The so-called Christian and “pro-family” group American Family Association (AFA) yesterday claimed that if gay marriage becomes legal, a rash of men — and, presumably, women — will want to marry not only people of the same sex, but cars, dogs, and buildings. The concerns voiced by Buster Wilson, the General Manager of the American Family Association’s American Family Radio, are ludicrous. As anyone with a eighth-grade education knows, marriage is an institution and a legal contract, and can only be entered by two people, who consent. Period. Even smartphones, or iPhones with Siri, aren’t that smart.
The AFA is an SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group, which sponsored, to the tune, reportedly, of one million dollars, Rick Perry’s prayer rally, “The Response.”
Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch writes that Wilson “yesterday on AFA Today told co-host Ed Vitagliano how marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples will ultimately lead to not just the legalization of polygamy but also legal approval of marriages to buildings, cars and dogs!”
Wilson: So that’s why we are among many others who are fighting so vigorously for the traditional marriage, and it is because it is not just that we are—we’re not homophobic and we just hate homosexuals—but that whole mindset is being pushed upon America and the end result of America giving into it is that the door is flung open. And it’s more than just homosexual marriage or homosexual relationships that will come out of it, polygamy comes out of it, what’s the term?
Vitagliano: Polyamory.
Wilson: Polyamory, that’s gonna come out of it. We have talked about people who brought to the forefront their desire to marry—one guy had a desire to marry a building, another one a car, another one his dog. It’s just unbelievable, if you throw off the restraints and you say there’s no Christianity that’s going to guide how we look at this issue as a nation, then anything goes.
Gotta love that “we’re not homophobic and we just hate homosexuals,” bit… Yeah, right. Anyone who has heard AFA’s Bryan Fischer say that gays are Nazis, or that Congressman Barney Frank caused millions to contract HIV/AIDS, or call for the criminalization of homosexuality, has to ask Wilson if he’s absolutely crazy.
Tashman goes on to report on a Canadian judge who “ruled against [a] polygamous couple and maintained that unlike polygamous relationships, ‘committed same-sex relationships celebrate all of the values we seek to preserve and advance in monogamous marriage’.”
Tashman notes the judge’s words:
The alarmist view expressed by some that the recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage will lead to the legitimization of polygamy misses the whole point. As Maura Strassberg, Professor of Law at Duke University Law School, points out in “Distinctions of Form or Substance: Monogamy, Polygamy and Same-Sex Marriage†(1997) North Carolina L.R. 1501 at 1594, the doctrinal underpinnings of monogamous same-sex marriage are indistinguishable from those of heterosexual marriage as revised to conform to modern norms of gender equality. This counters, as well, the argument advanced by many, that “in this day and age†when we have adopted expansive views of acceptable marriage units and common law living arrangements, the acceptance of polygamy, or at least the abandonment of its criminal prohibition, is the next logical step.
Â