Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

To: Hon. Rick Santorum
Senator, Pennsylvania

From: Blanche Poubelle
Spokesperson, Polyamorous Americans Coalition to Unleash Power (PACTUP)

Re: Adultery, Bigamy, Polygamy, Incest

Although you faced a storm of public criticism for your statement "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," we at PACTUP would like to thank you for the clear logic of your statement.

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PACTUP has been arguing for decades that marriage to more than one person or, as we prefer to call it, polyamory should be legal and encouraged. We applaud your endorsement of our position. As your statement clearly shows, given

a basic right to privacy in our sex lives, it is only logical to conclude that the government has absolutely no business deciding how many people we can be married to.

The legal mandate for monogamy is really just an expression of a cultural bias, wrapped up in moralistic terms. As you very well know, many of the most important figures in the Old Testament (e.g. Abraham, Jacob) practiced polygamy and there is no clear Biblical prohibition against polygamy. Our own cultural practice of monogamy comes from the Greco-Roman period, but it is not grounded in any rational argument.

We at PACTUP believe that American society has moved beyond the depiction of all bigamy as an act of fraud perpetrated by a man against a women. Of course, we are opposed to any polyamorous arrangement that does not meet with the consent of all the participants. But in cases where all the menand/or women involved in polyamory consent, what possible interest does the state have in opposing such an arrangement?

We thank you for pointing out that opposition to polyamory is just as irrational as opposition to consensual homosexual relationships. The vast majority of Americans have realized that the government should have no role in regulating what we do in our bedrooms, and that there should be no laws against homosexual behavior. We hope that your statement will help them to see that opposition to polyamory is just as irrational.

As for the connections between polyamory, homosexuality, and adultery, we again applaud your logic, and hope that it is more widely appreciated. Prohibitions against adultery do have a Biblical basis, but the health of our great nation depends on the separation of church and state, and the mere presence of a Biblical prohibition is no rational argument in favor of a law against adultery. For example, though the Bible prohibits the worship of idols, we would hardly want the government of the United States to prosecute idolators.

Adultery is the alleged crime of having sex with someone other than the person you are married to. Thankfully most states in the US have realized that such laws are archaic and removed them from the books. Such laws intrude into the private arrangements of married couples by presuming that their marriages exclude outside sexual partners, when

in fact many marriages are open to such encounters. Further, if the state consistently attempted to prosecute every adulterer in the country, we all know that the criminal justice system would break down.

Incest is the most taboo of the sexual behaviors you have included, and we praise you for your courage in publicly defending it. In fact, we agree with you that when incest involves consenting adults, there is little rational basis for prohibiting it. This is the hardest case, however, since most cases of incest involve minors, whose ability to say no to a more powerful family member is minimal. For this reason, we have not included incest law reform on our current legislative agenda. But we thank you for your provocative argument in favor of incest, and have formed a study group to consider the matter in further detail.

In closing, let us again commend you for your application of rationality to the tangled mess of American sex laws. We hope that your logic will lead others to the conclusion that we ourselves have reached that the government should stay out of the sex lives of its citizens.