Pro-family activists said that polygamy and polyamory would be next in the queue after marriage was redefined by Obergefell, and everything is unfolding right on schedule. The pattern is familiar. First, personal stories are employed in a willing media eager to cover the next weird thing, exploiting instinctive empathy and beginning the process of normalization. Children are usually involved and utilized as evidence that legal recognition of alternative family arrangements are necessary. Finally, the courts cave, predictably announcing that they are only recognizing an already-existing reality rather than making a substantial change.
Exhibit A is a story out of California. Back in 2017, a “throuple” of men successfully petitioned a judge to put all three of them on the birth certificate of a little girl named Piper. Dr. Ian Jenkins and Alan Mayfield met in 2003, and added another partner to their relationship upon meeting Jeremy Hodges, a zoo-keeper, in 2012. They discussed having children—the media reports on this ignore the fact that obviously, men cannot create children without women. But children have been turned into a commodity, and our society has decided that gay men have more of a right to children than children have a right to mothers.
