Nurture Shock: How Praise, Protection And PBS Are Ruining Our Kids

By Kari Henley
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
February 7, 2010

With the rise of stay at home dads, Einstein babies and hyper competition, being a kid today is radically different than it was a generation ago. As a parent, I have to say that I find the controlled environments and high expectations surrounding how to raise our children to be so different from when I was a kid that it is hard to keep up.

This blog is the first in a two-part series exploring the recent trends in "Over-Parenting." Today, I will focus on some of the circumstances involving younger children, and next week I will turn to teens.

While there are many improvements for life as a kid today - like car seats and really cool playground equipment - a lot of things are downright stressful and disappointing. Here is a top ten list of things I personally can't stand as a modern American parent:

1. Playdates. 


2. Endless "after school activities" that eliminate dinner altogether


3. Uggs, Beatles Guitar Hero and cell phones for 9 year-olds


4. The lack of freedom for kids to ride bikes all over town for fun


5. No paper routes or lawn mowing or weed pulling for extra cash


6. No more "Come Home When the Streetlights Are On" neighborhood standards


7. Fighting constantly to "downshift" our family routine.


8. Having to serve macaroni & cheese or pizza at every kid gathering


9. Texting instead of using the spoken word to communicate


10. Eight% of kids walking to school today vs. over 75% when I was a kid.

What has HAPPENED to us as parents? We bought into the notion that the world is a very scary place, when it is safer than ever. Toddlers are strapped down with every safety device known to man just to get out and learn to rollerskate or ride a bike, and all of their recreational time is carefully planned and monitored from the moment they can crawl.

We have succumbed to the consumer haze, and sold our souls to China. The seductive acceleration of our time over-saturates kids with choices, over-books their time with activities, and pushes them to stress before they should ever know the word.

I recently read a groundbreaking book for parents: NutureShock- New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. I was underlining like mad, dog earring pages left and right, and calling my husband every five seconds to read a passage. It's a must-read. Essentially, the take-away is that parents today are treating their kids as if they are mini-adults, when, in fact, they require vastly different tools and parameters to grow up.

Similar to Malcom Gladwell, Bronson and Merryman are journalists who know how to wrangle out some of the most groundbreaking research on children that has been conducted in years, and put it all together in a series of topics that will knock your socks off - like why kids lie, how praising kids paralyzes their growth, and how our focus on "prosocial" TV shows is contributing to relational aggression and bullying.

Let's face it, adults like to be praised. It raises our motivation, and is a key tool in any business environment. However, when children are constantly praised and told they are "smart," it reduces their confidence and motivation. Kids who are touted as smart are often afraid to tackle a challenge because they perceive they should be able to get it instantly. They stop trying.

Rather, children are best served by being praised for their efforts. 'Trying hard,' or 'doing your best' encourages their sense of autonomy and ability, rather than a vague notion of being smart. Think it's easy? Parents have the hardest time remodeling this one, but kids respond almost instantly.

One of the most controversial and potent chapters in the book revolves around "nice" TV, and its potential contribution to the rise in bullying. Interestingly enough, it appears kids are not watching any more TV than a generation ago, but the new trend in programming is towards "prososcial" shows often seen on PBS like Clifford and Caillou or even Sponge Bob. They are supposed to teach our kids how to be 'nice.'

But, it isn't working. We have forgotten that kids do not function like adults, who can learn a resolution or moral of a story at the end. The conflict is what they ingest. Dr. Jamie Ostrov and Dr. Douglas Gentile spent two years studying preschool kids from well off Minnesota families and monitored the types of television programming they watched; from the more violent Power Rangers to the educational PBS shows like Arthur.

They were shocked to discover the increase in any sort of physical aggression was no different between the two, and even more astounded to find that the educational television had a dramatic effect on "relational aggression," which shows up in comments like, "you're not my friend," or "we're not going to play with you anymore."

How can this be? I can see all the new parents bemoaning it now; PBS essentially saves the sanity of any adult who is raising a toddler- don't take that away! Yet, check this out: Ithaca conducted a follow up study to review 470 half-hour television programs commonly watched by children, and recorded every time a character insulted someone or put someone down.

Ninety-six percent of all children's programming includes verbal insults, and of the 2,628 put-downs identified, only 50 circumstances featured some sort of reprimand or correction -- and not once in an educational show. "Fully 84 percent of the time there was only laughter or no response at all," found Dr. Cynthia Scheibe.

"The more kids watched, the crueler they'd be to their classmates," Ostorov reported from the Minnesota study. "The correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression. They were increasingly bossy, controlling, and manipulative, and it was stronger than the connection between violent media and physical aggression."

As a mother, I fully understand the power of guilt, and feeing guilty or responsible for every imperfection in our kids, or every misstep we may take as a parent. This book is not meant to make all of us feel guilty that we are wrecking our children's lives, but rather presents solid and even uplifting revelations into the unique make up of what kids need. Bottom line, kids need some conflict, they need to fight with their siblings, they lie, and they might even benefit from seeing their parents fight when they can also witness the resolution.

Some of the traditional concepts of more free time, being bored, setting consistent rules and not fretting over a game of cowboys and Indians may not be so bad after all.

Let's start a dialogue here this week and next. What say you, parents of younger children? Are you stressed out and wondering what happened to parenting life? What do you think of some of the current parenting trends- both positive and negative? Leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Follow Kari Henley on Twitter: www.twitter.com/karihenley

Yes, gay is a choice. Get over it.

By Robert Oscar Lopez
http://www.americanthinker.com
December 24, 2012

According to Peter Schmidt in the Chronicle of Higher Education, yet another individual working in higher education has been demolished for saying the wrong thing about homosexuality.  The basis on which to define people as "anti-gay" has, however, taken a turn to the absurd (and eerie).

Unlike Angela McCaskill, who was nearly fired from Gallaudet University for signing a petition on gay marriage, Crystal Dixon of the University of Toledo was fired for writing an editorial in a local newspaper.  She referred to Exodus and mentioned people who chose to leave the gay lifestyle.

For this column I will stick to the gay male angle, since I have but 1,200 words.  Even if we accepted, for argument's sake (which I do not accept), that McCaskill was "anti-gay" because she signed a petition, the case against Dixon is based purely on wild assumptions about sex.  To fire Dixon, one must accept that gay men cannot stop themselves from having anal sex or engaging in fellatio.  Without anal sex or fellatio, it would seem that a gay couple is tough to distinguish from roommates who like to kiss each other once in a while.

These assumptions bestialize and infantilize gay men.  While I have tired of penning editorials about gay controversies, the situation is dire.  I feel compelled to write a column once again emphasizing a basic reality: gay sex is a choice.  Nobody lacks the power to refrain from having gay sex.  Get.  Over.  It.

Dixon said that gays had the choice to leave the lifestyle (in other words, stop engaging in anal sex and fellatio).  According to her detractors, such was tantamount to being anti-gay.  Her detractors are following the lead of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which lists "conversion therapy" as a hate crime.

Scroll through the comments section of any article about these issues.  You will see a roll call of gays and pro-gay supporters, issuing confident testimonials that nobody has ever changed from gay to straight.  (It's fine to change from straight to gay, according to these tribunes, because that's simply coming out of the closet.)  They allude, at various times, to Simon LeVay's 1991 brain study or problematic decades-old research into identical twins, if not warped evolutionary logic from ideologues like David Barash or anecdotes about someone they know.  The research has spoken!  Anyone who says you can change your sexuality is a lying, right-wing bigot!  To which I say the following:

Does anybody who uses the term LGBT remember the "B" in that God-forsaken acronym?  Hello?  There are bisexuals.  I am one of them.  Why include us in these categories if you think we don't exist?

Dating and marriage don't magically happen, like going to the bathroom or breathing.  They take conscious choices -- where do you hang out?  What are you looking for?  What type of partner shares your goals?  Whether to hang out in gay clubs or straight clubs makes a huge difference; these are completely different cultures.  We choose the life we want to live (or leave, for that matter).

Even gay men still choose which sex acts they commit.  I hate to admit this, but I worked as a housekeeper in a gay sex club in Manhattan in the early 1990s, when I was desperate for work.  I witnessed, literally, thousands of men having sex in the open, with me having to go clean up after them.  Very rarely (thank the Lord) did they engage in anal sex.

I have known, personally, scores of gay male couples that barely have any sex at all after they have been together for a while.  (They start preferringMonday Night Football and hitting the sack early.)  A large portion of the sex club patrons came to watch and then went home.  If "Gs" can choose what kind of sex to have, they can also choose not to have sex at all.  It's a choice.

In the lurid job I held in a Manhattan sex club, I learned some other things as well.  Many men get involved in the gay scene for unexpected reasons.  Many of them want fast and inexpensive sex, sometimes because they have trouble with women.  They can go to a bathhouse or a cruising zone and pick up men without paying the fortune they'd have to spend on a prostitute.

Moreover, a lot of times I saw people who were addicted to drugs and addicted to anonymous sex; the two compulsions were linked somehow, and there was no way for such people to quit their addiction without quitting their homosexuality.  These folks often ended up on the AA circuit or joining a church and getting baptized.

Lastly, a lot of men came to the gay sex scene in order to engage in bondage and sadomasochism, because they were raped as boys.  The aftereffects of sexual assault, as we know from studying female rape victims, are complicated and often lead people to repeat or recreate the assault scene.  Many of these mentally scarred men did not even have sex in sex clubs, even though they sought male partners to enact their eroticized simulations.

Lastly, straight men do not magically reach puberty with a fully functional sex life because of their nature.  They struggle with impotence, might be late bloomers, get embarrassingly aroused in all-male environments occasionally, and sometimes can't find women they are attracted to.  To address these issues, many men in relationships with women have to work through their difficulties by talking things over with someone else, who might be a chaplain or even a counselor.  Are they all gay?  No!

Lastly, I am left with my own life story.  I can't change it.  I went from being in the gay lifestyle to marrying a woman, having a daughter, and living a happy heterosexual life.

Consider the difference that twenty years make.  Twenty years ago, I had never been with a woman, but I had had relations with quite a few men.  Virtually all of my friends were gays, lesbians, or women who enjoyed gay company.  I found girls pretty, but I was scared of them.  Most of them were not attracted to me because I was effeminate.

Now I am twelve years into a happy and faithful marriage to a woman.  I sinned at different times, but talking things over with people helped me overcome my harmful behavior.  I begged God for forgiveness.  You couldn't pay me to have sex with a man at this point in my life.  I don't feel the urge -- maybe because I'm in my forties and one calms down in middle age, or maybe because it just wasn't right for me all along.

There's no point in obsessing over my sexual ontology, never mind obsessing over other people's.  I have to tend to the garden out back, as Voltaire would say in Candide.  We have better things to do with our time -- especially "gay men," who have chosen to go into a dating scene that's small, often incestuous, vulnerable to disease, and sometimes cold.  If that's what they want, I salute them and wish them the best.  If they want something else in life, I won't judge them for it.
Crystal Dixon pointed out something that no amount of peer-reviewed research can disprove.  Gay is not the new black.  "Gay" is about sex and genitalia.  People we call "gay" make choices about what they do with their genitals; blacks do not make choices about the color of their skin.  Period.  If one is going to fire Crystal Dixon for harming gay men by reminding all of us that no penis is beyond the executive decisions of its owner, then one might as well fire all the humanities professors in the United States (starting with me), because it seems that millennia of human civilization do not count, and the most advanced nation in the world now expects men to live like rutting, uncontrolled animals.

In short, it's time for gay rights activists to get off their high horses and let other people live.

Robert Oscar Lopez is the author of three new books based on his time in the gay lifestyle, to be published by the owner of the Runaway Pen in 2013.

Remembering what matters on Christmas Eve

By John Kass
The Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com
December 24, 2012

For all the children who should be loved always, but especially on this wondrous night, with our arms around them and a long good-night kiss on the temple, a kiss more precious than anything wrapped in a box.

For all the parents who linger in the doorways of the bedrooms, watching the sleeping shapes.

For all the babies who aren't loved and have been forgotten, and who may grow up with a hard crust around their hearts because someone didn't plant those kisses and give those hugs.

For every couple who adopts a child to save a life. For every young woman who has given up her child for adoption to save a life. For all those couples who have tried to have children but are unable. For those who've lost their children. For the children who've lost their moms and dads.

And for all the crazy uncles who will drink too much tonight, and dance and tell their wacky jokes before sneaking outside to put on the red suit in the cold, then sneaking back to surprise the kids.

For those wise aunts who make sure that the coffee is strong, so the crazy uncles sober up.

For the men and women of all the choirs in the world. They've been practicing for months now, gathering on weeknights in empty churches. And tonight is the night they've been working toward, the night they carry us with their harmonies.

And for their voices that invite us to humble ourselves, so we may ask for help in scraping away any bitterness that has taken root over the year.

For the friends and relatives, uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents and neighbors, the people who don't wait for a special night to begin building a family.

All year they've been building it, with their concern and their love and their time. They show up on a Thursday afternoon in June, or on some cool morning in November. They drop by just to see if you're OK.

So tonight is for them, and tomorrow, too, because they are family, by friendship, by blood, by the acts of family.

For those who are physically far away and can't make it home this year. And for those who've been distant other ways, and worry now that it's too late. They fear they locked the door behind them when they left, and now they wonder if there is any way back inside the house.

But tonight is the night of new hope.

And the door is always open.

Just reach for it, and see.

And for the old guys at the end of the bar, nursing drinks, fingering their packs of smokes, half watching the TV, men grateful of a warm place and the sound of laughter.

For the old women alone in their rooms tonight, awake in bed, remembering these nights past and the laughter of children, on nights that weren't so terribly still, when there was so much to do and a houseful of guests to feed.

For young parents who are stressed and overwhelmed. And for older moms and dads who are overworked, or out of work or underemployed, with pressure and those college bills pressing down on them, good people who refuse to let their children see fear.

And for those who get that call from the doctor, and feel bad news coming before they hear the words.

For everyone on the night shift tonight, and those who have to work tomorrow, police and firefighters and paramedics, store managers, servers, reporters, everyone. And for their families, waiting for them to come home.

For everyone in hospitals praying for dignity and relief, and an end without shame or suffering. For the physicians who care. For the nurses who'll enter the rooms tonight, and pull up chairs, listening to quiet confessions.

For the clergy, including those who have struggled with belief yet find it again and are renewed.

And for every sailor at sea, especially those on watch on the bridge, staring into cold black water, remembering brightly lit rooms.

For the members of the U.S. armed forces who protect us with their bodies and their lives. And for members of the U.S. Foreign Service and intelligence services who risk themselves for us. For their loved ones, who wait.

And for those Americans who died in Benghazi. For the children and adults killed at the Sandy Hook school and their families.

For our great nation, and our people who never, ever quit.

To those of you whom I've hurt with my stupid and thoughtless words on my bad and strident days, I'm sorry. And to those who give this column a chance and visit with me in the mornings and send me letters and email I share with my wife. Betty and I can't thank you enough. But thanks again.

And for everyone who keeps hold of what is important about this night:

It is that message brought to us by the child who came to light the world, that perfect child born in that manger in Bethlehem so very long ago.

He is the gift.

And it is all about love.

And I hope it comes to you, and comforts you, and remains.

From Betty and me and the boys, from my brothers and their wives, from Yia-Yia and her seven grandchildren, from all of us to all of you and yours.

Merry Christmas.

jskass@tribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

Don't cross the forces of tolerance

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
July 27, 2012

To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but aldermanic power corrupts all der more manically. Proco "Joe" Moreno is Alderman of the First Ward of Chicago, and last week, in a city with an Aurora-size body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants. "Because of this man's ignorance," said Alderman Moreno, "I will now be denying Chick-fil-A's permit to open a restaurant in the First Ward."

"This man's ignorance"? You mean, of the City of Chicago permit process? Zoning regulations? Health and safety ordinances? No, Alderman Moreno means "this man's ignorance" of the approved position on same-sex marriage. "This man" is Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, and a few days earlier he had remarked that "we are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives" – which last part suggests he is as antipathetic to no-fault divorce and other heterosexual assaults on matrimony as he is to more recent novelties such as gay marriage. But no matter. Alderman Moreno does not allege that Chick-fil-A discriminates in its hiring practices or in its customer service. Nor does he argue that business owners should not be entitled to hold opinions: The Muppets, for example, have reacted to Mr. Cathy's observations by announcing that they're severing all ties with Chick-fil-A. Did you know that the Muppet Corporation has a position on gay marriage?
Well, they do. But Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef would be permitted to open a business in the First Ward of Chicago because their opinion on gay marriage happens to coincide with Alderman Moreno's. It's his ward, you just live in it. When it comes to lunch options, he's the chicken supremo, and don't you forget it.

The city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, agrees with the Alderman: Chick-fil-A does not represent "Chicago values" – which is true if by "Chicago values" you mean machine politics, AIDS-conspiracy-peddling pastors and industrial-scale black youth homicide rates. But, before he was mayor, Rahm Emanuel was President Obama's chief of staff. Until the president's recent "evolution," the Obama administration held the same position on gay marriage as Chick-fil-A. Would Alderman Moreno have denied Barack Obama the right to open a chicken restaurant in the First Ward? Did Rahm Emanuel quit the Obama administration on principle? Don't be ridiculous. Mayor Emanuel is a former ballet dancer, and when it's politically necessary he can twirl on a dime.

Meanwhile, fellow mayor Tom Menino announced that Chick-fil-A would not be opening in his burg anytime soon. "If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult," said His Honor. If you've just wandered in in the middle of the column, this guy Menino isn't the mayor of Soviet Novosibirsk or Kampong Cham under the Khmer Rouge, but of Boston, Mass. Nevertheless, he shares the commissars' view that in order to operate even a modest and politically inconsequential business it is necessary to demonstrate that one is in full ideological compliance with party orthodoxy. "There is no place for discrimination on Boston's Freedom Trail," Mayor Menino thundered in his letter to Mr. Cathy, "and no place for your company alongside it." No, sir. On Boston's Freedom Trail, you're free to march in ideological lockstep with the city authorities – or else. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when Massachusetts was a beacon of liberty: the shot heard round the world, and all that. Now it fires Bureau of Compliance permit-rejection letters round the world.

Mayor Menino subsequently backed down and claimed the severed rooster's head left in Mr. Cathy's bed was all just a misunderstanding. Yet, when it comes to fighting homophobia on Boston's Freedom Trail, His Honor is highly selective. As the Boston Herald's Michael Graham pointed out, Menino is happy to hand out municipal licenses to groups whose most prominent figures call for gays to be put to death. The mayor couldn't have been more accommodating (including giving them $1.8 million of municipal land) of the new mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose IRS returns listed as one of their seven trustees Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Like President Obama, Imam Qaradawi's position on gays is in a state of "evolution": He can't decide whether to burn them or toss 'em off a cliff. "Some say we should throw them from a high place," he told Al-Jazeera. "Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement ... . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime." Unlike the deplorable Mr. Cathy, Imam Qaradawi is admirably open-minded: There are so many ways to kill homosexuals, why restrict yourself to just one? In Mayor Menino's Boston, if you take the same view of marriage as President Obama did from 2009 to 2012, he'll run your homophobic ass out of town. But, if you want to toss those godless sodomites off the John Hancock Tower, he'll officiate at your ribbon-cutting ceremony.

This inconsistency is very telling. The forces of "tolerance" and "diversity" are ever more intolerant of anything less than total ideological homogeneity. Earlier this year, the Susan G. Komen Foundation – the group that gave us those pink "awareness raising" ribbons for breast cancer – decided to end its funding of Planned Parenthood on the grounds that, whatever its other charms, Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with curing breast cancer. Within hours, the Komen Foundation's Nancy Brinker had been jumped by her fellow liberals and was strapped to a chair under a light bulb in the basement with her head clamped between two mammogram plates until she recanted. A few weeks back, Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor who "says he's never voted for a Republican presidential candidate," published a paper in the journal Social Science Research whose findings, alas, did not conform to the party line on gay parenting. Immediately, the party of science set about ending his career, demanding that he be investigated for "scientific misconduct" and calling on mainstream TV and radio networks to ban him from their airwaves.

As an exercise in sheer political muscle, it's impressive. But, if you're a feminist or a gay or any of the other house pets in the Democratic menagerie, you might want to look at Rahm Emanuel's pirouette, and Menino's coziness with Islamic homophobia. These guys are about power, and right now your cause happens to coincide with their political advantage. But political winds shift. Once upon a time, Massachusetts burned witches. Now it grills chicken-sandwich homophobes. One day it'll be something else. Already in Europe, in previously gay-friendly cities like Amsterdam, demographically surging Muslim populations have muted Leftie politicians' commitment to gay rights, feminism and much else. It's easy to cheer on the thugs when they're thuggish in your name. What happens when Emanuel's political needs change?

Americans talk more about liberty than citizens of other Western nations, but, underneath the rhetorical swagger, liberty bleeds. When Mayor Menino and Alderman Moreno openly threaten to deny business licenses because of ideological apostasy, they're declaring their unfitness for public office. It's not about marriage, it's not about gays, it's about a basic understanding that a free society requires a decent respect for a wide range of opinion without penalty by the state. In Menino's Boston, the Freedom Trail is heavy on the Trail, way too light on the Freedom.

©MARK STEYN

Polygamy, Too

From the April 16, 2012, issue of National Review

By David J. Rusin
http://www.nationalreview.com
April 19, 2012

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum got jeered for comparing the legalization of same-sex marriage to that of polygamy, but, whether or not the comparison is rationally sound, thoughts of the former’s facilitating the latter bring a smile to many Islamists. If the definition of marriage can evolve in terms of gender, some Muslims ask, why not in terms of number?

Islam sanctions polygamy — more specifically, polygyny — allowing Muslim men to keep up to four wives at once. Though marrying a second woman while remaining married to the first is prohibited across the Western world, including all 50 U.S. states, a Muslim can circumvent the law by wedding one woman in a government-recognized marriage and joining with others in unlicensed religious unions devoid of legal standing.

As Muslims have grown more numerous in the West, so too have Muslim polygamists. France, home to the largest Islamic population in Western Europe, was estimated in 2006 to host 16,000 to 20,000 polygamous families — almost all Muslim — containing 180,000 total people, including children. In the United States, such Muslims may have already reached numerical parity with their fundamentalist-Mormon counterparts; as many as 100,000 Muslims reside in multi-wife families, and the phenomenon has gained particular traction among black Muslims.

The increasingly prominent profile of Islamic polygamy in the West has inspired a range of accommodations. Several governments now recognize plural marriages contracted lawfully in immigrants’ countries of origin. In the United Kingdom, these polygamous men are eligible to receive extra welfare benefits — an arrangement that some government ministers hope to kill — and a Scottish court once permitted a Muslim who had been cited for speeding to retain his driver’s license because he had to commute between his wives.

The ultimate accommodation would involve placing polygamous and monogamous marriages on the same legal footing, but Islamists have been relatively quiet on this front, a silence that some attribute to satisfaction with the status quo or a desire to avoid drawing negative publicity. There have, of course, been exceptions. The Muslim Parliament of Great Britain made waves in 2000 about challenging the U.K.’s ban on polygamy, but little came of it. In addition, two of Australia’s most influential Islamic figures called for recognition of polygamous unions several years ago.

With the legal definition of marriage expanding in various U.S. states, as it has in other nations, should we anticipate rising demands that we recognize polygamous marriages? Debra Majeed, an academic apologist for Islamic polygamy, has tried to downplay such concerns, claiming that “opponents of same-sex unions, rather than proponents of polygyny as practiced by Muslims, are the usual sources of arguments that a door open to one would encourage a more visible practice of the other.” Yet some American Muslims apparently did not get the memo.

Because off-the-cuff remarks can be the most revealing, consider a tweet by Moein Khawaja, executive director of the Philadelphia branch of the radical Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After New York legalized same-sex marriage last June, Khawaja expressed what many Islamists must have been thinking: “Easy to support gay marriage today bc it’s mainstream. Lets see same people go to bat for polygamy, its the same argument. *crickets*”

The “same argument” theme is fleshed out in an October 2011 piece titled “Polygamy: Tis the Season?” in the Muslim Link, a newspaper serving the Washington and Baltimore areas. “There are murmurs among the polygamist community as the country moves toward the legalization of gay marriage,” it explains. “As citizens of the United States, they argue, they should have the right to legally marry whoever they please, or however many they please.” The story quotes several Muslim advocates of polygamy. “As far as legalization, I think they should,” says Hassan Amin, a Baltimore imam who performs polygamous religious unions. “We should strive to have it legalized because Allah has already legalized it.”

Again and again the article connects the normalization of same-sex marriage and Islamic polygamy. “As states move toward legalizing gay marriage, the criminalization of polygamy is a seemingly striking inconsistency in constitutional law,” it asserts. “Be it gay marriage or polygamous marriage, the rights of the people should not be based on their popularity but rather on the constitutional laws that are meant to protect them.”

According to a survey carried out by the Link, polygamy suffers from no lack of popularity among American Muslims. Thirty-nine percent reported their intention to enter polygamous marriages if it becomes legal to do so, and “nearly 70 percent said they believe that the U.S. should legalize polygamy now that it is beginning to legalize gay marriage.” Unfortunately, no details about the methodology or sample size are provided, and in general quality data on Western Muslims’ views of polygamy are scarce and often contradictory. Results from a recent poll of SingleMuslim.com users, many of whom live in the West, show significant support for the religious institution of polygamy, while findings from a more professional-looking survey of French Muslims indicate little desire for legalization.

Nevertheless, the number of polygamous Muslims and the opportunity presented by the redefining of marriage make it very likely that direct appeals for official recognition will ramp up over the next decade, as more Muslims join vocal non-Muslims already laying out the case that polygamists deserve no fewer rights than gays. In the meantime, watch for Islamists and their allies to prepare for ideological battle.

For starters, one hears a lot about the alleged social necessity of recognizing Islamic polygamy. The hardships encountered by second, third, and fourth wives who lack legal protections are regularly highlighted, while polygamy is promoted as a solution to the loss of marriageable black men in America to drugs, violence, and prison. Because polygamists who are not legally married are known to abuse welfare systems — for instance, Muslim women in polygamous marriages often claim benefits as single mothers — it would not be shocking to see legalization pushed even as a means of curbing fraud.

These practical arguments are supplemented with heavy-handed attempts to extol the supposed virtues of Islamic polygamy, as in a Georgia middle-school assignment featuring a sharia-lauding Muslim who tells students that “if our marriage has problems, my husband can take another wife rather than divorce me, and I would still be cared for.” Leftist academics such as Miriam Cooke, who has peddled the fiction that polygamy frees married Muslim women to pursue lovers, will have a role to play as well.

The good news for opponents of polygamy is that eventual legalization remains far from certain in the U.S. or elsewhere. State representatives will not be rushing to introduce pro-polygamy bills when, according to a Gallup survey from last year, almost nine in ten Americans still see the practice as morally wrong. Opinions can change, of course, as they have regarding same-sex marriage. Unfortunately for polygamy’s backers, however, the equality arguments employed to great effect by gay-marriage advocates may ring hollow, in that recognizing polygamy — which almost always takes the form of polygyny — would essentially endorse inequality between the genders.

Convincing American judges to overturn restrictions will be an uphill battle as well — and not just because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1879 rejection of the “religious duty” defense of marrying multiple partners in Reynolds v. United States. More recently, state supreme courts have explicitly held the line against polygamy in their rulings to extend marriage rights to same-sex pairs. See Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (Massachusetts, 2003) and In re Marriage Cases (California, 2008); the latter decision describes both polygamous and incestuous unions as “inimical to the mutually supportive and healthy family relationships promoted by the constitutional right to marry.”

Judicial criticism of polygamy is not unique to the U.S. In a case concerning self-proclaimed Mormon fundamentalists, the supreme court of British Columbia upheld Canada’s ban on plural marriage last November after the chief justice, in the words of the New York Times, “found that women in polygamous relationships faced higher rates of domestic, physical and sexual abuse, died younger and were more prone to mental illnesses. Children from those marriages, he said, were more likely to be abused and neglected, less likely to perform well at school and often suffered from emotional and behavioral problems.”

Focusing on polygamy in the Islamic world does not yield a happier image. Based on her experiences in Afghanistan, feminist university professor Phyllis Chesler has called the practice “humiliating, cruel, [and] unfair to the wives,” and noted that it “sets up fearful rivalries among the half-brothers of different mothers who have lifelong quarrels over their inheritances.” Likewise, Egyptian-born human-rights activist Nonie Darwish has elucidated polygamy’s “devastating impact on the healthy function and the structure of loyalties” within Muslim families.

Recent studies have bolstered these accounts. According to new research, Israeli Arab women in polygamous marriages are worse off than those in monogamous ones. A separate investigation uncovered similar negative effects on Malaysian Muslims. In addition, an academic paper released this year concludes that polygamous societies in general lag behind their monogamous counterparts and explores the reasons for this, including the increased tension and criminal activity that result from creating a surplus of single, low-status men.

There are many other arguments against polygamy that supporters of legalization will have to defeat, such as that expanding marriage to three or more people would require massive alterations of Western family law. However, neither bureaucratic obstacles nor public exposure of the social ills accompanying polygamy will deter polygamous Muslims from seeking what they desire.

Recognition of polygamous marriages would be a major win for stealth jihadists — and the time is nearly optimal for them to make their move. How ironic that laws benefiting gay couples may aid Islamists — followers of an ideology that despises homosexuals — in their campaign to establish sharia in the Western world.

— David J. Rusin is a research fellow at Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. This article initially appeared in the April 16, 2012, issue of National Review.