Insipid Ideals

A few days ago at Rod Dreher's blog, there was a discussion over some symposium or some such as Georgetown promoting "Relationships Beyond Monogamy," offering "thoughts on polyamory, radical honesty, the pitfalls & joys of open relationships and much more."

Rod said that "the people pushing this garbage are the enemy, pure and simple."

Commenter Jimmy Shi responded:

No, they're not. They simply have a different view of the nature of what you, and presumably, they, believe is the gift of human sexuality. That doesn't make them particularly villainous. And if you're indicting them as villains, chances are they're doing the same.

You may not like the concept of an open marriage. But frankly, it beats the hell out of a broken family that comes apart because one partner can't keep it in their pants and simply tries to hide that fact.

I responded:

1. Who is "the enemy"? Yes, I'll concede calling people the enemy isn't the best way to persuade them and more often than not will cause strife and contention. But, for whatever reason, even if they may not themselves be "villainous," they have arrived at a terrible conclusion and ended up in support of a "villainous" position on sexuality. In the interests of maintaining dialog, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and presume they reached their conclusion out of a simple mistake, and hold off on the vitriol. Really, I mean that--I am not trying to be patronizing, and I don't think we should try to be. But at some point, disagreements will inevitably arise, and it's not "bad faith" argumentation or disingenuous to say so.

2. In regards to the open marriage point, a broken family because one partner can't keep it in their pants and proclaims that behavior loud and proud ain't much of an improvement. Or, to put it more plainly, I am not impressed with arguments for freedom based on lowest-common-denominator morality. Why must our ideals conform to our weaknesses? Isn't the entire point of ideals that we would conform our weaknesses to them? Or has thinking of sex using concepts such as ideals and weaknesses become utterly outmoded, leaving us only with "what is," and not "what should be?" What happens to people, societies, families, when we forget to ask such questions--or deliberately avoid them?

That's when I threw down and started wailin' till the ref had to throw me in the box.  Five for fightin'. But seriously, what are your thoughts? I'm all ears.