POSITIVELY POLYAMOROUS
 We Demand the Right to Legal Polyamorous Marriage

by Janet Kira Lessin, Chief Focalizer, World Polyamory Association

A few weeks ago Reporter Abby Ellin of the Daily Beast, interviewed husband Sasha and me about legal recognition of polyamorous marriage. We related our commitment ceremony with Shivaya, the third in our triad. We demanded the right to legally marry him.

Charles Coleson (of Watergate fame) wrote that poly marriage was part of a slippery slope leading to massive social change. Coleson’s"Triads: Mr. & Mrs. & Mrs. &.... Or Whatever" appeared on BreakPoint. Then O’Reilly on Fox News took up our demand and said that if the U.S. allows optional same-sex marriage, as Maine just did, polyamous marriage would indeed be next and would, eventually lead to marriage with ducks and turtles.

Ok, laugh, laugh. But why not polyamorous marriages?

We find polyamory–legal marriage of more than two people–in the Bible, the Vedas and the writings of ancient Sumer. People all over the world still practice plural marriage.

It’s time to recognize polyamory as legal throughout America. Polyamory is a logical, rational, emotionally-fulfilling system of creating loving families in existence since the dawn of time, but not called "polyamory" until the 1980s. We want our country to recognize in law what we polys do in practice. Proclaim in law that we poly-married have all the privileges and duties of different-sex and same-sex spouses.

Legalizing polyamorous marriage in no way harms monogamous marriage. Though there’ll always be some folks who marry only one person at a time, few will marry one person for life. Legal relationship choice would sanctify all our options. No longer would the various relationship styles be deemed out of the ordinary or something to be ashamed about. We could be who we truly are with whomever we wish whenever we want.

With legal marital options there’d be no incentive to sneak and cheat. Each person could proclaim his or her own relationship style and orientation. Finding the right matches for yourself at each stage of your life would become easier.

Imagine if individuals could be openly bisexual and have at least one partner of each sex without feeling guilt-tripped and shamed. If we were free to be ourselves, polyamorous people would no longer marry monogamously and try to get their needs met for more love through clandestine affairs that hurt and destroy lives.

Since polyamory would be a viable relationship option, an option as readily available as monogamy, more marriages could be saved as there would be more options for staying together when needs change and evolve over time for those who originally married monogamously. As polyamorous relationships and dating more than one became more socially acceptable and normal, irrational feelings of jealousy, insecurity and potential abandonment would dissolve as we, as a society, naturally gravitated into more healthy relationships that are less co-dependent and dysfunctional.

There would be more avenues for discussing feelings around jealousy and negative emotions since acceptance, tolerance, diversity and compersion (the opposite of jealousy) would become the norm and jealousy and other negative, lack-based emotions would be deemed unhealthy and unnatural. Jealousy and other lack-based, competitive and comparison fueled negative emotions would no longer be seen as normal and natural as they are in today's society, and as a result, jealousy-based rages, beatings, abuse and murders would become a thing of the past.

Children would have many parental models to nurture and love them, to assist them with their education, growth and development. More parents could teach children a broader range of skills that would better enable them to succeed. With more parents, there would be less strain on individuals who share child-raising duties. Co-parents could help parents balance giving to their kids and allowing more time for themselves. Children with more parents would no longer consume one or two parents live's completely.

Larger families with more parents and children connected through extended polyamorous families would not only allow parental members of the family to share child raising roles, but there would also be more members of the family to care for members who need elder care. Also, if a one member of the marriage dies, there are other members left to emotionally support them, so the person will not be left completely alone like in the case of monogamous relationships when their only partner passes.

Ally’s, Coleson’s and O’Reilly’s debate tells me that time is finally catching up with the times and we may all live to see a time of tolerance, love and acceptance for individual expression and diversity. We see a time of freedom, choice and love of love for all reasons, all seasons, all ages, races, colors, creeds, orientations, genders and relationship styles, the spice of life for spouses who may someday refer to their multiple spouses as spice. Now wouldn't that be nice?

I look forward to the day when humanity will acknowledge that each member of its global (perhaps even universal) society of sentient beings has a birthright to live out their lives (existence) with dignity, beauty, grace and peace. This new universal society would honor consciousness, uniqueness, individuality, diversity and respect choices made through the practice of ahimsa (do no harm). In this new world of tolerance, basic birth rights universally accepted would allow no room for abuse because abuse would no longer be seen as something tolerated by anyone anywhere. Each individual would be encouraged to maximize his or her own natural abilities and contributions to society through the development of his or her own individual, innate uniqueness, optimizing creativity creating happiness and bliss for all in creations continuum.

To get to that optimum level of universal respect, I come back to the first step that must be taken in this reality (paradigm, program) and declare that I have a right to marry whom I desire. If I chose to marry more than one, it's really no one else's business but is a decision made between myself and the other mature, conscious, aware, consenting adults who make that decision to marry with me as we declare one another beloveds and family.

Honor choice and diversity. Otherwise we'd live in a boring world, all carbon copies of one another and we all know that doesn't work but rather leads to the extinction of species and deadens life itself.

In the meanwhile, I live my life with my two husbands. Politically and societal approval are not available for us at this time. Free in our hearts, we love whom we love.

Janet Kira Lessin is a featured presenter at the annual Harbin Hot Springs, California Polyamory Conference, September 11-14 (http://www.worldpolyamoryassociation.com)

THREESOME MARRIAGES

 by Abby Ellin

First came traditional marriage. Then, gay marriage. Now, there's a movement combining both—simultaneously. Abby Ellin visits the next frontier of nuptials: the "triad."

Less than 18 months ago, Dr. Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one another. Nothing unusual about that—Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55—were legally married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something "husband."

Says Sasha: “I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together openly and proclaim our relationship. But also to have all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that.”

Maine this week became the fifth state, and the fourth in New England, to legalize gay marriage, provoking yet another national debate about same-sex unions. The Lessins' advocacy group, the Maui-based World Polyamory Association, is pushing for the next frontier of less-traditional codified relationships. This community has even come up with a name for what the rest of the world generally would call a committed threesome: the "triad."

Unlike open marriages and the swinger days of the 1960s and 1970s, these unions are not about sex with multiple outside partners. Nor are they relationships where one person is involved with two others, who are not involved with each other, a la actress Tilda Swinton. That's closer to bigamy. Instead, triads—"triangular triads," to use precise polyamorous jargon—demand that all three parties have full relationships, including sexual, with each other. In the Lessins case, that can be varying pairs but, as Sasha, a psychologist, puts it, "Janet loves it when she gets a double decker." In a triad, there would be no doubt in Elizabeth Edwards’ mind whether her husband fathered a baby out of wedlock; she likely would have participated in it.

There are no statistics or studies out there, but according to Robyn Trask, the executive director of Loving More, a nonprofit organization in Loveland (yes, really), Colorado, dedicated to poly-education and support, about 25 percent of the estimated 50,000 self-identified polyamorists in the U.S. live together in semi-wedded bliss. A disproportionate number of them are baby boomers. (Paging Timothy Leary: Janet Lessin claims on her Web site that she's able to travel astrally.)

As with a couple, the key to making a triad work is communication. The Lessins' group specifically advocates something called "compersion": taking joy in another person's joy. Thus, they know how to process jealousy. “We don’t have anything take place off-stage,” says Sasha Lessin. “You witness your lover making googly eyes and you share your feelings. It’s not difficult for most people to be compersive once they feel they’re not being abandoned.”

Like most people in the poly community, the Lessins, who also helm the School of Tantra (they take pleasure of the flesh quite seriously), take great pains to discuss pretty much everything. Some people even write up their agreements like a traditional prenup, detailing everything from communal economics to cohabitation rules. And buoyed by an increasing acceptance of same-sex unions, others want more legal protections. "We should have every right to inherit from each other and visit each other—I don’t care what you call it, we’re not second-class citizens!” says Janet Lessin. “Any people who wish to form a marriage with all the rights and duties of a marriage should have the legal right to. The spurious arguments of marriage being for procreation of children is ridiculous.”

That said, Valerie White, executive director of the Sexual Freedom Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal-defense fund for people with alternative sexual expression in Sharon, Massachusetts, says she believes that triads are actually a great way to raise a family. "Years ago, children didn’t get raised in dyads, they got raised with grandparents and aunts and uncles—it was much looser and more village-like," says White. "I think a lot more people are finding that polyamory is a way to recapture that kind of support.” For a year, Loving More's Trask and her then-husband were both involved with another woman, who was a part of the family. Trask's three children knew all about it. “I’m totally out,” says Trask.

Many others aren't. Larry, Rachel and Andie would only talk to me anonymously, due to the fact that Rachel, 47, works at large, traditional financial institution in Manhattan. Larry, 56, met her on a commuter ferry two years ago. At the time, Larry was a member of Poly-NYC, a polyamory group in New York; on their fi rst date, he told her about it. Rachel had just gotten out of a year-and-a-half-long relationship with, unbeknownst to her, a married man. “I was so overwhelmed with Larry’s honesty," she says, "I said to him, ‘I need to look that up and understand it.'"

A few months later, they met Andie, 56 at a poly retreat in upstate New York. Andie has been has practiced "multi-partnering" since the early '90s, and was giving a talk on the subject. Rachel turned to Larry and said ‘Wow, that’s someone I would turn poly for!’ “She was so elegant and classy. I just felt she was a beautiful person.”

While Larry, on the other hand, was not especially attracted to Andie, he was fully supportive of Rachel exploring her attraction. She didn’t, but ran into Andie at a few other events. Andie, in turn, began noticing the quality of the relationship between Larry and Rachel. “They didn’t just go to those meetings and do what happens to other poly partners, that they disappear from each other,” she says. “They stayed together.”

Three months ago, they reconnected at yet another retreat, and this time the three bonded on an emotional level. So they decided to figure out how to make a three-way relationship work. This involves weekly conference calls where they discuss the tenets of the relationship (honestly, respect, communication, jealousy) and agree to undergo blood tests for STDs. They talk about what they want out of life, and each other. “There are people who’ve been married 20 years and never had these kinds of conversation,” says Andie. “I feel blessed.”

Akien MacIain and his wife, Dawn Davidson, have been counseling dyads, triads, quads and once even a quint, in San Francisco for over a decade. On their web site, they offer tips for creating agreements—among them, “Use Time Limited Agreements Where Needed” (i.e., two weeks, two months, and so on) and “Check in Periodically; Renegotiate if Needed.”

“A triad is a series of dyads, but it’s more complicated because if I’m in a relationship with one other person, there’s my relationship with the other person, her relationship with me, and the relationship that each of us has to the couple,” says MacIain. “When you make it a triad there are four factorial connections. It’s very hard.”

And yet some make it work. Doug Carr, Robert Hill, and Paul Wilson have been a happy threesome for 29 years. The three men, who live outside Austin, Texas, share a bed, a checking account, and joint real-estate properties in each of their names—“a left-handed form of cementing the relationship in a legal context,” says Hill, 69, a retired financier (because of their arrangement, they, too, requested I use pseudonyms). Their ranch is split three ways; they call themselves “husbands” and wear matching wedding bands. Back in 1980, when they met at a furniture store in Dallas, Hill and Wilson were a confirmed dyad for 10 years. Carr, now an assistant dean at a local college, fell for both of them; they developed a friendship, which soon turned to love.

Wilson, 61, a consulting engineer for the health-care community, admits that initially he was less gung ho. “I thought, how is this going to turn out? You can’t read an article in Readers Digest, ‘Twelve Ways to make a Triad Work.’" He finally saw the light on a trip to Vienna the three men took. “I decided to go for it. I turned to them and said, ‘I love you,’ and I love you,’ and let’s make it work.”

They held a commitment ceremony in 1984 for 20 friends, and then a reception for 200 in their house, where we “introduced ourselves to the world as a triad,” says Carr, 49. They would like to marry legally, though they are not holding their breath that it will happen any time soon. “As far as we’re concerned, in the eyes of God we’re already married—and from an economic standpoint, we’ve taken that as far as we can, ” says Hill.

Despite the fact that they are also “Dad, Daddy and Pappa” to the 4-year-old quadruplets Carr sired with a lesbian20couple, they actually see themselves as quite traditional. “We’ve patterned our relationship on the relationships of our parents,” says Hill. “So many gay people throw away all the values they learned at home. Some are worth throwing away, but a lot are not."

“The crux of all this,” he says, "is commitment.”

Abby Ellin regularly writes the Vows column for The New York Times, and previously wrote the Preludes column for that newspaper about young people and money. She is the author of “Teenage Waistland”, but her greatest claim to fame is naming “Karamel Sutra” ice cream for Ben and Jerry's.

WHY A DUCK? POLY AND BESTIALITY ON THE O'REILLY FACTOR
Fox News

As Cunning Minx says on her Polyamory Weekly podcast, it always comes down to marrying goats. On Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor," Bill O'Reilly adds turtles and ducks to goats. He got wind of Janet and Sasha Lessin's "World Polyamory Association" (from the Daily Beast article four days earlier that I posted about), and yesterday he brought up triads and other abominations:

O'REILLY: All right, Hoover. I did not know this, but I had said from the jump if you OK gay marriage, then you have to do plural marriage, which is now -- has a name, triads. Three people getting married. There is a group in Maui, Hawaii, called the Lessin's adversary group -- advocacy group, and it's World Polygamy [sic: Polyamory] Association. They're associated with that. And they want to be married....

Too bad O'Reilly's well-meaning foil doesn't draw the line between people and animals either:

O'REILLY: If I walk in to the Massachusetts state house and say, "Hey, Governor Deval Patrick, you've got to marry me and Lenny." All right? Because --

HOOVER: I would love to see that, by the way.

O'REILLY: Not only Lenny, but Squiggy too. All right? Or I walk in with the O'Brien twins from South Boston and say, "Hey, you've got to marry me, because you're allowing gays to get married, and I'm in the Lessin's group, the World Polygamy [Polyamory] Association."

HOOVER: You've got to change the law, then. Because the law says it's between two people.

O'REILLY: OK, but --

HOOVER: Not multiple people. By the way, the last time polygamy was on the rise? 1896, when Utah became the 45th state in the union. Not a massive movement going mainstream.

[crosstalk]

...HOOVER: I don't buy into the slippery slope argument at all.

O'REILLY: You'd let everybody do whatever they want?

HOOVER: That's the slippery slope argument. That's if you allow one thing to happen, then another thing, and another thing.

O'REILLY: Hoover, you would let everybody get married who want to get married. You want to marry a turtle, you can.

HOOVER: Due process. I want to abide by the law. If the law says I can marry a turtle, I'll marry a turtle. Last time I checked, we're a Judeo-Christian culture that doesn't allow me to marry turtles.

O'REILLY: You've got to take a stand. You've got to take a stand, now. You would be for, then, putting the umbrella over all groups.

HOOVER: I am for what the law says. I do not support polygamy.

O'REILLY: That's a copout. Total copout.

HOOVER: No, I don't support polygamy. I support two people, couples, marriages.

O'REILLY: OK, but then you have to explain why two and not three.

CARLSON: And then you don't call it marriage anymore. It's not marriage anymore.

O'REILLY: Explain why two and not three? And you can't.

HOOVER: I think that the crux of our foundation of our culture depends on --

O'REILLY: On two.

HOOVER: -- two people, yes.

Watch the video on Fox (May 11, 2009), or read the whole transcript on Media Matters for America ("fighting conservative misinformation"). The O'Reilly Factor is part of why the upcoming generation voted overwhelmingly against Republicans.

Incidentally, remember that the term "slippery slope" frames everything as all downhill. Accept the term and you've already lost. Reframe it as a "sticky ramp" upward. As Theresa Brennan (of Polycamp Northwest fame) once put it, awkwardly,

Giving blacks the vote, women the vote, contraception — it's all a slippery slope to a place of better social justice and acceptance.

Bonus! Here's a quick promo about triad marriages on Fox and Friends.

Question: Is there such a thing as bad publicity? Before you say "of course," consider that most people have no idea that serious group relationships are possible. Getting it into the culture that people actually do this, even if they're icky, will make the idea thinkable... for those who need to discover they're not alone.

Update, next day: On MSNBC's "Hardball," David Shuster ridicules O'Reilly's marry-a-turtle argument as "ridiculous," "illogical," "stupid."


--- In WorldPolyamoryAssociation@yahoogroups.com, "Janet Kira Lessin"
<lemuriancenter@... wrote:

TRIADS: MR. & MRS & MRS ... OR WHATEVER by Charles Coleson
Reprinted from BreakPoint

Earlier this month, Maine became the fifth state—and the fourth in New England—to legalize same-sex "marriage." Five thousand miles away in Hawaii, Sasha and Janet Lessin are hoping to build on New England's example.

If they are successful, no one can seriously claim to be surprised.

Writer Abby Ellin described how the Lessins gathered with friends and held what was dubbed a "commitment ceremony." The "commitment" being celebrated wasn't a renewal of their marriage vows—it was the incorporation of a third party, "Shivaya," into their so-called "triad."

That's the word the Lessins and other advocates of "polyamory" call a
relationship between three people. Unlike bigamy and polygamy, in which one man has multiple wives, in a "triad," each party is a "spouse" to each of the other parties. In the Lessins' ase, "Shivaya" is both Sasha's and Janet's "husband" and vice-versa. Or whatever.

In a saner, more sensible time, antics like those of the Lessins would be shocking. But in case you haven't noticed, we are not living in sensible times. The acceptance of same-sex "marriage" has been made possible by a profound shift in our understanding of marriage. We no longer see marriage as an institution defined by someone and something other than the couple, like tradition, religion and even biology.

Instead, marriage is the product of the couple's understanding of their relationship. It's the product of certain feelings and willingness to make a public commitment to another person. If these are present, the reasoning goes, denying people the right to marry because they "happen" to be of the same sex is arbitrary and unjust.

The problem, as the Lessins and others have noted, is that, given this reasoning, denying them the right to marry of the basis of the number of partners is also arbitrary and unjust. The only difference between them and similarly-situated same-sex couples is Americans' discomfort with the idea.

And as courts never fail to tell us, one man's discomfort is another man's irrational prejudice. Besides, in a culture like ours, attitudes can change quickly. If I had told you in 1984 that, by 2009, same-sex "marriage" would be legal, would you have believed me?

That's why advocates of polyamory emphasize their "commitment" to the other members of the "triads." The more comfortable people become with these kinds of arrangements, the closer people like the Lessins come to their stated goal: that is, in their words, being able to "walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand" and also enjoying "all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that . . ."

Of course, many advocates of same-sex "marriage" insist that this can't happen. But if feelings and commitment define a marriage, what's to stop "triads" from being the "next frontier of nuptials?" Certainly not logical consistency.

As Sasha, Janet, and Shivaya remind us, the reasoning that made same-sex "marriage" possible goes hand in hand in hand with all sorts of arrangements.

Copyright © 2009 Prison Fellowship. Used with permission.

Dr. Sasha (Alex) and Janet Kira Lessin produce the World Polyamory
Association's annual Harbin Hot Springs CA Polyamory Conference September 11-13,where the polyamorous people meet and celebrate multi-lover relationships.

http://www.worldpolyamoryassociation.com