In any case, from this outline of its vision of “Christian sexual ethics,” I guess RMN is willing to present “one way to think about this” that would support the ideal of monogamy, but also wants to make clear that RMN is totally cool with non-monogamous relationships if that floats your boat.

The arguments in many Western churches today over whether or not to abandon very clear biblical and historic Christian teaching against homosexual practice have raised the question of what other biblical boundaries for sexual ethics might also become up for grabs, after Scripture is abandoned as authoritative for morality.

Within America’s second-largest Protestant denomination, the United Methodist Church, the main organization pushing the LGBTQ liberationist cause is the extraordinarily well-funded Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN).

In a recent article, RMN tackles the “slippery slope” argument, in its own way, in apparent hopes of refuting “a few anti-gay Christians [who] have liberally used fallacious logic and hateful rhetoric.”

From its opening by singling out an African-American pastor for ridicule through its rambling at length about “why we don’t marry mops” to its approvingly citing Karl Marx to its bizarre sci-fi digression of expressing openness to “inter-species marriage relationships” between humans and extra-terrestrials, the essay makes clear that THE central, and perhaps only firm, sexual boundary for RMN’s rather secularized sexual ethics is consent.

Hence, traditional United Methodists are assured that because of this standard, RMN would agree with us in opposing rape and bestiality. RMN would also agree with us in opposing parent-child romance, although the article’s stance on other forms of incest is less clear.

But what about “polyamory” – the practice of having multiple sexual partners in overlapping periods of time – a term I first learned from monitoring RMN? And what about the reality of “monogamish” relationships – where two “committed partners” allow each other to cheat – being so widespread in the LGBTQ community that liberal Slate magazine reports the “dirty little secret about gay marriage” that “Most gay couples are not monogamous”?

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