Saturday, March 25, 2006

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.”



5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Liberals are apes! Yay! This is so fun....

12:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bill

Here you go again. You state a few facts (some primate sexual behaviors) and lay out your pre-formed conclusion (monogamy is best, especially for conservatives), and, hey presto, you deduce that you have to be monogamous to write Shakespeare.

First, If your ultimate test is the ability to write Shakespeare, then it must be mortifying for you to realize that Shakespeare wasn't monogamous. Furthermore, if he had been, he probably wouldn't have written Shakespeare himself.

Second, conservative cavemen could not possibly have been the first to tame fire, plant crops or invent the wheel. They would have said "put the flames out". "just kill another mammoth", or "If God wanted this, he'd have made our feet circular". It's always those tiresome progressives who move things forward.

Third, don't knock the other primates. They've survived in the evolutionary swamp as long as we have, and they may have more fun than we do. It isn't their sexual behavior which might lead to their extinction, so much as our stupidity.

Fourth, other successful species do it very differently. The male praying mantis is monogamous, but that doesn't save him (although presumably the sex must be very good!) The queen bee gets laid by all the available males, while other females are completely out of luck. Amoebas still mindlessly split into two. How about the highly successful hermaphrodite species?

So, your oft-heralded intelligent designer seems to have been very open to all kinds of different sexual behavior. She doesn't sound much like a conservative to me.

Tex

2:26 PM  
Blogger Katy Grimes said...

In most animal species, the pack kills any pack member that is homosexual or preys upon the younger animals by sexually abusing them. That's how Mother Nature deals with the issue.

In our society, they expect special rights above what all humans already have.

10:56 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fetching Jen,

What the hell are you talking about? There are plenty of examples of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdon. As for child abuse, I would submit that long ago, girls under the age of 18 were routinely married off and had children. This was culturally sanctioned. Where do you get your info? Oh, that's right, the Bible and Faux news.

11:48 AM  
Anonymous Heartbroken guy said...

I dont feel that it is wrong to love more than one person at once intimately as long as all partners put all cards on the table and everyone feels ok with it. One problem with this is that people get pressured into one side or the other by the decision made by a partner, and if you go against it you are the bad guy and you are holding her/him down in their eyes. Is requesting someone else to not love anyone but you wrong? I have been hurt by it and it is so hard to find a wife that wants to stay monogamous. I get the feeling all women want to have their cake and eat it too without caring what their partner feels and the modern media seems to want to make people think it is morally wrong to be upset by polygamy. I support the old saying 3 is a crowd and try to engage in these 1 on 1 relationships but every time I am hurt by a woman who eventually wants to experiment with other men. It just seems to be the way things work. I have been with this woman for 6 years and she now wants to experiment and never wants to marry because she feels like she might find someone better. Am I the bad guy because I fell in love with this one and want her all to myself? I want to be only hers as well because I feel our commitment would get us through this horrible journey of pain we call life. This is upsetting because I dont know what to believe. I support people who are in open relationships but I dont condone breaking someones heart over a fling. Is it hypocrisy? I dont need any more heartbreak, pain and confusion in my life but that is all long term relationships give. Men do it too but statistically more women cheat/ think about cheating and this has been contributed to women wanting more adventure and change in their lives compared to men. And they call us pigs...

5:42 PM  

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