By Maria Padhila
It’s all coming out.
That’s the expression that keeps coming up in my mind, over the past year. The Snowden revelations are just one example: piece after piece of information comes out, and in coming out reveals more, changes more, pushes more change. I think most of us are getting that feeling of everything happening so damn fast, of the floodgates opening. It’s a tipping point, critical mass effect — you’ve pushed and pushed for so long, and finally the door opens and your own momentum carries you stumbling halfway into the next room.
This is what has been happening with polyamory as well. It’s gone from a phenomenon only a few (such as Eric Francis) acknowledged, to a way of life with more than one TV show and a media article a week — and hundreds of bloggers like me, slogging away. In a way, the Republican/Evangelical types might be right: if you accept The Gays, then everyone else will want equal rights, too. What the hell is wrong with people?
It would be nice if there were anything like equal rights — and if the mere gesture of being able to be married in some states really made that big a difference. We all have to be really careful not to assume everything will be rosy because a few bigots sulked off looking defeated. But from a longer perspective: it has happened really, really fast. People who have never heard of such a thing in their lives now know what polyamory is and isn’t. More people are saying, “Hmm. Maybe that’s for me.” More people are saying, “Well, it’s not for me, but where’s the harm?” People are even starting to complain about being bored with articles about polyamory! To me, that’s success.
Hence Simon Broussard’s recent post in Journals of a Polyamorous Triad on “Why Social Acceptance of Polyamory is Inevitable.” He runs through a number of myths and gives some needed perspectives — marriage is about wealth transfer, and hey, folks, remember when polygamy was not only acceptable, but respectable? It’s educating reading. It concludes: