For all those who don’t believe the slippery slope on marriage and the family is real, I give you New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan.
Bacdayan’s name is — well, was — mostly unknown outside of small legal circles in New York State. She was appointed to her seat in the Bronx County Housing Court in 2018, almost three decades after her graduation from the University of Kentucky Law School in 1990, according to legal database Trellis.
No offense to Bacdayan, of course, but this isn’t exactly Supreme Court material. However, while few people were noticing, the judge made a groundbreaking ruling that could open the door for legally recognized polygamy.
According to CBN News, Bacdayan ruled late last month that a man in a polyamorous relationship had the same rights that other married individuals had regarding housing.
The Washington Examiner reported that Scott Anderson and Robert Romano were married to each other and had been “life partners” for 25 years. Despite the typical entanglements like joint bank accounts and being named as beneficiaries on each other’s retirement accounts, they lived separately “to provide them comfort and space.”
Trending:
A third individual named Markyus O’Neill moved into Anderson’s rent-controlled apartment in 2012, one year after beginning a relationship with him. While Romano knew of the relationship, he wasn’t friends with O’Neill and disapproved of the arrangement.
When Anderson died, O’Neill was denied the opportunity to renew the rent-controlled lease. He sued, arguing the polyamorous relationship made him a “non-traditional family member.”
Bacdayan agreed, writing in her Sept. 23 ruling that “the time has arrived” for courts to recognize such arrangements as legally binding even — if there’s no legal undergirding to them.
“The existence of a triad should not automatically dismiss respondent’s claim to noneviction protections,” she wrote in her decision. “What was ‘normal’ or ‘nontraditional’ in 1989 is not a barometer for what is normal or nontraditional now. Indeed, the definition of ‘family’ has morphed considerably since 1989. Specifically, many articles have been written about multi-person relationships in recent years, revealing a preference that for some has long been known.”
Do you think that marriage in this country is on a slippery slope toward immorality?
Pay close attention to that year: 1989.
Bacdayan wasn’t just picking an arbitrary point in time to compare the mores of the present to those of the past; she was pointing to the date the selfsame court she sits on became the first in the land to legally recognize same-sex relationships.
“Before gay marriage was legalized in any state, Braschi v Stahl Assocs. … was decided,” she wrote.
In that case, the court decided a same-sex partner counted as “family” under materially similar circumstances.
“The New York State Court of Appeals became the first American appellate court to recognize that a non-traditional, two-person, same-sex, committed, family-like relationship is entitled to legal recognition, and that the nontraditional family member is entitled to receive noneviction protections,” she wrote.
She added that previous court rulings in same-sex relationships were problematic because “they recognize only two-person relationships” and that they were “rooted in traditional ideology.”
Read that last part carefully: “Traditional ideology” is essentially a problem, a hurdle that needs clearing. It was never there for a reason except to cause problems — and Bacdayan is more than happy to play her little part to tear it down.
Braschi v Stahl Associates eventually led, inch by inch down the slippery slope, to Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that claimed there was a constitutional right to gay marriage.
It didn’t stop there. And, as Family Research Council president Tony Perkins noted in an Op-Ed in The Washington Stand, it was never meant to stop there.
“The media laughed off the conservative movement’s concerns about the slippery slope when Democrats pushed to sexualize the military 20 years ago,” he wrote. “Now, almost two decades later, with American parents in the fight of their lives over transgenderism and judges paving the way for ‘plural marriage,’ it, unfortunately, proves we were right.
“The LGBT’s fight was never about marriage — it was about every social norm,” he added.
And that slippery slope doesn’t stop going downhill at polygamy, Perkins warned.
“If ‘love’ and ‘consent’ are all that define a relationship, then proponents of incest, pedophilia, and group marriage can follow the LGBT playbook all the way to validity,” he wrote.
Why not? The taboos and laws against these forms of “love” are all mere “traditional ideology,” when it comes down to it. Even with pedophilia, though the issue of age and the ability to give consent comes in, tradition and cultural norms inform our idea of what constitutes the proper age of consent is.
Perkins noted those who have sounded the alarm have been shrugged off until it was too late — the most notable example being the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Back in 2003, the late Justice Antonin Scalia warned of a day when state laws ‘based on moral choices’ against ‘bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution … adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity’ would all fall,” Perkins noted.
“At the time, people thought he was being dramatic. Exaggerating, even. But they don’t think so anymore. An astonishing 23% of the American public thinks polygamy is ‘morally acceptable’ in 2022, Gallup shows — more than triple what it was (7%) when Scalia sounded the alarm.”
This ruling represents just another page in a playbook to turn America into a land where traditional values are mocked and all matter of sexual deviancy is legally and socially protected.
This isn’t the supreme law of the land — not yet, anyway. I beseech my fellow conservatives, however: Think back to every time when a radical form of Judeo-Christian moral decay was proposed and you thought, “not in my lifetime.” Then count up how many how many have happened in your lifetime.
I guarantee you this: If America doesn’t start pushing back, a whole new raft of “not in my lifetime”s will happen in your lifetime.
