January
2, 2003, 8:30 a.m. Left
Clones
The Raelians
are just liberal nuts.
eep
down inside, the Raelian cloners are just a bunch of good-hearted liberals.
Liberals love to tweak conservatives when some Right-wing nut starts bombing
people or spewing hate. But the Raelians are definitely children (if not
clones) of the Left. The Raelian
website is filled with paeans to nonviolence and world peace. Tolerance,
we are told, is not enough. Instead we have to actively "love differences,"
be they "racial, cultural, religious, sexual or genetic." The
Raelian platform includes provisions for a guaranteed minimum income,
free medical care, abolition of the death penalty, and the establishment
of a democratic world government. Oh, and by the way, the Raelians are
polyamorists — advocates of group sex, and of state-sanctioned group
marriage.
Whether the Raelians
have actually cloned a human being or not, this little flap reminds us
of the way in which a seemingly marginal group can open a Pandora's box
for society at large. In fact, the Raelians have already made headway
against a psychological barrier, even if their clone turns out to be imaginary.
A little ways down the road, the de facto destruction of marriage through
legally recognized polygamy and/or polyamory may be the next big change
ushered in by apparent social outliers.
The Raelian website
features a brief description of its courses in "sensual education."
But a well-publicized
newspaper story gives the details: "[Raelians] can have heterosexual,
homosexual and bisexual sex in couples, threesomes, foursomes, and "moresomes."
Apparently, Raelians flock to the sect's Canadian headquarters for "free
love orgies." No surprises there. Any self-respecting cult from the
Sixties or Seventies (Rael's first encounter with space aliens was in
1973) ought to furnish its members with opportunities for group sex. But
this being a new century, it's time to go further and seek legal recognition.
Here is Article 10 in the Raelian movement's revised version of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights:
Each
human being has the right to engage in any type of relations with others
as he/she wishes, be they of homosexual or heterosexual nature provided
that these relations are established between consenting adults, no matter
how many adults are involved. These unions, and possible separations,
must also be legally recognized by our society and free of any discrimination.
Nicely done! Not
only must multiple sexual unions be legally recognized as marriages, but
discrimination against the polyamorists next door is banned. And we already
know that tolerance isn't enough. Group marriage, be it heterosexual,
homosexual, or bisexual, is one form of difference we're going to have
learn to "actively love."
Let us stipulate
that the Raelians are a bunch of nuts. (As a stick-in-the-mud conservative,
I'm willing to tolerate them. "Actively loving their differences"
will have to wait.) But there's an obvious method to the Raelians' madness.
Take away the bits about aliens engineering our DNA, and the Raelians
are committed to an only slightly shallower than usual version of Left-liberal
utopianism. As such, the Raelians remind us that, just like cloning, demands
for legalized polyamory are only a few steps down the road. And just like
the (slightly saner) organized polyamory movement itself, the Raelians
obviously link the quest for state-recognized polyamory with the demand
for gay marriage. That link is not only present in the Raelians' support
for homosexual and bisexual polyamory, but in the report that the second
cloned baby will be born to a lesbian couple.
After gay marriage
has been legalized, it's only a matter of time before we are peppered
with demands to take the next logical step. I don't expect the critical
legal cases to be filed by the Raelians. Stranger things have happened,
though, as the cloning flap indicates. Given the legal road we're headed
down, if the Raelians do decide to get into the polyamory-legalization
business, their arguments could have an even greater chance of success
than their cloning efforts. Nonetheless, the important challenges will
likely come from organized
polyamorists (who have already pressed one legal case), and from breakaway
Mormon polygamists in the southwest. Tom
Green's 2001 polygamy case, after all, received backing from so mainstream
an organization as the ACLU. It may take some years to come to fruition,
but once gay marriage is legalized on rights-based grounds (the same sort
of grounds already used to mandate civil unions in Vermont), at least
one plank in the Raelian platform will become a reality. (And if the cloning
turns out to be real, we could face what might be the most lovable "difference"
of all: Clones marrying each other in groups!)
Once legal, would
polygamy/polyamory spread beyond a few marginal movements? Hard to say,
but as the polyamorists point out, an interest in having sex with more
than one partner is not exactly unheard of. In fact, restraining that
desire, and the damage it can do to our families, is a central purpose
of marriage itself. Polyamorists, by the way, are convinced that Bill
Clinton is a closet (or maybe not so closet) "poly." The extent
to which legalized group marriage would actually catch on is tough to
predict. What's not hard to predict, however, is that the legalization
of group marriage, even on a relatively small scale, would effectively
destroy the meaning and purpose of marriage itself. Yet that is the future
we face, once legalized gay marriage opens up the gates to all rights-based
redefinitions of marriage. Clone group marriage anyone?
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eep
down inside, the Raelian cloners are just a bunch of good-hearted liberals.
Liberals love to tweak conservatives when some Right-wing nut starts bombing
people or spewing hate. But the Raelians are definitely children (if not
clones) of the Left. The 
