Today, fewer and fewer people on the liberal side of questions of marriage and sexual ethics are even pretending to have moral objections to polyamorous sexual relationships or their recognition. Increasingly, the pretense is not regarded as politically necessary. “Poly” groups no longer need to be pushed into the closet in order to depict redefining marriage as a “conservative” cause; “polys” are now even welcome to march in pride parades and the like.

The logic of the sexual revolution continues to play itself out in exactly the way defenders of “traditional” marriage and norms of sexual morality saw (and said) that it would. When I and many others noted that the abandonment of the idea of marriage as a conjugal union and its replacement with a conception of “marriage” as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership would swiftly be followed by the mainstreaming of polyamory and eventually demands for the legal recognition of “poly” partnerships and families, we were accused of “scare mongering” and making illicit “slippery slope” arguments.

What we saw—and what anyone should easily have seen—is that the displacement of the conjugal conception of marriage left no ground of principle for supposing that marriage is the union of two and only two persons, as opposed to three or more (“throuples,” “triads,” “quadrads,” etc.) in multiple partner sexual ensembles. With the sole exception of Jonathan Rauch, who at least tried to identify a principled moral basis for monogamy consistent with jettisoning the norm of sexual complementarity (though he failed), no supporter of redefining marriage, so far as I am aware, made a serious effort to address our challenge on this critical point.

Today, fewer and fewer people on the liberal side of questions of marriage and sexual ethics are even pretending to have moral objections to polyamorous sexual relationships or their recognition. Increasingly, the pretense is not regarded as politically necessary.

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Read the whole CNN story here.