believe, help thou
mine unbelief,

and knew him
my twin:

a man whose entire being
had knotted itself
into the one tightdrawn question,
Why,
why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,
why is this child who will soon be a man
tormented, torn, twisted?
Why is he cruelly punished
who has done nothing except be born?

The twin of my birth
was not so close
as that man I heard
say what my heart
sighed with each beat, my breath silently
cried in and out,
in and out.

After the healing,
he, with his wondering
newly peaceful boy, receded;
no one
dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,
the swift
acceptance and forgetting.
I did not follow
to see their changed lives.
What I retained
was the flash of kinship.
Despite
all that I witnessed,
his question remained
my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,
known
only to doctor and patient. To others
I seemed well enough.

So it was
that after Golgotha
my spirit in secret
lurched in the same convulsed writhings
that tore that child
before he was healed.
And after the empty tomb
when they told me that He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
told me
that though He had passed through the door like a ghost
He had breathed on them
the breath of a living man --
even then
when hope tried with a flutter of wings
to lift me --
still, alone with myself,
my heavy cry was the same: Lord
I believe,
help thou mine unbelief.

I needed
blood to tell me the truth,
the touch
of blood. Even
my sight of the dark crust of it
round the nailholes
didn't thrust its meaning all the way through
to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge,
refusing to loosen
unless that insistence won
the battle I fought with life

But when my hand
led by His hand's firm clasp
entered the unhealed wound,
my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat,
what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my
obstinate need,
but light, light streaming
into me, over me, filling the room
as I had lived till then
in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time,
the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed
all things quicken to color, to form,
my question
not answered but given
its part
in a vast unfolding design lit
by a risen sun.

Democrats Debate

Watching the Democrats debate last night, two thoughts:

1. the reasons why the YouTube format worked, and I think it did, is not because the candidates cannot dodge the questions raised by ordinary people, while they can snow the professional media better. The reason is that ordinary people, even internet savvy geeks, ASK BETTER QUESTIONS than our shallow media personalities. People ask about actual issues; media types ask about candidates reactions to premises created by shallow media stories.

If CNN/NBC/Fox/ABC/etc. ask the questions, they come up with questions like this: "Senator Edwards, given the stories about your haircut costing $400, how will you overcome the perception that your concern about poverty is only a campaign ploy?"

Actual people might ask something like: "Hey how about some help down here?"

Anderson Cooper always kept trying to bring the candidates back to the question asked. Anderson should butt out, once in a while. The idea that the news departments of the networks somehow have the authority to referee the dialogue between candidates and voters is laughable.
Second thought:

Seems like there is a weird mismatch between candidate's positioning on Iraq and strategies for ending the war. It's a mismatch between past, present and future.

Obama Barack wants everybody to know that he opposed the war before Hilary Clinton. I have said this before and will say it again. What Hilary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards thought about the war in 2003 and 2003 was completely irrelevant. The President had a solid majority in both houses of Congress and was planning to do to war. If Hilary had immolated herself on the Senate floor in protest, it would not have stopped him. So Obama was right back then, so what?

Right now, Obama and Hilary are in an identical spot on the strategy for ending the war, along with Dodd and Biden. Continue to vote for funding for now, while pushing other measures that will, it is hoped, bring in enough GOP votes to pass a binding timetable for withdrawal. They know that the GOP is just hoping for someone to blame the disaster of Iraq on, and to be able to pose that as stabbing the troops in the back is their best hope. The Senators are not willing to walk into that trap, but insist that some of the GOP come with them.

Kucinich and Gravel argue that Congress should just vote to cut off funds. It appears that Edwards is in a similar place, though I can't tell. Of course, they are being brave about votes that they don't have to take.

In some ways, the antiwar left candidates (K,G and maybe E) are really aiming at developing a mass movement outside the election cycle to force the Capitol Hill Democrats to have the courage to cut off the funds. Their strategy is aimed at this summer and fall, and not at the primary elections in the winter, and certainly not at winning in Fall 08.

Richardson and Biden try to distinguish themselves by having a different plan for 2009 and beyond, but like the difference between Obama and Hilary in 2003, who cares?

My own opinion on how to use one's vote and political support to bring about an end to the war is this: start talking up Ron Paul, and send him a few bucks. I think that it is a good idea for you, although I can't quite get myself to do it. Right now, Bush is able to keep enough Republicans on Capitol Hill in line with him, because it doesn't appear that the Republican base is splitting away on the war. Ron Paul is the Eugene McCarthy of 08 -- all he has to do is better than expected anywhere -- even in fundraising and home page hits -- and he sends a shiver of panic down the spine of that Republican Congress Rat who realizes that the Bush administration is a ship that it is quite possible to go down with.

The Parallel Argument Fallacy

It is occasionally argued that since some of the arguments against legal recognition of polyamory sound like some of the arguments raised against same-sex marriage, and since same-sex marriage is OK, then polyamory must be OK, as well.

The arguments that were used by the GOP to argue for the impeachment of President Clinton sound like many of the arguments used today by Democrats for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. Does that mean that Bush and Clinton are the same?

Extending equal marriage rights to same-sex couples is not the same thing as extending marriage rights to groups of three or more. They are, at least, different enough to require some careful analysis and consideration.

Toward a Theology of Marriage -- Equality

I'm trying to deal with important stuff without being boring. So I am going to be much more pithy in my comments.

By nature, people are small group animals, kind of like apes. By nature, alpha males dominate the sexual system, with unlimited sexual access to females and subordinate males fight their way up the pecking order.

But people developed culture, long after our instinctual nature was set. Marriage is part of human culture and marriage system try to control, channel and direct our instincts to avoid conflict and increase chances for children's survival.

In the world of culture, ideas about marriage grow and evolve. Older systems make the old instincts of male power and dominance official; but newer systems, for a whole host of cultural reasons, move toward gender equality, mutuality and reciprocity in marriage. Old systems are systems of male ownership of women; new systems are mutual obligations.

I think that monogamy arose first as a way to limit the effects of competition among males for women (instead of the alpha male having access to all the women for the brief moment that he was king of the hill, pair-bonding was developing -- almost everybody had a sexual partner -- more sex, less fighting, with the added, but unplanned bonus, of greater genetic diversity.) But in more modern times, monogamy serves the interest of women by providing a more stable source of support for periods of pregnancy and infancy. Now, the push for monogamy is linked clearly with gender equality in those parts of the world where polygamy is culturally sanctioned.

Among heterosexuals in the West, the cultural debate is between "Promise Keepers" who want continued male dominance of the marriage and the "Equal Partners" who look toward gender equality as the underlying paradigm of the marriage.

As that strand of the Western religious tradition that is most committed to the radical equality of all souls before God, liberal religion knows where it stands in that cultural debate. We have a theological commitment, I think, to marriage as a set of mutual obligations between equal partners.

So, if you have been following these arguments about the theology of marriage I have been making, you see that I am proposing, so far:

1. marriage is not a natural act for humans, but a cultural construction which channels and directs our instincts toward socially beneficially ends.
2. The first principle we uphold is commitment, life long commitment between marriage partners. It is this principle that led to liberal religion's support of same-sex marriage.
3. The second principle is equality between marriage partners and turning away from our instincts toward male dominance.

My next post in this series will further develop my point about equality, specifically the fact that in the post-industrial West, the paradigm of domination and subordination has floated free of gender, to appear in many forms in all sorts of relationships.

Why It Matters to Unitarian Universalism

Unitarian Universalist ministers, I think we can say, led the way among clergy, toward equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. It is something that we can be proud of. We took the lead on that because of the experience of our own gay and lesbian colleagues and congregants.

I believe that this leadership gives Unitarian Universalist ministers and congregations some moral and social authority on the question of love and marriage. In some ways, we have more authority on this question than any other question. That authority is the result of our ability to see into the essence of the question of equal marriage rights and see what was most important and true: that the desire of gay men and lesbians to form permanent, faithful, lifelong bonds was as worthy and commendable as the same desires among heterosexuals, and that it was a simple matter of fairness to extend ALL of the SAME rights to gays and lesbians. We were not alone, of course, among religious leaders to see this, and we did not move in exact unison, but no other denomination was so committed, so early and with as close to unanimity.

We need to be aware of our authority on marriage as we approach the question of multi-partnered marriages. It matters to other people what we think.

Having gained some authority on love and marriage, it is inevitable that we will be the objects of other people who want to use our authority to advance their own purposes. If we accede to the passive-aggressive demands of the polyamorists, we will have given away whatever authority we have gained -- we will have been shown to more concerned about avoiding a certain kind of criticism than in thinking through the issue for ourselves.

Background to a Theology of Marriage

I think that it was in Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" that I first ran across the idea that humanity had thousands of years of existence before there was much culture, in which people acted according to their genetic code, or instincts. What we are "hard-wired" to be. He summarized what I am sure is a mixed lot of anthropological theories to the point that we, probably, functioned as a small group animal with some variation of what we see in other small group animals.

I have taken this insight as the starting point of the anthropology upon which I based my theology. Rather than starting from the position that human beings are essentially good, or human beings are essentially evil, I try to start from the point that human beings are essentially small group animals, with all the virtues and vices of small group animals. What seems to us to be best about human beings: cooperation, altruism, self-sacrifice, capacity for love, compassion are all the emotional qualities that exist within the small band. What we see as human cruelty is what is often the qualities we show to the outsiders of our small band: violence, suspicion, intolerance, murder, predatory rape.

Human beings also show a persistent tendency to create ever more complex systems and structures to avoid deadly conflict. My guess is that the development of marriage was for the purpose of avoiding the endless conflict between males for social dominance and sexual access to females. (Why am I suddenly thinking back to high school days now? But, I digress.) That it also made patriarchical inheritence of surplus wealth possible is an added bonus, h/t to Frederich Engels.

So the creation of systems to avoid conflict has created a larger and larger human community and culture, which is in conflict with our hard-wired small group loyalty. Hence most of our moral issues pit some form of "widening the circle" against some from of "smaller group loyalty".
Our biological evolution was driven by survival and brought us so far. Human beings, on a biological basis have not changed significantly in tens of thousands of years. Our cultural evolution is driven by the desire to accumulate surplus wealth and to avoid conflict, and moves very quickly. Culturally, we are very different than we were 100 years ago, much less 5000 years ago.

Religion, Philosophy and spirituality are the venues in which humanity tries to consciously grasp the meaning of our common evolution and to shape the cultural evolution that is occurring today. It is bigger than science, since it deals with the meanings we draw from reality and the moral conclusions that we draw about our actual nature, and the possibilities that humanity sees for itself.

Toward a Theology of Marriage

These are more notes toward a theology of marriage.


People are not naturally monogamous. In the state of nature, before culture, we lived as herd or pack animals with a sexual system similar to apes, chimps, horses, dogs etc. Alpha males, alpha females, subordinate males and females, unequal sexual access.

With the rise of culture and religion, people developed more ordered sexual systems, including marriages of all types. Religion is also a product of the same development and, among other purposes, provides a moral and ethical authority for the new sexual systems.

The fact that we are, by nature, one way, and have chosen, by culture, to live another way is the source of our divided selves – temptation, sin, etc.

Marriage systems keep changing to fit the needs of the culture, while retaining a moral aspect – however the marriage and sexual system changes, humanity cannot go back to the state of nature regarding sexuality, hence there will remain a moral component to thinking about sexual relationships and activities.

We live in a time of tremendous cultural upheaval – the changes in global economy, post industrialism, global urbanization etc. etc. means that much is up for grabs. This is creating a moment of creative crisis for sexual relationships and marriages as we step into uncharted territory. There is more freedom about life arrangements than ever before, and hence more potential healthy and unhealthy consequences.

The downside of the present moment is seen in a wide variety of social ills. The upside is seen in a wide variety of good things happening. It would take lifetime to list them and sort them out.

Our religious perspective, the Living Tradition of liberal Religion, has one overarching direction: the replacement of a religious and cultural systems that are based on external authority and cultural conformity with religious and cultural systems based on internal sources of authority and conscious covenant making between people. To counter the natural chaos, should people rely on coercion, or on covenants? We are heirs to a tradition that consistently reinterprets the Western religious heritage as culminating in personal freedom and covenantal community formation.

I also see signs of a return to a technologically facilitated state of nature, in which no commitments must be kept. On an individual basis, the moral self-discipline to keep commitments of sexual fidelity is constantly challenged. It feels natural and liberating to act upon all of one’s sexual desires and fantasies.

As tempting as it might be, a return to a state of nature of uncommitted sexuality would be a nightmare. The highest human potential, what we seem intended to be, is the result of the process of enculturation. Love, solidarity, empathy, compassion all grow in the cultural space created by our agreements to not just live together, but to live together in arrangements that we learn, remember, teach, pass on and make into tradition.

Because we are liberals, we take a critical view of traditions and are willing to experiment and revise them in an evolutionary process of cultural development.

We are not just “on the side of love.” We are on the side of covenanted and committed love, because we know that uncommitted love does not reach its full depth and meaning.

Our theology of marriage is that we are in favor of it, because it is the current cultural form of covenanted love. We are in favor of it for not only heterosexuals, but also gays and lesbians. My critique of our weddings is that we focus, often too much on love, and not enough on commitment. People fall "in love" all the time; we honor when they move from attraction and affection to lifelong commitment, because we know that attraction and affection are not enough to last a lifetime. More perfect love comes in the aftermath of disappointment and the temptation to quit.

When it comes to extending marriage rights to more than groups of two people, we say “no” at this time. While much of the rhetoric about polyamory is full of the language of commitment and fidelity, we are not sure at all that the small polyamory movement represents a step forward to wider forms of covenanted love, or whether it represents a step back toward the state of nature from which humanity came. The crux of the problem to me is that Polyamorists seem to claim that some people are, by nature, “poly people”, and hence, unable to make successful monogamous commitments. But, my understanding is that all of us are naturally “poly people” in that by nature, we are not monogamous. If that is true, than polyamory becomes a rationale for eroding the cultural commitment to monogamy, not just for a few, but eventually for everybody. Time will tell on where multi-partnered relationships will lead. The social and culture environment in the USA these days permits almost any sort of social experimentation.

Final theological note: I am a Christian with a modern and scientific outlook. When we look at that moment in prehistory when humanity began to create arrangements that were not instinctual, but learned and taught, one might say that it was an intervention by God, that created humanity.

One could also say that humanity projected onto the empty sky a deity who directed their activities to add weight to the traditions being created. Either way, the religious traditions have provided the moral authority behind the human culture that we create. As such, they have played reactionary and revolutionary roles at different points of history. Those religious traditions speak to the most vexing areas where we have to guard against following our instincts back to the state of nature: sexuality, money, wealth, power and violence. Christianity is a vast system which explains this contradiction in our natures, and more importantly, offers deep insight about how to live with the inevitability of failures and shortcomings, of sin.

This is How You Say No

When the issue of Multi-partnered Relationships first surfaced among the UU's, there was a high level of consternation among the ministers I know and talk with. Somebody, probably more than one somebody, said, "the problem is that we don't know how to say 'no'." This is an observation that I have heard more than once, and about more than one issue.

The reason why I have been devoting as much time and energy to a discussion of multi-partnered relationships has been to publicly engage in the practice of saying 'no' to a group of people who are trying to set our agenda for us. The liberal tolerance of the many, combined with the fervent advocacy of a few, would result in the tail wagging the dog.

A friend comments " You are awfully brave to be banging your head against this particular brick wall, LT. And during your vacation, too!"

One, I am not on vacation, since I my arrangement is that I work in the summer.

Two, this is not a brick wall. I concede that I will probably not change the mind of one of the persons who have been advocating for polyamory. I would not expect that; after all, they have already been pushing for something that is not popular for a while. Why would my disapproval have any real effect on their thinking?

I am really trying to speak to, by presuming to speak for, the many UU's who are concerned that our religious movement will be led, almost against our will, into taking a position on a matter of public policy and social ministry that we don't agree with.

I think that the debate and discussion here has gone long enough to reveal what is at stake with the polyamorists and the reasoning at work.

On the side of the polyamorists, they argue that (1) they exist; (2) they enunciate a fully developed set of ethical principles that are attractive; (3) they suffer from some amount of social disapproval, even in our UU congregations; and (4) they think that UU's should be more welcoming to them.

They do not explicitly ask that UUs adopt a public position affirming their agreements as equivalent to marriages, but that is their what they believe. From here, it is hard to tell what is strategic caution on their part and what is truly the result of not having thought the matter to its logical conclusions.

But once our efforts to make our congregations welcoming to multiple partnered relationships leads us to say that those arrangements ought to be viewed as socially equivalent to 2 person marriages, all the rest of the journey to advocacy of their equal marriage rights is a matter of timing and circumstance. We will pass from the pastoral to territory of public ministry and social policy very quickly.

Whenever a group comes to us and seeks to engage our commitment to a particular position of public policy, we should have the integrity to insist that that request be made explicitly, and we should consider it explicitly. That the UUPA does not ask us to call for equal marriage rights for 3+ person weddings does not mean that we should not consider whether what they do ask to do will lead us to that place.

One of the ways that we have to learn how to say "No" is that we have to learn to be upfront and explicit about social policy implications of the steps that we are being asked to take, even if the issues are presented as pastoral. We have to guard that boundary ourselves, extending ourselves pastorally wherever people look to us in that role, but being clear about when it passes into another realm.

When people ask us to take a stand on social policy, the burden of proof is on them. They need to convince us that the social policy that they advocate is warranted (it addresses a real problem in the world), necessary (that the problem at hand cannot be solved by lesser or more desirable means) and responsible (the proposal does not run a significant risk of creating more problems). Most of us wish that the Congress held President Bush to these standards when he proposed to invade Iraq. (And no, I am not comparing polyamory to the invasion of Iraq!)

In this discussion, many comments accuse me of being unfair in insisting that advocates present arguments for polyamory that meet those criteria, AND demonstrate how that will work in the real world, as we know it. I am accused of holding them to a higher standard than I hold the present system. That''s the breaks, and not just because this is my blog, but because they are asking me (and us) to do something that breaks with a long-standing, and yet, beleaguered social and cultural tradition.

I have specifically rejected the arguments that proceed from a best-case-scenario. I insist that we consider the effects of the legalization of multipartnered marriages as it would actually exist in the broken world that we know. If we affirm the equivalence of 3+ person marriages, then, it follows that we will eventually be legalizing polygamy in all of its forms -- Neopagan Polyamory, Mormon and Muslim Polygamy, and all the newer forms of multipartnered relationships that include gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people.

One of the ways that you say 'No' is to retain the right to make your own judgments about the implications of a position that someone wants you to take. The advocates might want to limit the implications to only that which they approve, but we are responsible for the all of effects of our decisions. The advocates of Polyamory now say that they are quite distinct from the advocates of Open Marriage in the 70's. That is their right to maintain, but we have to retain the power to judge for ourselves what will happen if 3+ relationships are affirmed as equally valid in our congregations. Will that change lead to an environment where open marriage is then also affirmed and then swinging and then a sexualized environment? We have to decide whether we think that is possible or probable -- we are not obligated to let the advocates of polyamory decide that for us.

Finally, saying "no" also includes retaining the right to say "I don't know." One poster predicted a day will come 50 years from now when my concerns will be seen as a petty obstacle to the eventual emergence of a society in which many-partnered relationships are seen as normal. I suppose I will be an object of as much contempt as we have for politicians who denounced race-mixing and feared the mongrelization of the white race in the past. This is a hard thing to imagine about oneself. I am already carrying the burden of eating meat, which I am also told will be considered outrageous a hundred years from now. And I am a trying to be a Christian, too. Talk about quaint.

But as frightening as those possibilities are for my future reputation, I don't think that we know enough to say that multi-partnered relationships are the wave of the future. If they are, it does not depend on UUism affirming them, any more that the hundreds of thousands long-term gay partnerships did. I have been watching for signs that M-PR's are a growing trend that brings health and stability to families and communities -- that they are, indeed, the new thing that will arise to address the epidemic of broken marriages, fatherless children, abandoned single mothers, and sexual acting out that are the symptoms of the crisis of marriage in our culture. If they do appear to be that new thing, then I will change my mind. Those who know me personally know that I am willing to recognize when I am wrong. But I have not seen that yet.

And so I have to say "I don't know" and in the absence of knowing, I think that it is proper to say that we oppose giving up the struggle to challenge people to make commitments of love and fidelity to one person, and to face down the myriad temptations to betray those commitments, and to let deeper love flower in the space and time created by those commitments.

And finally learning how to say no means that you accept the inevitable result that some people will think that you are bigoted, prejudiced, ultra-conservative, the same as Pat Robertson, or James Dobson. They will make historical analogies in which you are compared to some really awful persons in history. This is hard to take, because the great sin in UU circles is to "be on the wrong side of history." But we always face that possibility. It would mean that one could see everything all at once to never make that error, and that is reserved to God. We can only use all of our faculties to do what we are given to see to do.

Just in Case you Miss the Point

Trivium condescends and plunges to the depths of my soul.

Sorry, I learned a long time ago that if I wanted to have a serious relationship to anything difficult: race, sex, class, sexual orientation issues, marriage issues, or with anyone different than myself, I would have to conquer my fear of being called a bigot.

That didn't take long

In a recent post, I compared the best-case-scenario argument that some Multi-Partnered Relationship advocates make to the argument that the kind of argument that anti-gun control advocates make when they say that lots of people should carry guns, but they should all be well-versed in gun safety and law-abiding.

Of course, now someone is claiming that I have compared the sweet and healing love of poly relationships to loaded guns, weapons of destruction.

I am comparing the kinds of arguments being made, not the substance of the arguments, as a careful reader will readily see.

There are none so prone to see offense in the comments of others as those whose argument depends on being seen as a victim. It is an essential feature of the passive-aggressive stance that the MPR advocates are taking relative to the Unitarian Universalist movement. Prove to us that you are not bigoted and prejudiced against us! And the only way to prove that is to agree to our central claim, which we have not otherwise proven, that multi-partnered relationships are morally equivalent to two person monogamy.

Don't Bring that Bogus Game into My House

Having read over the many contributions and comments on Multi-Partnered Relationships that have come in, I want to repeat this.

I am not persuaded at all by arguments that work from a best case scenario. I am especially not persuaded by a personal testimonial which leads to a best case scenario to a conclusion that there could be no social danger from abandoning our cultural standard of monogamous fidelity in marriage. To me the argument is like this:

We keep loaded guns in every room of the house where we also run our day care center. However, we have all taken numerous gun safety courses and have instructed our children in gun safety practices. We are also Quakers and don't believe in violence and never get angry with each other over anything. We have lived our lives with loaded guns in the playrooms for years and have never had a problem. We think that it should be OK for anyone who wants to keep loaded guns in the nursery, because it has worked so well for us.

If you tell me that X number of children die from accidental gunshot wounds every year, then all I can say is that you are not talking about a situation that has any relevance to me, because we have all had gun safety courses and are Quakers. If you say that X number of spouses shoot each other with guns that they have around the house because a certain son-of-a-bitch never picked up his socks, then I don't see the relevance of that story to me because we are Quakers and we don't wear socks anyway.

Since we are good people, what we do is good, and therefore those same actions will be good no matter who does them. The same actions that result in undesirable results are not really the same actions, since they must have been done by bad people.

The argument that Multi-partnered relationships would decrease adultery because everyone who wants to have sex with more than one person would get themselves into a covenanted, faithful arrangement where all their needs would be met -- likewise a bogus argument that is based on a idealized premise.