Polyamory is a particularly apt illustration of how the sexual revolution encourages us to try to have our cake and eat it too—to have not just pleasure, but also the joys of love, while keeping our options open and never really giving all of ourselves to anyone. This is also why it is so destructive.

For fearmongering hicks, conservative Christians are remarkably prescient. Our latest prophetic triumph is seen in another New York Times puff piece pushing legal recognition for polygamy. Correction—another New York Times puff piece pushing legal recognition for polyamory. The difference is that while polygamy traditionally consisted of a man having more than one wife, polyamory consists of a group of men and/or women all having each other in various permutations.
Once again, we have gone from “you’re a bigot for suggesting that this will ever happen” to “you’re a bigot for not supporting this.” The subject of the Times piece is Somerville, a city in Massachusetts that has spent the past few years creating new legal rights for polyamorous partner groups.
As the Times notes, “Interest in nonmonogamy seems to be on the rise across the country.” Once again, the conservative Christian alarmists were right. And they were right for precisely the reasons they gave at the time. The poly movement’s champions see their cause as a natural extension of the LGBT movement, which has been all-conquering in Massachusetts.
Thus, the NYT describes how “Somerville is alive with events like Indecent, a fetish- and kink-positive party, and Boudoir, a queer underground dance party. There are polyamorous speed-dating evenings, drag shows at the venue Crystal Ballroom and a gender-neutral CrossFit gym.” If that is not clear enough, the Times reports, “There is a significant crossover between those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and pansexual and those who practice nonmonogamy, according to multiple studies.”
Oh.
Apparently, the math is more complicated than those equal-sign bumper stickers made it seem. On the one hand, there is marriage as one man and one woman, which unites the two halves of the human race and provides a stable basis for begetting and raising the next generations. On the other hand, there are relational webs such that of one “Mr. Malone, who … currently has a nesting partner, a long-term partner, two long-distance partners and a kink-based relationship with another person.” I guess that love is love is love is a kink-based relationship.
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Christians may be a genuinely prophetic voice against the injustices of our culture. We may need to sharpen some critiques, such as those against current manifestations of greed, while on others, such as those related to sex and gender, we need the courage to continue to proclaim Biblical truth against the cultural tide.

The American ruling class and its apparatchiks are increasingly post-Christian. This is bad in all kinds of ways, but it does highlight the differences between Christianity and the ethos of our exploitative and incompetent elites. A telling example was recently provided by Kat Tenbarge, a tech and culture reporter for NBC News, who opened a rambling Twitter thread by declaring:
Kids frequently go to concerts with female pop stars who wear sexy outfits, perform suggestive dances, and sing lyrics about sex—the kids sing along, wear their merch, and copy their mannerisms. This is never seen as a problem but equivalent drag performances are…The problem has never been kids exposed to sex or suggestiveness. Kids have always been welcome to watch movies with their parents that have sexual innuendo, dine at Hooters, watch cheerleaders, and pass by magazine racks that include Playboy. Have you seen some movie posters?
This “culture reporter” has apparently never met a social conservative. Despite Tenbarge’s (perhaps feigned) ignorance, millions of us object to all of this sexualization of children, and we work hard to shield our children from it. But the decades the left spent denouncing us as scolding, prudish killjoys were memory-holed as soon as this history inconvenienced the latest talking point.
In contrast to the conservative Christians who have consistently opposed sexualizing children, Tenbarge is only concerned with ensuring that the sexuality children are exposed to is rainbow-infused. This view is increasingly normal, and it is the result of social conservatives having lost repeatedly for decades. This is the world liberalism created. The many victories won by the sexual and cultural revolutionaries are the reason we are now trying to hold the line against child drag shows and sterilizing children.
Of course, there are some people who eagerly signed up for the toboggan ride down the slippery slope and are only now wondering why there aren’t any brakes. These people persuaded themselves that the cultural and sexual revolutions would go just as far as they were comfortable with, and not any further. But the real, consistent resistance to those revolutions has always been from people and communities providing a comprehensive critique against—and a lived alternative to—them.
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A Christian community will seek to share the benefits and burdens of both family and single life. This is because Christianity knows that it is not good for man to be alone and that the deepest fulfillment and joys of this life are found in human relationships.

It is bad that Americans are increasingly living alone.
This is obvious, but there are dissenters. For example, Frank Bruni of The New York Times recently complained that his paper’s reporting on older Americans living alone framed this as a problem. He is, he admits, “half-kidding. Both articles were important. They rightly expressed concern for older Americans who don’t have the resources or the kind of extended family that I do.”
But while acknowledging that there may be a general problem, he nonetheless wanted to inform his readers of the potential “bliss” of living alone, which he says is found in living as one wishes, from bedtimes to noise to tidiness, with no demands beyond those of his dog. To those who might consider this “selfish and shallow,” he replies, “Don’t people who live in larger households have their own indulgences?” He contends, “Their domestic arrangements are as driven by personal desires as mine is. It’s just that they have different wants.”
But it is not so simple. The reality is that many people living alone would prefer not to, but our culture and economic structure are making it harder to form and sustain the family lives that most people want. Consequently, a lot of people give up — for many young people, a happy marriage and family life seem like something from an alien world, while for many of their elders, it seems like something that has been irretrievably passed by or lost.
This reveals the cruel relativism in Bruni’s suggestion that “personal desires” all have equal value — that wanting an uninterrupted morning routine is equivalent to wanting to raise a happy family. This is false. Some desires are nobler and more virtuous than others, and they ought to be encouraged. It is true that those of us who are married with children still have our indulgences (often too many), but the love and sacrifice at the core of a flourishing family life are not reducible to the level of fulfilling a personal whim precisely because it is directed toward willing the good of the other.
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These cranks and creeps have captured the establishment, from medicine to academia to the Democratic Party. And they intend to use their power to intimidate and silence critics. They do not care that their attempts are dishonest and incoherent…But try though they might, they cannot alter biological reality. They may live by the lie of gender ideology, but they cannot make it true.

The transgender movement has a science problem. Trans activists and their allies are trying to silence their critics by accusing them of “science denialism,” but they are inadvertently illustrating the anti-science nature of transgender dogmas. For example, a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) — titled “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy” actually demonstrates that rejecting transgender ideology is the best way to protect health and defend scientific integrity.
Of course, the authors, a couple of Yale professors plus a student, set out to prove the opposite. They open by asserting:
A virulent brand of science denialism is emerging in the U.S. legal system, as states enact bans on gender-affirming health care. Misused clinical research and disinformation have provided legal cover for bans on essential treatments for transgender and gender-expansive (TGE) people. Many of these bans restrict Medicaid reimbursement of gender-affirming care for people of all ages or prohibit gender-affirming care for minors. The recent end of federal protection for abortion and the lifting of Covid-19 protections such as mask mandates may signal an expansion of this dangerous force in health policy.
Yes, the complaints about the Dobbs decision and the ending of mask mandates are real and not a parody of upscale liberal white women. The rest is just loudly repeating transgender orthodoxies, with imprecations for doubters. And despite its apologists’ accusations of misused research and disinformation on the part of critics, transgenderism is indeed a dogmatic form of mysticism. Science has nothing to do with it.
Transgenderism denigrates the reality of bodily sex in order to exalt a non-corporeal sense of gender identity. It does not make a scientific claim, but a spiritual or metaphysical claim — that we have something like a gendered soul in a sexed body and that mismatches are possible and are best resolved by modifying the body into a facsimile of the other sex.
This extraordinary claim cannot be proven and must be taken on faith. Consequently, transgender advocates and allies, such as those writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, do not even attempt to provide a scientific explanation for transgenderism. Rather, because there is no physical need for medical transition, transgenderism has to be self-authenticating, proving itself by whatever mental health benefits can be attributed to it. This is why trans advocates are constantly (and falsely) telling parents that the alternative to transition is suicide — it’s the only argument they have; the only physical harm that can result from not transitioning is self-harm.
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