Sanford, sons, and polyamory

I'm fairly sure that the three chirping crickets following the occasional update to this blog are A) intelligent not to click on links about polyamory or sex or relationships at work B) probably my significant other and/or a limited audience who've found their way here via my half-hearted links via the web, or C) both.

That said, I'm about to delve into NSFW categories of information. The following is probably not kosher reading material, but I'm always curious about the way people approach different decisions.

For instance, I'm both delighted and astounded that during the Iranian presidential election, President "No Really, I'm Not an Unstable Puppethead Dictator Who Enjoys Non-Alcoholic Pina Coladas, Long Walks on the Beach and Crushing All Political Opposition" Ahmadinejad used the Persian equivalent of "Yes, We Can" for his campaign slogan. Delighted, because it's terribly fun to watch hypocrisy in action. Astounded because it's questionable if he realized how much of a bonehead move ripping off the election slogan from the current leader of The Great Satan was going to be at the time.

I'm also fairly certain that President Nutsy didn't really think people were going to whine about yet another thrown election in his favor, or that by using Twitter to try to round up Iranian dissidents based on time zone he discounted how many people from San Francisco to Berlin would cheerfully set their local time to Tehran. But it is Iran, and they are very good at rounding up and kangaroo-courting dissidents. Of course, "fully democratic elections" in countries headed by dictatorships often result in political testiness when the people don't shut up and vote like they're told to, but in thirty years or so I'm sure the Iranian revolutionaries will all look back on this and laugh. Or cough in their prison cells. One of the two.

But politico-topic-of-the-day aside, I'm always fascinated on some level with the decisions someone makes that I'm fairly sure I would never make myself. For instance, an eighteen-year old Belgian girl who got 56 star tattoos on her face and blamed the artist when her father went nuclear. Sometimes these little white lies work in your favor, but telling people you passed out under nine needles injecting stinging liquid under your skin, on your face, is less likely to work unless you've a genetic disorder (like your brain being missing) that skipped a generation.

And I am very sure that teenage pregnancy, for most, is more about making decisions that have a critical effect on the rest of your life and for the life of your child and way less about using your new-found fertility as a path to fame and glory.

For instance, I'm fairly sure that if Jesus was born today in an "immaculate conception", Mary might try to be the Appointed face of Abstinence Only Education, while Joseph meandered back to play hockey....er, I mean, try to be an involved parent in the life of a child under the media spotlight who happens to have no actual marketable skills outside of the ability to complete wood, stone, or ice carving. And that he was told in a dream to take (wink wink, nudge nudge) Mary to prove earthly birth legitimacy prior to the actual wedding ceremony that would have made that whole angelic vision unneccessary. Oh, and he's rumored to be half Mexican. Er, Babylonian. What was I talking about? Riiiight. Use condoms and/or think about what one would do to obtain condoms, kids, or you'll wind up with a kid of your own who might grow up to found a new religion analyzing your every move from his birth to your death. Or be a political icon symbolizing teenage pregnancy. Your choice.

In some strange way I completely understand the mental acrobatics we go through as well. The question I asked multiple times to teenagers who had questions about whether it was okay to have condoms in your wallet was simply, "No".

Upon further explanation, my reasoning was this: if you're going to have sex, you're going to do it safely and accurately with a minimum of fussing around. To that end, getting condoms, lube, and practicing both the adornment and removal of the contraceptives isn't by any stretch (heh, heh) of the imagination a preplanning for sin or sinnerdom, it's basically figuring out ahead of time how to drive safely. Nobody flicks us crap for knowing how to do CPR even if you never hang around people with quadruple bypasses and/or poor swimming skills, but it's useful information to have in the event you ever do. Admittedly, nobody walks around with a CPR faceshield in their back pocket, either. The phrase "time and place" factors in immensely, and is also specific vis-a-vis stupid places to fumble with said condoms: broom closets, backseats of cars, long grass, poison ivy, camping trips, the fifteen minutes her mom's going to be at the store, etc. If these kids who know how to use condoms never actually enact that knowledge until their wedding day, who cares? The removal of that information from their arsenal is as intelligent as leaving loaded pistols around, saying NO TOUCHY and not mentioning why you should not juggle them or try to spin them on your fingers.

I like to think that at the very least when I give awkward teenagers the advice of "who cares about marriage? Wait until you have exactly the right time, the right context, the right setting and have enough condoms and lube to make latex animals afterwards" they cognate the connection between "accidental sperm in vagina" and "baby come out". How they term "accidental" is purely up to them - via fuckup in condom or the heat of the moment of teenage naked lust monkeys on some snowbank in Alaska near the Russian border.

It's easy to take what seems cuckoo to the majority of people and label it with a swash of prurience as "deviant" or "decadent". Heck, even, articles about Jon and Kate's recently announced divorce have begun questioning whether or not their divorce is "unChristian", to which I have to ask, "Did you even WATCH the show? I'm pretty sure Satan lives on Earth and has taken the form of a hyperfertile blonde chick in Hershey, Pennsylvania." I've taken the precaution of crossing myself each time I pass the checkout stand with all those devilishly chocolate goodies, just in case, but again, I find it fascinating that there are still people who believe in some unnamed, undefined "sanctity of marriage" when a cable television channel shows hours of incredibly shallow people enthusiastically violating it more than an Iranian protestor's human rights.

I'm actually wondering why the "unChristian" questioners are less concerned for the safety and home environment of eight children born to freaky reproductively greedy parents who barely tolerate each other living under the glare of a hundred cameras and a train of babysitters. Oh, and more paparazzi than your average nude beach hosting Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But hey, if God didn't want you to suffer through a marriage made in hell compounded by insane reproductive technology choices and half-assed cable network TV stardom, he wouldn't have founded the modern bedrock laws of the institution of marriage, right? Or maybe that was, say, the Roman Empire. In either case, whether Yahweh, Jupiter, or Zeus codified the institution of marriage into the traditions known today, I'm fairly sure whatever deity currently approves or disapproves of human partnerships would be fingering thunderbolts, rivers of blood, or a plague of toads. (Unless "toad" is mistranslated from the ancient Aramaic scriptures and truly means "scribes and sculptors who shalt follow you everywhere, lo, writing upon thy foibles and critiquing how fat thy clothes makest thou look".)

And the thing is, when someone holds up a highly biased example of what NOT to do in a generalized type of relationship, I tend to scramble for another example, even though I'm fairly certain that the next example is going to be fraught with near-identical issues. It's like finding out that the McDonald's down the street found e.coli contaminated meat and running to the next nearest one instead - the probability factors don't increase in your favor.

But the thing is, "Oh, my goodness, how unChristian this whole divorce thing is!" sounds to me less like a protestation of the needs of the people involved and way more cover-your-ass condemnation from the people who can't stop themselves from telling you how much your afterlife is going to SUCK if you don't give them 10% of your income.

And I will fully admit it, I once was in a stage of my life where I would think the whole "Jon and Kate" mucky divorce/religiously-inspired baby factory saga would be limited to monogamous couples in Christian-church sanctioned marriages.

But oh, no. No no no. See, monogamy carries its own burden of issues, but polygamy and polyamory are even MORE fun.

Truly, as a guy who would be best described as a serial monogamist, happily ensconsced in a monogamous relationship, I comprehend what a pain in the ass it's got to be to juggle the emotional lives and needs of more than one person at once. When I wasn't in a committed relationship, I called that "dating". I came to the fast realization that I'm simply not an emotional multitasker above two, and frankly some days I'm rated only to handle my own. Trying to maintain more than one physically and emotionally romantic relationship at a time is exhausting, and I'm not making an oblique reference to Cialis. God help you if you're trying to run a large institution, company, country, or state and screw up so badly you go missing for five days while your staff scrambles for excuses. "Hiking in the Appalachians! Yeah! That's WAY better than the Emergency Defense of Marriage meeting off the coast of Argentina!" Ah, no, Sanford. Not really.

Anyway, in a very long ramble, I've come to the spark point of this post, which was the local polyamorous advocate's blog a friend of mine recommended. http://rosephase.blogspot.com/ is written as a blog dedicated to the philosophy behind one person's personal choice to have open relationships.

And by and large, I agree with many of the philosophical arguments most evanglists of polyamory espouse. Had Sanford discreetly approached his wife about having an affair with a mutual Argentinian friend and figured out a way to bounce the peso, so to speak, in the governor's mansion with full permission, I'm fairly sure this whole scandal he's now in wouldn't have found itself anywhere near the front page. However, by vanishing off the face of the earth for five days sans anyone knowing where he was headed, it became a full-blown sex scandal, replete with the now-banal, "I have been unfaithful to my wife" describing a relationship the Bible-thumping, "get morality back in government now" governor had with the woman who, eight years ago, advised him to stay with his wife for the sake of the kids.

Eight years ago a divorce would be career suicide for a rising star of the Republican party (okay, any rising star of any American political party), so it's a tad misleading to beat Sanford too harshly, and the obvious joke that the Edwards' estate in Chapel Hill has expanded the doghouse to include Minority and Majority suites is, well, obvious, now that I've made it.

But what I think our reactions to on so many levels with this kind of insanity generated around whose genitals conjoin with whose is not that the organs are doing anything out of the ordinary, but rather the hypocrisy and the mendacity that surrounds them.

Had Jon and Kate simply said, "Screw it, you're a bitch and you're a bastard" early on prior to trying for kids to salvage their relationship, and gotten divorced, they'd have no more cause for celebrity than your average hyperfertile-with-the-aid-of-fertility-drugs/surgery people. No harm, no foul, and it's possible that the two of them might not have pulled five seasons of television from a cable network known previously for its dedication to estrogen-laden made-for-TV-movies.

I'm fairly sure I personally know (and adore) the writer of rosephase both for their warmth and their generosity of spirit, but I'm also fairly full of stories I can tell of polyamorous individuals and the more libertine examples of their ways. Contextually most of those stories involve massive amounts of booze and controlled environments, but the actions speak incredibly true to stereotypes of young hipsters running amok nekkid, and while I know that indeed, there are warm, generous, healthy, happy polyamorous individuals and couples out there, the ratio of those folks to the maniacally callous Swingers of Hipster Love is few and far between. These days, polyamory is polyfuckery - the use of the word love substituted for a simple fix of moral flexibility for someone unable or unwilling to compromise their own needs in partnership for another.

But you know, the straight-and-narrowists who vigorously defend pestle-and-mortar marriage at all costs are simply losing the battle when it comes to bastions of Faith and Devotion...to one's wife or husband. And I can hear the self-ascribed freaky-freaks cheering in the background as once again, Republican and Democrat Soapboxers alike admit to the inability to keep it in their pants. I'm not exactly sure what they're cheering, or why someone breaking a promise of trust is cheerworthy, but I get it. Watching someone self-righteous and haughty get it in the nose with a cream pie of their own making is comedy gold.

Likewise, when Sanford pleads with the press not to interfere with his wife, it doesn't ring true. As a political figure, he knows that ain't going to happen, and as a husband, he OUGHT to know that his betrayal of her is all the more painful because damn near -everyone- with an Internet connection on the planet now has an idea of what he did to her. I am positive that on many an Internet Blog promoting the many benefits of uncontrolled polyamory, the cry, "Well, that just shows how much monogamy is unnatural and fails to keep people happy" will crop up.

Hell, I'm pretty sure they were out in front of the Christian apologists noting that Jesus forgave him long ago and it isn't up to the masses to critique his ways.

But Jon and Kate? Now them's a rich, juicy target for The Lord.

In a large way I think the writer of this blog misses the point of "marriage" as a written concept in much the same way opponents of "gay marriage" or proponents of "opposite marriage" miss the point when discussing the actuality of it. And while it's good, solid argumentation, it's misleading, nonetheless.

"The whole premise behind marriage is exclusiveness? The whole premise is keeping other people away from something you have to give, like love or sex? And exclusive love... LOVE? If you are married you can’t love your friends? Love your children, love your family?

Yes, yes but those are different kinds of love so they don’t count. I dare you to try and love two people in the same way. You can’t. Love is like any other connection it is individual and unique for the person you are connecting with.

But really the thing that bothers me about this is - I don’t want to be a part of any institutions that are about exclusivity. I don’t join golf clubs.

Marriage is about commitment, it’s about celebrating a relationship, it’s about bringing people together. Families, friends, and yes sometimes lovers. It’s about sharing your love with the community. Marriage, as I choose to see it, is about opening your relationship. It’s about inviting people into your life and your love.

Love isn’t about keeping people out; it’s about letting people in. Marriage is a celebration of love." - rosephase.blogspot.com

Well...kind of? What marriage as a word has meant for centuries was "legalization of a relationship involving two sexually and romantically involved persons of differing gender allowing rights of inheritance and co-ownership of property for said persons of differing gender except for the one with no Y chromosome." Only in the past century has that Y chromosome gained some status, but not universally, and the expectation that the social acceptance of said partnership will show up any day is still kind of silly, what with the continuance of White Power organizations and neo-Nazi movements fifty years after the American Civil Rights movement and not fifteen after the racial genocides in Rwanda.

That marriage SHOULD be defined as a partnership between two individuals who have chosen to join families isn't in question; the indignant outrage that the society's acceptance of marriages that add "forsaking all others except the ones we think are hot and/or unlikely to challenge my/your place in your/my sexual and emotional hierarchy" hasn't quite caught on yet seems kind of odd, if not misplaced.

And yes, I'm fully aware that polyamory as a personal choice is not that stereotype, but I'm also aware that the unique challenges facing most polyamorous couples regarding the issues of jealousy continue, as always, to converge on a pecking order hierarchy of sexual preference - if not between genders, then between sexual partners.

I am fully positive that many people in marriages that are marriages of political and financial benefit conduct their sexual lives out of the spotlight, and would not be shocked if Condi Rice and W had a thing going on the side under Laura Bush's nose. Woefully chuckling and waiting for the tell-all tapes from the Oval Office to be released forty years from now, but not terribly shocked.

And honestly, why not compare a marriage or a long-term partnership to a golf club? Why not compare a personal series of relationships in your life to an exclusive club where you, as the property owner, get to decide who plays and who doesn't? I have had divots and mulligans a-plenty, and only through my admission of who gets to play on my fields and who doesn't did I figure out that I'm perfectly fine and I'm willing to close my gates to all other players once the right one walks on the course. Most golf clubs are like that - admission is limited based on attributes. Love can be as well. But someone who declares themselves open to all is going to get a lot more damage over the long haul.

Or, as I found out at the age of seventeen, "public golf course" doesn't actually mean "public and open to anyone, more specifically horny teenagers who decided that the private spot over by the ninth hole would be perfect for two people to have their initial sexual experience". It does, however, often connote a greenskeeper with a sense of humor and a set of well-timed sprinkler systems. In other words, the public versus private golf courses still cost a good deal of money, time, and energy, and with the public ones you have to deal with all kinds of secondary issues you don't neccessarily have to deal with at the private ones.

But I can't really see the idea presented by many polyamorous evangelists that by being polyamorous, one rejects the sexual stereotypes pushed to us from the media of one man, one woman. If anything I think the media tends to be more schizoid than that - the best example being Neal Patrick Harris, a gay man playing a man's man getting all the ladies, or straight men playing gay men, or straight women playing man-to-woman transexuals.

I am truly not shocked that sexual relationships are complicated and people use elaborate naming conventions and tracking systems to try to make some sense of them, but the simple reality is this: people are complicated critters, from the asexual to the amorously uninhibited and everywhere inbetween, and the idea that any one mode of human sexual behavior is "right" or "wrong" or can fix everything that happens to be wrong with people and/or society is narrow-minded zealotry, whatever flavor it actually happens to be.

Every single one of the indicators that the writer of Rosephase states in the post on June 6 apply equally to monogamous or nonmonogamous relationships. Well, for the most part. The two that talk about individuals who are involved with monogamous others are designed more for the poly community, but someone who wants to be the primary emotional and romantic focus should probably watch out for that kind of person as well.

What it comes down to is not that Jon and Kate's divorce is unChristian, or that Governor Sanford's marriage could have been saved by polyamory and/or a tactic bootycall understanding. Or even that the Alaska branch of the governors have taken more than their fair share of crazy but rather that these people done screwed up their lives, publicly, letting their greed overtake their other needs.

Because frankly, even though I've gleefully desecrated via chapter-and-verse quotation more than one official Xian Church doctrine throughout this entire post, I'm a firm adherent of the mantras of Jesus: namely, love one another and be open to love in return. Be kind to those less fortunate than yourself. Be a child of God and the world, and be true to yourself and those whom you choose to love. It's a pretty simple system of action and behavior that doesn't get adhered to very often primarily because of the issues of greed in their way.

The issues of polyamory, monogamy, Christianity and basic human decency are still one and the same - to earn, and deserve the trust of those you choose to keep in your life is the driving force behind most, if not all of human interaction. Whether you choose to share that openly with many or privately with one, it matters ONLY that you stand fast and never violate the foundations of trust that your relationship, your belief system, or your political constructs are founded upon.

And if you fuck that up on national TV, we're all gonna laugh at you.