Is Today's Adultery Morphing into Tomorrow's Polygamy?

It appears that de facto polygamy is creeping into Mainstream America counterpoised to our monogamous Christian underpinning.

Each new high profile scandal captivating the American media may be pushing the American people towards the acceptance of polygamy as is the case in other societies. We are accepting Gay Marriage then why not polygamy?

I guess it is the brazen nature of today’s high profile scandals. A sitting governor chasing a lover in South America while lying to his constituents. A presidential candidate fathering a love child knowing his wife is terminally ill and so on. Yet the Arnold Schwarzenegger scandal is the real Hollywood script.

It is as though Arnold Schwarzenegger was living out the fantasy polygamous marriage captured in the HBO series “Big Love.” It took a great deal of nerve to have your wife and concubine operating in the same house day in and day out for years without the wife getting a hint that she had help meeting Schwarzenegger’s sexual needs. The lesson here is that copulation does not respect money or class for fertilization leads to new life.    

However, I recall in the 1950s there was a chap who purportedly had the mother and the daughter pregnant at the same time. These women had these children a couple of days apart in the same hospital.  

In another situation, I heard my teenage peers and tweens criticizing one family relationship saying, “uncle-father” and “mother-aunt.” As I recall this was a very embarrassing situation for the children.

When you see Hollywood actors involved in multiple marriages it becomes obvious that de facto polygamy is already legitimated in the Mainstream American psyche because these marriages may have ended underpinned by adulterous involvements of one or both spouses. My wife and I had to redefine a parameter of a book “Wedlock the Commonsense Marriage” because our goal was to interview couples married 25 years and more who said they were happy. One lady added up all of her multiple marriages to get 25 years. We had to coin the phrase “serial matrimony” then restricted our interviews to people 25 continuous years.

Today’s serial matrimony suggests that de facto polygamy is like a minister without portfolio who everyone thinks should be in a pulpit but does not see his or herself being held accountable for a congregation.   Yet high profiled male promiscuity may be hiding a real problem that DNA testing is bringing to light. Wang Hongyi (China Daily) reports, “A leading Beijing paternity testing center says up to 30 percent of tested men were not the biological fathers of their children.”

The women are demanding the DNA before giving birth to establish paternity. “The number of women opting for prenatal paternity testing has also shot up in recent years. ‘They want to know whose baby they are carrying,’ Wu said. If the husband discovers he is not the biological father, it is divorce or abortion."

The growing Chinese paternity trend is disquieting because it suggests that socioeconomic advancement now is juxtaposed to adulterous relationships that are becoming a mainstream norm.  The religious must be quaking with the thought of a significant increase in the abortion rate once the repercussions of sexual promiscuity come to light in paternity tests. Thus, I must ask, “Are we suggesting that today’s adultery will evolve into tomorrow’s polygamy?”