Push for Polyamorous Relationships Reaches New York City

The left’s push to grant legal protections to polyamorous relationships is reaching New York City. The city council here is weighing legislation to enshrine “nonmonogamous families” as a protected group under the Five Boroughs’ Human Rights Law. The slide toward legalizing polygamy is the latest vindication of the warning from the conservative dissenters when the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.The measure pending at the city council is designed to “protect non-traditional families and relationships by prohibiting discrimination” in “employment, housing, and public accommodations” on grounds of what the bill’s backers call “family or relationship structure.” Protected persons include, according to Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, “nonmonogamous families,” who, she avers, “continue to experience unequal treatment.”The legislation is needed because these “nonmonogamous families,” Ms. Hudson asserts in a memo supporting the proposed law, “are not protected from discrimination by city law.” The measure, in Ms. Hudson’s telling, is meant to ensure that legal “protections apply regardless of the number of people involved in a relationship or the nature of their emotional or caregiving bonds,” provided that “the relationship is lawful.”The attempt by Ms. Hudson and her council co-sponsors to protect “nonmonogamous families” amounts to an early step, if only a step, toward bringing unconventional domestic arrangements like polyamory, or even polygamy, under the umbrella of legal sanction. The move is echoed by attempts in the Pacific Northwest to, as the Times reported earlier this year, “confer the beginning of legal protections to polyamorous relationships.” Seattle has adopted an ordinance that expands the meaning of sexual orientation, per Bloomberg Law, to include pansexuality and “actual or perceived consensual relationships involving multiple partners such as non-monogamous relationships.” An activist for transgender rights told the Times that such laws are “about the law catching up to where we are culturally.” Yet the measures, too, can serve to accelerate cultural trends by granting them legal sanction. Feature a measure adopted by Portland, Oregon to broaden the city’s prohibition of discrimination based on family status, Bloomberg Law reports, “to include multi-parent, multi-partner, multi-generational, non-monogamous, and aromantic families and households.” Such incremental recognition at the municipal level for “non-monogamous” households could seem harmless. One can imagine, though, a slippery slope from there toward legalizing polygamy.That was the concern mooted in 2015 when the high court in Obergefell v. Hodges voided laws in “states that define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.” Such laws were invalid, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion, because “the Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach.” The ruling pointed to a breach of “due process of law” for same-sex couples seeking to wed.Yet due process is shorthand for equal and fair treatment under law, not a grant of any substantive privilege. Justice Clarence Thomas has called the idea of “substantive due process” a “legal fiction” and an “oxymoron” lacking “any basis in the Constitution.” Hence Chief Justice Roberts’s warning in Obergefell that states, after the same-sex marriage ruling, could in the future have trouble defending “the definition of marriage as a union of two people.” After all, Justice Kennedy’s majority ruling had stressed the “dignity of the bond” between two men or two women “who seek to marry.” Ms. Hudson justifies her proposal based on “the evolving realities of family life in New York City.” That logic puts a spotlight on Chief Justice Roberts’s caution from Obergefell: “Why would there be any less dignity in the bond between three people who, in exercising their autonomy, seek to make the profound choice to marry?”

Push for Polyamorous Relationships Reaches New York City

Push for Polyamorous Relationships Reaches New York City

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