" Where does the next advance come?" he asks in an essay at Politico. "Now that we've defined that love and devotion and family isn't driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals? The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy.... Gay marriage remains illegal in Australia, most of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, and parts of Europe and Mexico; the most liberal of those countries strike me as the most natural places for "the next advance" of marriage. I'd urge my fellow gay-marriage proponents to focus their efforts there––and legalizing group marriage in America right now would strengthen the hands of gay-marriage opponents abroad, confirming slippery-slope arguments that were raised and rejected here. If it ever made sense to avoid this fight as a matter of political strategy, it still does; if gay marriage was ever a more important priority than plural marriage, it remains so." ~ Freddie de Boe...
Comments
As useful as religious practice is for helping children and adolescents understand and practice a way of life that connects them with others in a deep and meaningful way, my own prejudice has been that one can only fully internalize moral principles by being critical of the principles one learns as a child - choosing ideas on the basis of their merit.
The idea that there is a universal moral code to which we aspire, I think, is an excellent one. The idea that we can completely and definitively define its details, however, can be very divisive and dangerous.
Jim
"The Universal Moral Code is not a set of principles that everyone follows successfully every day, nor a set of principles that each of us would apply the same way in every case. (Sometimes we disagree very strongly about how to apply them!)"
In my opinion, I think where things get "fuzzy" is that we (everyone) likely disagree about how to apply them more often than we agree ...