After reading Catherine Siepp and Louis Wittig commenting on Big Love today on NRO, I think it’s fair to say the show’s creators are succeeding in their quest to normalize polygamy (and, implicitly, alternative family forms in general). That quote from Jonathan Turley at the beginning of Wittig’s piece is telling. Turley, a law professor, was defending polygamy in USA Today in late 2004. Yet, even as that popular newspaper was giving Turley’s defense of polygamy a platform, he pretended that polygamy could never gain public acceptance in the United States (through, say, a television show). That was about a year-and-a-half ago! Actually, when conservatives raise the slippery-slope argument, libertarians who have no problem with polygamy are more likely than most to roll their eyes and pretend it’ll never happen.

I haven’t seen Big Love yet, but I don’t doubt it’s as fun and engrossing as Siepp and Wittig say. That’s the point! Nowadays I like country music better than MTV, but that doesn’t mean MTV can’t be clever, fun, and addictive. I have seen Three of Hearts, the documentary about a polyamorous family playing in selected art houses and slated to air this spring on BRAVO. It’s a fun film, with extremely sympathetic characters you can’t help but like. Again, that’s the point. We are supposed to see these polyamorists as “just like us,” and we do.

The problem is that, once the secrecy breaks down and polyamory and polygamy gain open acceptance, our larger family system will be spectacularly weakened. You can argue that proposition as a public policy issue, but at this point it’s getting awfully hard to deny that same-sex marriage will eventually lead to calls for the recognition of polygamy and polyamory. And remember, we are still at a moment when the cultural left is for the most part downplaying their ultimate plans. A truly concerted push for recognition of polygamy and polyamory won’t begin until sometime after same-sex marriage is safely achieved. So whatever we’re seeing now is just the barest taste of what might someday be coming.