Not sure if this belongs in “comment” or not, but here goes.
Everyone knows I’m for blogging. The benefit of blogging/blogs is it allows one to produce and consume information in small quantities that make their way through the information overload. Those bits can still be either useful or unuseful, but they at least get through; they at least get written. I haven’t had the time or propensity to write fiction since we moved to DC, and perhaps it is because this has been a transitionary time, maybe it is because I have been in a long planning period. Whatever the reason, I have been able to blog. I’m not NOT writing, just not what I WANT to be writing.
What to consume is also a question. It is a very weird period of history right now. I’m finding I’m having to do more and more to comfort an increasingly troubled spirit. Today I’ve only been able to listen to The Innocence Mission, Denison Witmer, and Chris Rice, i.e. all very chill and hopeful music. Comfort music.
I recently got to test the new version of the RSS reader I use, which allowed me to keep feeds in my configuration but not poll them (I already wasn’t reading them). I mentioned a few: Evhead and SN, to my friend and said “Once their heads get small enough for them to pull them out of their asses, I’ll start polling them again.” They are fine blogs, actually, I’m not trying to talk shit about them, what I’m trying to say is I have decided not to read them. I am being my own filter.
Which leads me to the point: today, there is another one to add to that list.
ambiguous.org was one of my usual reads. I found it one of the few well done group blogs in existence. A post today made me start to wonder about its authors, and so I immediately started to dig a little deeper and found out that the two major authors are both polygamists.
At the risk of ruining my “dangerous” reputation, I will say this: I have a real problem with polygamy (they call it polyamory–perhaps this is the gender-neutral version of the word?). I remember about 1.5 years ago I found out a member of the faithmaps listserve was a polygamist, and I don’t doubt that that led to my eventual retreat from that forum. It’s just that major alarm bells go off inside my heart whenever I come up against it. From everything that I know and feel, the human soul was meant to be in deep romantic and sexual relationship with one other person. When people do otherwise, whatever the context but especially in polygamy, I always think, “Who is damaged, and who is going to be damaged?”
I’m not so paranoid around singles who are sexually active, and I dare say that if I hadn’t spent my years between 18 and 22 (when I got married) in a highly restrictive religious context I might have been one myself. But polygamy, the intentional, knowledgable, and open rejection of monogamy in a long-term emotional and sexual context, seems to my heart to be an exponential move off the spiritual and social commitments of millenia.
Maybe I’m being paranoid, after all David had many wives (and still couldn’t control himself), and he was a man after God’s own heart. But something tells me, just my Spidey-sense, to make a wide berth around such people. Which in this case is too bad, because I enjoyed their opinions about other things in life. But I wouldn’t be able to read their words the same way again after today.