Cave Men Were Good Guys

As liberal interest groups pursue the destruction of marriage, Hollywood pitches in with an addition to their already rich, multi-moral fare, a show promoting the joys of polygamy. It reminds me of Bill O’Reilly’s assertion: If you make same-sex marriage legal, then I want to marry the Andrews sisters, or some such thing.

In Polygamy and Me (The American Spectator, 3/23/2006) William Tucker says he proposed a book to several publishers about terrorism and polygamy. “They thought I was crazy. Polygamy? What did that have to do with anything? A year later, it's an HBO sitcom about polygamy -- Big Love. It's hard to keep up these days.”

Craig DeLuz reports that this “blurring of moral and cultural values is no accident.” He points to gay activist Michelangelo Signorile who describes the movement’s goal in Out Magazine back in 1994 as the "fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution that as it now stands keeps us down."

But, one asks, what about that archaic institution? The intellectual question is this: What is the evolutionary high ground, monogamy, polygamy, unisex or whatever you wish?

In the March issue of The American Spectator, Tucker has an article entitled The Alpha Couple and the Primal Horde. He points out that "we are a monogamous species, at least in our beginnings. Hunter-gathering tribes, the original human economy, are all monogamous."

Cavemen and women were monogamous. The reason was simple. They wanted to survive. Predators were everywhere, we were puny. “The only safety lay in group solidarity. Monogamy became preferable because it knit the group more tightly together. In a word, it was more democratic. Monogamy creates a society that has an inherent equality. Every male has the promise of getting a female and every female has the promise of getting a male. It gives everyone a stake in society.”

Now, let’s turn to Tucker's connection of polygamy and terrorism.

“Polygamous societies remained backward precisely because they were polygamous. Polygamy creates a huge inequality where all the wealth and all the women are concentrated among the more successful men. Exclude enough men and you have the makings of a jihad society. When there aren't enough women to go around, it's easy to convince low-status men there are 70 virgins waiting for them in heaven.”

But on the evolutionary tree there were other branches that took a different path. Jane Goodall's studies have shown that “the great apes, especially chimpanzees and extra-especially their cousins the bonobos, are extravagantly promiscuous. All sorts of ruttings go on all the time -- and yet no bonobo has ever advanced enough even to write the Kama Sutra, much less the works of Shakespeare.” (Thanks to Ralph for the pointer to the piece by Quin Hillyer in, you guessed it, The American Spectator, 3/24/06.)

Conservatives, of course, defend monogamy as the ideal that God wants for us. Lefties, on the other hand, promoted free love and all sorts of “tommyrot.”

“It should be a point of pride for conservatives to be cavemen. The alternative is to be liberals, and they're the apes.”