What are alternative ways people are defining family in the modern era? What systemic changes are needed culturally and institutionally to support a more diverse definition of family?
In this episode we build on the two part series on consensual non-monogamy by discussing modern family structures and the work underway to support them.
Our guests, Alexander Chen and Health Schechinger are both doing remarkable work in this field.
In this conversation we discuss:
Resources:
[INTRODUCTION]
"HS: Family should be defined by its function. Not its structure. And that the function of a family is really to provide stability, and love, and meaning-making and consistent care across someone's lifetime. And it doesn't matter where they're getting that from. We have examples of humans getting support from both biological and non-biological kin for as long as humans have been in existence. But currently, there are many different diverse ways to form loving and caring families for one another that aren't supported by our built environment, by city planning, by our laws and our social norms."
[0:00:47] JS: That's Heath Schechinger. Co-Founder of the Modern Family Institute. And this is the Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti. In this episode, we're building on the last conversation, tying consensual non-monogamy to systemic change where we're looking at alternative family structures and the work underway to enable them.
Whereas in the last conversation, we got into the personal work and how it's relevant for the systemic conversation. Here we look at the work underway at the systems level in terms of policy, cultural change, education and research to enable alternative family structures.
Our guests, Heath Schechinger and Alex Chen are Co-Founders of the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition. They're both doing such incredible and interesting work in this space. In addition to founding the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, which focus on advancing the civil and human rights of polyamorous individuals, Alex is also the Founding Director of the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic. And he teaches gender identity, sexual orientation and law at the law school.
Alex has received numerous awards for his work including being named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in law and policy. One of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40 by the National LGBT Bar Association. He's also the co-founder of the National Trans Bar Association and the co-author of Trans Youth Handbook. He's doing such incredible and diverse work in this space.
Heath also is doing incredible diverse work in the space. As I mentioned at the top of the conversation, he is a co-founder and Executive Director of the Modern Family Institute. He also serves as the Founding Co-Chair of the American Psychological Association Division 44 Committee on consensual non-monogamy. And he's an affiliate faculty at the renowned Kinsey Institute. And a board member of the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy. They're doing really important work in both the legal and policy space as well as the research space. Just really incredible superstars to support us in this part of the conversation.
In this episode, we discuss personal stories of how they got into the space, which takes the recent CNM conversation and widens it to include the LGBTQ+ movement and questions of family versus simply non-traditional sexual and romantic configurations. We also talk about relevant trends around family structure in CNM. Why this is a civil rights issue.
We discussed recent groundbreaking work they've been involved in on the legal front, specifically around municipal ordinances for multiple-person domestic partnerships and non-discrimination laws. There's also policy reform happening at the organizational level. And we talk about some of the impediments to progress. We also discussed the research agenda that Heath is well positioned to discuss given his vantage point at the Modern Family Institute.
And we close with tying into the systems conversation both from last week and the individual work and the relevancy of it for this movement. But also, the importance of the movement for the broader system change that we talk about on this podcast and in the Denizen inquiry.
As always, you can find our show notes on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com. There you can sign out for our newsletter where we bring our latest content to your inbox alongside announcements from our partners. We started doing bi-weekly virtual events to discuss the podcast. If you're interested in connecting to the community and rolling up your slaves to talk about this content, we'd love to see you there.
All right. Without further ado, on to Heath and Alex.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:04:09] JS: We've just released a two-part discussion on consensual non-monogamy that's been of great interest within the community. It's been incredibly well-received. And it started talking about the basics and then got into how the personal work that happens in that space is relevant for systems change. There we kind of essentially looked at it from the inside out from the micro to relevance for the macro. And this conversation will widen the lens beyond just consensual non-monogamy into a broader conversation about family. And also tie its relevance to broader questions of social justice.
And then we'll get wonky into kind of the brass tacks around systems change. You're both sitting in such remarkable positions to think deeply about the broader systemic change. Not just from a legal but from a cultural and research perspective. I'm super excited to dive in. And I just feel blessed to have you both here. And it's really great to see both of your faces too.
I thought we could bridge from the CNM conversation to this slightly wider lens by getting personal. I mean, Alex I just love to hear a little bit more for you how you came to focus on this space. I mean, we previously had really fascinating conversations about the LGBTQ+ space and how certain subsets of that have effectively been left behind in the importance of focusing on this specifically.
I mean, you've got such an incredible background as the founding director of the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic. You teach on gender identity and sexual orientation. I'd love to hear your personal story and how this kind of fits into, from your perspective, a broader movement that you're a part of.
[0:05:52] AC: Yeah. That's a wonderful question. Thanks for asking it, Jenny. And it's such a pleasure to be here today to speak with you and your audience with one of my favorite collaborators in this space, Heath Schechinger. Yeah, I'll just start by saying that I think that there's many ways that you can tell a story about why you come to be in the type of work that you do.
And I think one thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently is that I think part of what drew me to poly advocacy was an instinct that much of the way that we talk about social justice and civil rights issues in America today kind of contains this inherent paradox which I find very fascinating, which is a paradox between are we talking about individual rights or are we talking about collective or group rights?
When we talk about things like women's rights, when we talk about LGBT rights, when we talk about racial justice, we're usually talking about phenomenon that can only really be explained in a systemic or a group way by talking about groups of people and how they're treated in society. But in America, the solutions that we then often focus on are solutions that are about individuals getting legal rights in our system.
And a big part of that of course is really just the political unconstitutional tradition of this country, which is really a very individual rights-focused framework. There are lots of ways in which group and collective interests actually do manifest. And they're just not often in the framework of civil rights.
If it comes to corporations having rights, when it comes to nonprofits having rights, when it comes to recognizing groups like labor unions, groups like environmental activism, there are different kinds of like public interests. Groups like investors and investors rights. But when it comes to things that minority groups, we often think of it instead in this very individualized way. And that leads to a lot of different I think paradoxes and conundrums when it comes to what is the scope of the rights that we're advocating for? And what do we see as a community or groups interest, right?
Within LGBT advocacy, much of the advocacy has focused on rights that are actually I think in some ways you could think of them as having a collective aspect. Things like marriage equality and the ability of LGBT people to form families. You could see that as purely an individual's right to marry. But you can also see it as associational about who you get to form a family with. And then you could see it as what kind of cultural connections or knowledge can you pass on to the next generation.
I think that I've done a lot of work that has really been that traditional framework of individual rights and really manifesting LGBT rights as individual rights. And I was really feeling like there are lots of aspects of cultural and group community and identity that are really important for this community but are not really recognized within these traditional legal frameworks.
And so, I think when the opportunity to work in this area presented itself, one of the things that was really exciting to me is this is an area in which people are really trying to figure out what is that connection or that relationship between the individual and community groups that they form and the wider society. And what are different ways that people are trying to either innovate or resurrect historical traditions around group belongingness and togetherness that are really important for human well-being but are not well captured by the current constitutional framework that we find ourselves in – the political framework we find ourselves in America.
[0:09:05] JS: Thank you for that. And you were also just mentioning when we were – I just want to make sure that point is made too. Just how in the LGBTQ+ you felt initially that the strategy was focused on gay rights and kind of the trans were left behind, right? And then you also mentioned like you felt like the poly space was left behind and the importance of focusing on that. Can you say more about that?
[0:09:30] AC: Yeah. Sure. I think that one of the sort of questions for minority groups is partially how do you define yourself and who you even are? And then what are your collective interests, right? Which I think goes to this like individual versus group kind of dynamic question.
And one of the key questions within this space has always been who is part of this community of people who have some kind of sexual orientation or gender identity difference with mainstream society? And why should we be a group, right? Are we a group because we have things in common in lived experience? Are we a group because there are certain immutable aspects of biology that are playing out here? Are we a group because we're being oppressed in a similar way?
And I think that the more political version of LGBTQ+ identity has been that latter idea, that the reason that we all should hang together is that, if we don't hang together, we hang separately. That what harms gay people, lesbians, bisexual people, transgender people. And these days we also talk about intersex folks, non-binary folks, two-spirit individuals, is that there is a dominant paradigm society. The paradigm is a heteronormative ideal of a nuclear family that involves two people. One man and one woman who are in a heterosexual union have children together. And then that is the sort of cardinal sort of way we're supposed to organize society. And that if you deviate from that, you are going to experience oppression because people think that it's negative for society for people to deviate from that structure.
And so, I think that is the more political way to think about it. But of course, within that group of people who are under that umbrella, there are different people with different lived experiences. And you can say we all share that political interest. But how much do gay men and lesbians have in common in terms of the movies they like to watch, or the TV shows they enjoy, or the ways they like to socialize? Let alone talking about transgender people, for example, where a lot of people would say, "Well, that's not about sexual orientation. That is about gender identity. You can both be a transgender person and a gay person." And I'm a good example. I'm both somebody who is transgender and I'm also somebody who identifies as a gay man, right?
People start getting confused. How can you be both at the same time? Or what does it mean for those things to have something in common? Why should you have be considered to be part of the same group for a particular purpose? Like, cultural unity, or political activism, or what have you. And of course, then within those groups, then there are different levels of access that people have to education, to wealth, to political influence.
And historically, the critique has been that those who are smaller or more marginalized subgroups within that larger LGBTQ+ or queer umbrella are getting left behind because the majority of people are seeking things that are more mainstream are more traditional. And that includes transgender people, but it also includes people who are interested in non-traditional family structures that aren't just a two-person marriage. And that includes the fact that there's always been a very high prevalence of LGBTQ+ people who are not engaged in a sort of traditional monogamous heterosexual relationship. But because they've been more open to these different forms of relationship, but they have not been spotlighted or platformed when the community has had a political goal of assimilating into wider society and saying, "We're just like you. Love is love. Let's not rock the apple cart or make things too complicated by introducing these things that sort of reinforce negative societal stereotypes about our community."
And so, to me it's personally a political value to recognize when that's occurring and to push back against the ways in which when we say those things or we do those things we're reinforcing the same negative stereotypes that the entire group already suffers from.
And so, that is also a part of the political values that I hold in terms of what kind of advocacy we should be doing in the world and sort of bringing a counter balance or a counter weight to the fact that there's going to be a lot of prevailing societal pressures pushing us in the other direction anyway. And so, if people who have a position of power and influence push in a different way, they should push into the opposite direction of where all the other institutional pressures are going.
[0:13:13] JS: It does raise an interesting question about strategic sequencing and cultural change. Too much all at once to introduce same-sex marriage and non-traditional family structure marriage. Do we get enough political and cultural acceptance for same-sex marriage and then take on the nuclear family? Do you have any thoughts about that?
[0:13:33] AC: Absolutely. And I'll say this, that I don't think that there are ever any easy answers. And I think hindsight is always 2020. And it's always easy to say, "Well, we should have done something else at that time." And especially when you talk to younger advocates and myself being one of those people when I was younger who were full of fire and brimstone, a lot of people are really willing to make the critique without necessarily understanding what kinds of pressures were people under at the time that made them make the choices that they made?
And maybe it's true, that sometimes it's a better time now than it was then. And up until 2015, a very good reason why gay rights advocates fled for the hills whenever anybody mentioned the word polyamory is because the Supreme Court was constantly comparing gay people to polygamous. And constantly, if you look at all of the dissents in all the gay rights decisions from Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized sodomy in 2003 onwards, the dissenting conservative Supreme Court justice repeatedly say, "Well, what is the limiting principle here now against this turning into a man marrying their dog?" They would literally mention beastiality. They would mention incest and they would mention polygamy. And they would say, "Here are the sort of like parade of horribles that will happen if you allow gay marriage to happen."
And so, very understandably then, strategically, as an advocate, you are like, "Absolutely not. There are monogamous gays as well. You can give rights to us and you don't have to worry about those poly people. That's some other problem for another time." But my viewpoint is, sure, that might have made sense at the time. But it's eight years past when marriage equality was achieved at the national level. Congress just passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrines also a legislative recognition of same-sex marriage. And so, if not now, when are you ready to go back for the rest of the community?
And so, in my view, it is time now to push forward.
[0:15:08] JS: Yeah. No. I appreciate that.
[0:15:10] HS: And I think that we are starting to enter into that Overton window where non-monogamy is becoming more societally acceptable, right? I think even a turning point for me is –
[0:15:22] JS: Wait, Heath. I'm going to stop you. Because we're going to get to that.
[0:15:25] HS: Okay.
[0:15:26] JS: I just wanted – before we dive in too much to that, to those details, because I want to get to them, I just wanted to start with just getting a little bit personal with the two of you. Just from your perspective – because what we're also doing in this conversation is moving beyond just the questions of polyamory and consensual non-monogamy. We'll get into the wonkiness. And that will be kind of much of the conversation, but I think your work is so fascinating because it looks not just at the romantic and sexual relationship and how that might look differently in consensual non-monogamy. But family more broadly. Can you talk a little bit about your story and just how you're seeing your work relating to family?
[0:16:03] HS: Sure. Yeah. I think for me it started in – I think I shared with you, Jenny, how I have a background of getting – I was on my way of getting a master's degree in ministry. And that along the way, I started developing attraction to one of the best guy friends. And the church's response and there not being space for that is what prompted me to leave.
And then a couple years later when I was in my PhD program and wanted to have conversations about our capacity to be drawn to more than one person simultaneously, it felt like that I had a similar response in that context as well. And that's what really prompted me down this path of – really, my observation was that we had made advances on really focusing on creating space for understanding who in terms of the gender that we are in our gender expression as well as whom we are attracted to in the context of gender. But really, that there was needing expansion in terms of how. How are we structuring our relationships?
And it started with starting a committee on consensual non-monogamy within the lgbtq division of the American Psychological Association. I'm happy to talk a little bit more about my art experience with how do we even do that?
[0:17:21] JS: We're going to. Yeah.
[0:17:23] HS: And those conversations, I really think it intersects with what Alex is saying. And even the timing it as well I think is interesting. But we ended up housing ourselves in the LGBTQ division because the other option at the time was the couples and families subdivision. But in our conversations, we really felt like that there was more shared experiences with the LGBTQ division because there was this shared stigma, et cetera. And there was a microaggression in the name of the other division in terms of talking specifically about couples. And really, we were wanting to have conversations about structure.
And through our work and as well as my work with Alex and the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, we started to see the through lines of really how talking about non-monogamy and talking about how we're structuring our relationships, there is a lot of overlap with a number of different groups that also experienced stigma. At one point, interracial relationships were highly stigmatized. Still are. But in terms of acceptance, we've gone from something around 5% in the 50s to 95% that accept interracial relationships. Also, with divorce and blended families. We've seen a shift there. Or single people.
There are these other clusters of groups that really haven't been represented. And we didn't want to make the same mistake that Alex was talking about of just pigeon-holing and having this be about one group and trying to fight in some ways for advocating for this one group's interest. But we really were asking ourselves how can we take a broader approach and be inclusive? And a lot of the work that we do in terms of how we're framing it now is focusing on family and relationship structure diversity.
[0:19:19] AC: And I'll just jump into to say one thing, which is it's funny, right? I'm listening to us talk. And I think because we are advocates, we're giving you the spiel already when you asked us to get personal. And so, I guess what I'll just rewind and say that, on a personal level, I think one reason that I was really drawn to this and have been more and more drawn over time is I think one of the reasons why queer folks are so interested in these kinds of forms is because a lot of people don't have a strong relationship with their biological family or their family of origin.
And a lot of times, people, they make chosen families. But these chosen families are not usually recognized by law. And there's many ways in which not having – the point of laws – there are many points to laws. But one of the points of laws is to shape the way that a society constitutes itself and how people relate to each other and incentivize certain kinds of relating and disincentivize other kinds of relating.
And when you recognize nuclear family forms and you don't recognize things like career-chosen families, it makes them harder to sustain. And that is so important in a community where, yes, increasingly, people have more acceptance in their families of origin. But also, people want to be able to really support their chosen family in the same kind of way. And our legal system simply makes that extremely difficult and really disincentivize that happening. And that is something that I've seen as very harmful for our community.
[0:20:38] JS: I'm so glad you made that point, and I think it's so critical, that these subsets, these groups tend to be ostracized by their families. And so, for them, chosen family is so essential.
I mean, that raises a really interesting point. I'm already going off-script. But I think it's such an important provocation. And I always want to get clear about language and the ambiguity of it. It raises this really interesting question of what is family.
Heath, why don't you kick us off with an answer to that? Because I know you're thinking about it at the Modern Family Institute.
[0:21:11] HS: Yeah. I think it's important that we're – in my perspective and the perspective that we're taking with the Modern Family Institute is that, one, everyone should be – or family should be defined by its function. Not its structure. And that the function of a family is really to provide stability, and love, and meaning-making and consistent care across someone's lifetime. And it doesn't matter where they're getting that from. We have examples of humans getting support from both biological and non-biological kin for as long as humans have been in existence. But currently, there are many different diverse ways to form loving and caring families for one another that aren't supported by our built environment, by city planning by our laws and our social norms, as Alex was saying.
Really, what we're interested in doing at the Modern Family Institute and I know with Alex's work as well is to focus on how we can change this landscape and try to focus on how do we ensure that all people have access to the rights, the infrastructure, the social support to create the families that make sense to them and how they're structured.
[0:22:29] JS: Okay. When you say structure, you mean – I wanted to just make sure that was clear. When you say structure, you mean specifically the presumption that structure is a cohabitating dyad effectively. Or that there's an assumption structurally that it's biological. That's what you mean when you say structure? I just want to make sure that was clear.
[0:22:43] HS: That's right. Yeah.
[0:22:44] JS: Okay. That makes sense. I think it's also really interesting around not just having more freedom to define family in context of multiple romantic relationships. But also, I think part of what is driving this is also around parenting. The relationship to a child when you're child-rearing.
Alex, do you have anything to add around just this broader question of how do you define family?
[0:23:08] AC: Absolutely. I'm a lawyer. When you ask me for a definition, I will go to source of authority to start us off. And so, very interestingly, if you go to, for example, the Merriam-Webster, which is one of the primary dictionaries that's recognized for American English and you look at the first definition, definition A is a basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children. Then it says also: any of various social units differing from but regarded as equivalent to the traditional family.
Definition 1B is a spouse and children. And definition two is a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head. Definition three is a group of persons of common ancestry. Definition four is a group of people united by certain convictions or common affiliation. And then it goes down from there, right? Into other definitions of like scientific families and things like that.
But what's really interesting is that, actually, the tier of definitions reflects the way that we tend to talk about these things in society, which is to say that it doesn't have one unitary meaning, but it has a nexus of associations at the head of which is this idea of the nuclear family unit.
And in fact, for the purposes of American law, one of the things that a lot of people don't know is that there's still a Supreme Court case from this 19th century, which governs why, constitutionally, it's okay to only allow monogamous marriages and not allow polyamorous or polygamous marriages. And in this case, it's called Reynolds versus United States. And it's from the 1880s. And it's from a period of time in which the chief question politically is the integration of the territory of Utah into the United States.
And the problem from a political standpoint is that the territory of Utah is primarily occupied by Mormons. And Mormons deviate from other white Americans in practicing a form of religion which doctrinally says that it is desirable to live in polygamous households. And this was something which was regarded as a huge political problem because the majority of other Americans and especially people in Congress did not want to admit a nation where into the nation a state that would have the full rights of a state in which people practice particular form of relationship. And so, it was actually a political condition of the admission to the union that the Church of the Latter-day Saints disavow polygamy.
And so, after they did so and Utah was integrated as a territory, a series of laws were enacted in Utah and surrounding states like Idaho which were about things like criminalizing bigamy. The offense of having more than one wife. And also, doing things like barring people who were practicing polygamy and did not disavow it from doing things like holding political office and voting.
Reynolds is one of these cases where a Utah man is challenging his conviction under a criminal statute for engaging in bigamy. And he is trying to raise a first amendment's free religious exercise claim saying that I have a religious right under my religious tradition to engage in polygamy. And that ought to override your state's legal ban on engaging in polygamy.
And what's really fascinating about this case is that the Supreme Court 120-odd years ago wrote differently than it does now. And it says things out loud. That current jurists are often not willing to say out loud. And so, you can kind of see like, "Oh, this is actually what is going on."
And what this court says is that the family is the basic unit of society. And the family and how it's structured – how it is structured reflects what kind of society that you have, which is an idea that comes across in many different cultures, right? And if you look at something like Confucius, Confucius says, "So, the family is organized. So, the state should be organized. Just as in a family, there is a man at the head of a household, so in a nation, there should be an emperor. And then the emperor will rule over the people."
And so, the Supreme Court in this particular case does much the same thing. They say, "So, as you have monogamy or polygamy in a society, so you will understand the nature of the political entity that the state has." And that monogamy is associated with – okay. They said that polygamy is associated with what they call the patriarchal principle. And that it is something that has historically been practiced primarily by Asiatic and African nations. And with the exception of Mormons is not a characteristic of Western society.
And that, so as you have polygamy, so you have despotism. And so, you have people being fettered into chains of hierarchy. Versus those principles the court says cannot long survive if you have a monogamous family unit. And the reason that they had to say not long survive is that they made this decision at a time in which American women didn't have the right to vote and American marriage was very unequal. And there was a lot of gender imbalance in American society that was enshrined in law. But their idea was that monogamy versus polygamy is Western civilization versus African Oriental civilization. And it's the values that we have that make us superior to those other countries. And one of them is gender equality. And gender equality is guaranteed by monogamy.
This is actually a case which is still good law in the sense that like it's never been overturned and it's the constitutional foundation for why it's legal to only legalize monogamous marriage. And so, when you ask what the family is, those kinds of principles and those kinds of values are deeply embedded into the legal structure we have today here in America.
[0:28:31] JS: I appreciate that. Fascinating. It's fun having a lawyer on deck. I wanted to speak to the relevant trends on the cultural side. I know you are both armed with stats around this, around the nuclear family and how that's transitioning around consensual non-monogamy. What are the key stats and trends that we should be thinking about?
[0:28:55] HS: Sure. I can share a few in terms of nuclear families. I think some key headlines is that, certainly, we're seeing the rise of a myriad of different diverse families, right? I think of how 38% of adults no longer live with a romantic partner and maybe creating families and plutonic partnerships. And just how, altogether, the majority of US adults now are doing something different than heterosexual monogamous marriage in a nuclear family. And the most recent census came out indicating that only 18% of Americans are in a nuclear family. And that has dropped by over half, by 50%, since 1970. In the last 50 years.
And so, I think from a nuclear family standpoint, that is some of the key information to take away. Is that, despite that, the majority of us feel like that we're doing something different. We deviate from that. Or how a lot of our laws and foundations were built around this concept of the nuclear family.
And I think, also, regarding consensual non-monogamy, I think some key stats with that are that in terms of lifetime engagement, it's 20% of Americans have engaged in consensual non-monogamy. I think an interesting piece of that stat is, one, that's as common as owning a house cat. And two, that religious and political affiliation are not predictive.
I think many people see this as being an issue that is driven by politics or by left people on the left. But the truth of the matter is there are just as many people on the right as there are on the left who have engaged in consensual non-monogamy or engaging in consensual non-monogamy. But it's people on the left that tend to talk about it a little bit more.
But I think also some key facts to consider in terms of where we're going culturally in terms of trends is, also with consensual non-monogamy, we have about 5% of people that are currently engaging in consensual non-monogamy. But recent surveys are indicating that one-third of US or Americans indicate that they deal relationship structure is something other than strict monogamy.
And so, it's interesting to me to consider what is going to happen in the future as we're starting to enter the Overton window where conversations about relationship structure are really shifting. I think another big piece is that we're only the second generation to be living with birth control.
A lot of our society's roots or culture around orienting around monogamy, I would say in the more recent context of capitalism, Industrial Revolution and really when monogamy kind of took shape in our culture. Because it hasn't always been part of our culture. That post that era, or in the monogamous era, this is the first time that we have multiple generations that don't have that same anchor or argument around monogamy with birth control coming into the scene. It's interesting to me to see where are trends going to go as some of our culture starts to shift around how we are thinking about monogamy.
[0:32:09] AC: If I can just add one piece to this, which is I think that when there are these statistics that are presented, oftentimes, it will be presented in a way which as people often use words like increasingly. This is increasingly prevalent. This is increasingly common. We also, as moderns, have a tendency to like to think of ourselves as doing new and novel things. And we don't necessarily like, especially America, the idea that we might be doing things that people have been doing for a long time.
But I think that the combination of that tendency and the fact that, as a science, things like social sciences and the research sort of framework have been developed in the last century mean that, oftentimes, we weren't even tracking these statistics before a certain point. And so, it can create this idea of, A, imagined sort of like permanent fixed past compared to a changing present.
And I think I just wanted to like push back a little bit against that in the context of this issue because – and it connects back to what I was just saying about the legal frameworks. That really, the thing that's really interesting about America is that even if you go back to the time of Tocqueville, you have people who are not Americans coming to this country and saying America is a very interesting country. Because it's a country that is both really mad about marriage and the idea of family formation. And in which people are actually really frequently deviating from the kind of ideas we had in Europe about how this was supposed to go. And then part of that's because it's a frontier society and it's a society with a lot of immigrants and settlers.
And actually, it's very difficult to enforce a lot of these traditional family norms like monogamy or lack of bigamy because the state is weak. And so, actually, people were often engaged in things like bigamy just by crossing state lines and leaving behind their previous family. And there wasn't a lot of state apparatus to enforce some of these norms.
And so, the idea is, when the laws are weak or the state is weak, community norms often become stronger because people are trying to hold on or establish an ideal that they feel like is not actually present in their day-to-day society. And so, ideas that American society is becoming more decadent and immoral because people are not engaging in traditional marriage, go back to the founding of America. People have been anxious about it the entire time because a lot of people just weren't doing those kinds of things.
And because things like the current idea we have of the nuclear family from the 1950s also have a class-based component as well as a gender component. And one of the components is one of the people involved can make enough money that the other person stays at home and takes care of the children. But working-class families never had that level of resources.
And especially, if you're thinking about people settling into an immigrant and frontier society, people usually don't have those resources. And people are coming from all over the world who have different kinds of family forms that are much more about extended families or clans, especially Eastern Europeans, Southern Europe. And then indigenous folks here in America are also not practicing those forms. And then you have these religious minorities like Mormons.
Everywhere you look, there are people who are not conforming to a certain middle to upper-middle-class educated waspy family ideal. And really, it was only in the 1950s that we had this strange historical moment in which the confluence of a number of different factors including the prosperity of America, post-World War II, industrialization, sort of being a country that was ahead of a lot of other countries economically because everybody else got their economies ruined by the wars, that created this brief Leave It to Beaver moment that we then crystallized in things like television and society as being the way things always were back then. But actually, it's better to think of it as being anomalous moment in American society rather than being a historical norm that we're now deviating from.
[0:35:18] JS: I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, your point also made me think of just from an economics perspective how inefficient it is to all live in a nuclear way, right? And also even – I think it's interesting you bring up birth control. I think, also, other drivers of alternative family structures are just divorce, which has been happening for many decades at an increasingly prevalent rate. We're accustomed to blended families and the complexity associated with that.
And also, just the rise of new models for procreation, particularly same-sex couples. Where, often, the sperm or the egg donor wants to play a role in the child's life and what that looks like. It's interesting how that is also – because there was such an assumption of, a man and a woman come together and make a baby and that is the kind of thing that defines family. It's really interesting as science advances the ways in which we procreate. That gets challenged as well.
[0:36:15] AC: I'm going to just present one interesting little anecdote of like how invested we are in creating these fictions that that's the way society ought to be, right? One good example is adoptions. Traditionally, if you adopt a child, you can change the birth certificate so that your parents are your adopted parents instead of your birth parents. You can steal the records. And now a lot of adoptee groups are advocating for that to be changed because they think it serves the interest of the adopted parents. And society present the family as if it was always a nuclear biological family. But it doesn't really serve the interest of the adoptees in knowing who their biological parents were.
And actually, in the context of some litigation around transgender birth certificates, one of the arguments that the state used was, "Well, this is just about accuracy. This is just a historical document of what sex this person was assigned at birth. And we could never change that."
And one of the counter-arguments advocates made was like, "Well, no. Because actually, when it came to making adoptive families look like biological families, you were willing to change the historical record and change who was there at the time of the hospital at the registration of the birth certificate in order to serve a particular family value." Right?
And so, we're always invested I think in these ways of changing law and policy. And the question is are we changing them to serve a certain idea that that's how everything always was? When in fact, we were always trying to bend and fold different people and situations into that particular structure. Or are we willing to adapt them to recognize the changing needs of the moment and what people really need in their lives? Right?
[0:37:36] JS: That's actually a nice bridge to policy. Before we get into the brass tacks of it, because I think it's really fascinating the work that you have both been doing. And I applaud you for it and your recent successes. I just love, Alex, for you to answer this question of how is this a civil rights issue? When we talk about rights and justice, what are the rights that are compromised that you are advocating for and pushing for policy change around?
[0:38:00] AC: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that there are a couple of different answers, right? One is a discrimination framework. And that's one of the things that we've been working on. These non-discrimination ordinances that would protect people from discrimination on the basis of family relationship structure. As a lot of Heath's work is about sort of the impacts of stigma and discrimination. And that a lot of times – sorry. Go ahead.
[0:38:21] JS: Sorry to interrupt. It would be great if you could just delineate when we talk about discrimination. What are the forms of discrimination that are prevalent that you're looking to address?
[0:38:29] AC: Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Heath?
[0:38:31] HS: Yeah. I mean, some of the most common forms of discrimination that non-monogamous families and relationships experience have to do with, one, it's about two-thirds of people indicate that they experience some form of stigma and discrimination. And the majority of the people that don't aren't out about their identity.
A lot of it is experienced an anticipated stigma. Worry about how people are going to treat them if they were to disclose about their identity or about their additional partner that they have. But really, where we see some of the most pressing issues are with housing in terms of how people are structuring their families and being limited in terms of where they can live or discriminated when they're trying to get access to housing.
Another area that we really see a lot of discrimination is with children, and parents and polyamorous parents. There's been a number of documented cases where somebody's relationship orientation or the fact that their polyamorous has been weaponized against them in the court of law, especially in more conservative jurisdictions.
And then another place is in the workplace. People being fired, or demoted, or just experiencing a lot of loss in social capital. Or experiencing a lot of distress in making decisions within their family about who to bring to a certain event. Or can I talk about my partner who has been in my life for 10 years in the workplace? Or fear that, if I do, that I might lose my job as a teacher or might lose this contract that I have. Those are some of the most common forms of discrimination and stigma that we see.
[0:40:06] JS: Alex, you were still going when I asked for that double click. I don't want to lose what you're about to say. I just wanted to make sure that that part of it was clearer.
[0:40:13] AC: Absolutely. And so, what I'll say is that I think that what I think of as civil rights issues or social justice issues in a legal context are situations in which people are doing things which are just trying to live their lives in a way that is not harming other people and trying to achieve things that everybody in society tends to be interested in, right? Being able to receive an education. Being able to get a job. Being able to live somewhere. Being able to live without fear of harassment or stigma and discrimination. Being able to access healthcare services. Being able to vote. Being able to just kind of engage in the sort of same kinds of life functions as other people in a society. But they are unable to do so in the same way because they are facing some type of unequal treatment.
And that unequal treatment can come in the form of formal inequalities. Legal things that say things like you just are not even allowed to marry somebody of the opposite sex. Or you cannot vote if you are of a certain type of trait. But it can also come in the form of just how private actors act.
One thing you can have a state-based discrimination, which is about state-based policies. But it can also be about society's role in regulating the behavior of private actors so that they are not doing things like saying, "Well, you can't swim in the swimming pool if you're of a certain skin color." Or, "We will not give you a certain type of customer service." Or, "We will not allow you to enroll in a certain type of school." "We will you a promotion." Or, "We will –" in some other way, treat you differently because of that status, right?
And one of the things that you see often is that, actually, what happens is that a minority group is not able to access those kinds of civic rights or that kind of equal treatment in the law. And then the result is that they have higher poverty rates, lower education rates or other kinds of negative outcomes that are then imputed to the group as being because of the characteristics of the group or the group's – sort of the way that they behave, but are in fact the product of an equal treatment.
And so, I see those as the kinds of issues that warrant a civil-rights-based approach. An approach where you see it as connected to social justice when people are really not given that fair crack at life because they're being treated differently in some way that is causing them a negative outcome.
And so, I think that working on these issues involving polyamory, involving people who engage in consensual non-monogamy to me really fits well into that framework. Because what we're seeing and a lot of the scientific evidence is that there's absolutely no evidence that engaging in these kinds of behaviors in and of themselves without other concomitant factors, like just being abusive, are inherently harmful to society or to children. But the stigma and the perception that that's true is what's causing the instability. Is what's causing the harm.
It's as in with a gay relationship, if a couple breaks up, and they weren't able to get legally married, and they were never able to live together. And then when one of them got sick, they weren't able to visit each other in the hospital and then one of them died of a disease and then the family took the partner away and didn't allow them to access the other person at the funeral and didn't talk about them as they existed. It's like, well, there's so many layers of discrimination going on. And then for you to say, "Well, at that time, gay relationships were less likely to be stable than straight relationships and people broke up more," would you be surprised?
Was that about the idea that gay relationships were inherently bad, or immoral, or wrong? Or was it because everybody treated them that way? And so, people weren't able to actually engage in a form of living that was actually conducive to their utmost well-being? And instead, they were pressured by society into being these very cramped and broken versions of themselves, right? That's what I see.
Discrimination to me is something which really isn't just about these material impacts. It's really about the spiritual impact. And that's like something that Justice [inaudible 0:43:42] talked about in Brown versus Board of Education. That when you're talking about something like segregation education, sure, you could talk about it in this very formalistic way and talk about, "Okay, how many dollars goes to this school district versus that one? And do they have the same quality of teachers?"
But it's not just about. It's about the idea that being marked as a second-class citizen and being separated is not equal because you feel that inferiority in your soul. And it really affects how you see yourself and what your possibilities are in life. And that's what we see so often when people experience discrimination. And we see that right now for people who are in this community as well.
[0:44:15] HS: And if I could add just briefly, I think one of the most common forms of stigma that comes up that is harmful or unhelpful is that people perceive that non-monogamous relationships don't work. And so, despite having evidence – and I think it's remarkable and demonstrates the resilience of the community that the research is demonstrating that primary partnerships tend to last just as long, tend to be just as happy and just as healthy.
But what ends up happening is that when we inevitably hear about a non-monogamous relationship that doesn't work, we're like, "Oh, oh, oh. Well, it's because they're trying to have their cake and eat it too." Or whatever it is. But what the research shows is that, actually, they last just as long. But it's notable that when we hear about a monogamous relationship that ends, and there's a lot of them, we don't blame monogamy in the same way that we blame non-monogamy because of this confirmation bias that we have towards non-monogamy.
[0:45:09] JS: Well, you also – I was just about to bring in. You've got that blog post on. You did the research that you did around the reasons people site and the kind of the bias or the sort of perception bias around it being about sex. And actually, sex is, I think – what? Number eight on the list in terms of ranking? Can you speak more to that? And also, I think that blog post was quite interesting in terms of where you felt like that bias came from.
[0:45:32] HS: Yeah. Right. Yeah, what you're referencing is that my colleagues and I just did an analysis of asking people the reasons that drew them to non-monogamy. And we came up with 25 different reasons that we categorize from the data. And of those reasons, only three of them were sex. And the top seven endorsed reasons had to do with social and emotional support.
And I think a lot of this has to do with – as we've kind of been talking at the top of this conversation is about increased isolation. Or even I think the pressures of capitalism pushing us towards a dyadic pair bond where everyone has to have a washing machine, and two cars, and et cetera that I believe that that was in some regards intentional.
But what we're seeing is increased isolation. And I see non-monogamy as just one form of responding to our current environment and trying to create more consistency or communities of care. And we're seeing that pan out in the data. Yes, sex can be certainly a part of the conversation and might be a key part of what starts that conversation for a number of couples. But people stay and continue to engage in consensual non-monogamy predominantly for the social and emotional support and increased intimacy. And that there's more people, I see it as really helping them overcome the impacts of the isolation that we experience now.
[0:46:57] JS: Totally. Let's talk about the policy. Both of you founded the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition. And you've done some really, really important work in your hometown, Alex, in Cambridge. And adjacent, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Can we talk about that? What are you seeing is sort of the key areas of work in the advocacy and legal space that you focused on and that you're sort of now turning to as you think about? We just teed up how this is a civil rights issue and like, "Okay. Well, how are we approaching this in terms of actually getting the legal landscape to shift?"
[0:47:34] AC: I'm happy to kind of start first on this one, Heath, and have you join in as well. To date, there are two different legal areas that we have focused on the most, which isn't to say that they were the only areas we'd ever focus on. But they are the ones that we've kind of started with.
The first one is domestic partnership ordinances. These are basically laws that are passed below the federal level. Primarily historically on the state and local level that recognize rights short of marriage but have some kind of legal benefits and protections for people who want to kind of enter into that domestic tie with each other.
They were of course pioneered originally in the context of LGBT advocacy at a time when it was a non-starter to try to get federal marriage rights and as a way of sort of starting at the local level to have some forms of lower legal recognition that would provide some measure of protection for LGBT couples.
The main way that we have done that is that we've helped three different municipalities in Massachusetts, Cambridge, Somerville and Arlington to pass first in the nation laws that basically remove the numerosity restriction on domestic partnerships so that an unlimited number of people could be domestically partnered with each other.
And we then sort of engaged in a variety of technical fixes to help with – there's just a lot of parts of these laws that kind of imagine that they're only two people and that there's a lots of aspects of the registration requirements and aspects of like adding partners or taking partners away that like are sort of they just weren't really contemplating that there would be more than two people.
We've kind of, on a technical level, gone and sort of like looked at a lot of the aspects of the ordinances and try to figure out how to resolve that. And then, also, a lot of technical support around figuring out, "Well, what does that get people legally to get that piece of paper?" When it doesn't change something like your federal taxes. It doesn't change what your federal immigration rights are. Because those things aren't controlled at the state or local level. Those things are controlled by the United States government.
And so, really helping people to understand by publishing things like FAQs and doing know your rights trainings and things like that. What does that actually mean? Because, actually, in Cambridge and Somerville, there is no residency requirement to get that domestic partnership. You may remember the early days of a marriage recognition at the state level. Gay couples flying to places like San Francisco. Flying to places like Vermont to get domestic partnerships and civil unions. And there are a lot of really legally complex questions about what that actually means when you go back to your home state or even if you live in that jurisdiction. And what does that control and not control? A lot of our assistance has been kind of on that level of legal analysis and understanding those things.
[0:49:55] JS: Can you speak to what happens when you – what are the implications from a legal perspective when you have a domestic partnership with these –
[0:50:03] AC: Yeah. That's a great question. There's a lot of ways in which it can help you even if it's not recognized by the [inaudible 0:50:07]. And so, they can be as simple as, you are at a hospital and you're trying to show that you have a tie legally to the person you're trying to visit when you are not a person who is a parent, or a blood relation, or somebody who has a marriage to them.
Things like hospital visitation. Things like a lot of employers have programs for benefits in which you can enroll somebody to be a dependent if they are a domestic partner. And they may impose their own sort of criteria as a company upon that as well, but they also are always looking for do you have a piece of paper from a legal government saying that some government recognizes that you are legally domestic partners?
You can also get potentially some kinds of employee, employer healthcare benefits. It can be helpful for things like if you want to pick up your partner's child at school and you don't have a parenting tied to that child legally through biology or adoption. It's a piece of paper that you can show, "Hey, look. We do have that legal tie." And so, that really bolsters the ability to visit to pick up a child.
It can also be helpful in contexts like prison visitation. And even things like we had a situation involving a COVID era fact pattern where somebody had both a spouse that they were married to under federal law but they also had a second partner and they were living abroad during COVID. And this domestic partnership was enough to suffice for a European government to recognize that person as being legally close enough that they were able to get in under COVID restrictions about what your degree of family kinship is.
[0:51:32] HS: Yeah. And it allows for a lot more flexibility I think to add to that point as well, especially since our healthcare is rooted in who our employer is. It gives people a lot more flexibility in terms of making choices about who they want on their healthcare.
I know there's been couples that we spoke to that then – one, that experienced a health crisis that they were faced with a choice before this law of having to get divorced. And then getting a marriage or domestic partnership with their other partner of 10-plus years. But having this ordinance pass theoretically allowed them to not have to go through a divorce to then get the partner who was having –
[0:52:10] JS: Just to have the legal statuship to get – yeah.
[0:52:12] HS: Yeah. Yeah. Significant health concerns on their health insurance.
[0:52:16] AC: Yeah. And we also anticipate that, as in the LGBT context, it's going to be helpful for people who are trying to establish things like three-parent adoptions and other kinds of like familial issues when you come into family court and other courts. Where courts are looking for different indicia that you are trying to form that tie and make that tie legible in a system of law.
[0:52:36] JS: What about the non –
[0:52:36] HS: I also think – one last thing. I think in future conversations about employment as well and healthcare benefits as well in terms of how this opens up conversations or even potential litigation. Alex, you could potentially speak to this better than I. About if someone goes and gets a domestic partnership and then advocates to their employer about wanting coverage as well given the demonstration of a domestic partnership.
[0:53:02] AC: Yeah. We're super getting into the weeds. But there's a lot of interesting things. For example, municipalities basically have very – they have very specific types of control and not others over like different companies that are headquartered there versus in other places. But at the very least, it also at a minimum gives everybody who works for the city governments of those particular counties the ability to have multiple dependents and sort of have multiple people on insurance and things like that. And that's something that these cities, having pass these domestic partnership ordinances, are now trying to figure out like how are they going to make policy implementations around those things as well.
One of the things that you get is, oftentimes, there's this by word that American government is very federated. And then you have this idea that you have laboratories of democracy. And one of the things that you get to do is figure out, "Okay, we have a whole system that just contemplates that there's only two people at all times." And actually, there's all these different assumptions that we've made about custody, and about alimony, and about visitation rights for children, and about healthcare benefits that are all attached to this idea that they're only two people."
And if you start changing that, there are all these effects on all of these other systems. And there are a lot of actual problems that are not fake about we have to go from one system to another. And so, how are we going to do that? And actually, being able to see it play out in the municipal level gets you the opportunity to figure out a lot of these answers and figure out, "Well, this worked. And this worked." And you can look at this example of how that was done. And that is what we're seeing now that we have these laws passed.
Now all of these different questions are cropping up and now governments are now having to address them in a way that they just didn't when it was theoretical. And that's really, really interesting. That's one category of law.
And then, very briefly, I'll say the other category of laws that we've helped pass. And now two cities in Massachusetts, Somerville and Cambridge, are non-discrimination ordinances. And these ones are ordinances that are legally protecting people from discrimination on the basis of family and relationship structure.
And we've defined that very expansively to mean discrimination on the basis of intimate personal relationships and in explaining what those are. We've said that these can be relationships of sort of emotional sexual or romantic intimacy. But it doesn't have to be any or all of those. And also, it's also defined as people not being involved in those types of relationships or being perceived as being involved or not involved in those relationships.
Because a lot of discrimination we see is not necessarily that people are in a poly relationship, but somebody thinks they're poly. Or they saw that they were on a poly dating app and they're getting fired as a result of that. Or that it's not even about being poly. It's about being a sexual, or a romantic, or single and not wanting to get married and having that be something that people think is not fitting in with our society and sort of viewpoint that there should be a compulsory sexuality going on.
We have a very weird society and it's like we want you to have sex. Not too little. But also not too much. Right? And so, you get discrimination going in both directions. And so, we've been explicit in the language that it covers all of those situations as well as situations involving consensual non-monogamy, blended families, step-families and the like.
And in both the domestic partnership ordinance and the non-discrimination ordinance, we've really striven to make sure that it centers this community. But at the same time, the protections would help others. And so, we've advocated for them to strip out in the domestic partnership ordinances they used to have various restrictions that were about things like you have to live together.
Actually, in order to get married, you'll have to live together. But the reason that these ordinances historically had all these additional requirements was that gay people were trying to prove that they were more responsible and better at marriage than straight people. So, give us fewer rights and more responsibility so that we can show that we deserve it.
And so, actually, if you look at them now, they have all of these kinds of elevated requirements. When in fact, that doesn't work for a lot of people in this community and others, especially with the increased cost of housing in places like Cambridge and Somerville. A lot of times, people don't cohabitate. And it's not even necessary that they don't want to. But that it's about rent control, and like increased rents, and like how are you going to be able to cohabitate with people? Which I think people who reside in places like San Francisco also understand.
And so, we're really trying to think about how do we protect the core of the community and the core community interest? But also, write these laws in such a way that they're going to protect larger categories of people when we can.
[0:56:52] JS: And what is your thinking around where you go from here? Are you focused on these particular categories of law? And I just would love to hear a little bit more about the focus on the municipal level and specifically these two pieces of the legal landscape. Just how are you thinking about it from a macro strategy perspective?
[0:57:08] AC: Absolutely. There's nothing like making things happen by just starting doing them. And when you start doing things at the local level, it encourages optimism and excitement from around the country. We've talked to advocates around the country. Including California who are very excited about moving forward on some of this stuff. Can't name any jurisdiction specifically publicly. But certainly, interest from many places including some folks in different municipalities in California. I think one thing is spreading to other states. I think another is –
[0:57:36] JS: Well, it's worth noting – I think an important thing that hasn't been surfaced with respect to that in the conversation is that there are a handful of states that have laws against bigamy that are an inhibition to the domestic part. California is one of them. I'd love to just hear – speak to that quickly and also speak for the people who are interested in doing this in states like California, which you would presume would be at the forefront of this type of cultural change because it historically has been. How are you navigating that?
[0:58:01] AC: Yes. That's a great question. Just to wrap up my previous thought. I think moving to the state level once we get more sort of political momentum, moving to other states and starting in the municipal level and then moving up to the state level and passing more of these types of protections would be the work of it. That's a couple decades of work right there, you know? If you look at the pace of other social justice movements, that's going to be a hot minute. And if we manage to do even that and get this to the state level, that will be like a market success.
People have been working on things like this for quite some time now. And we're starting to finally get that momentum of actual legislators who are willing to pass laws like this. You've identified a particular Wrinkle in California itself, which is that – so here's the thing. This is not a barrier to passing non-discrimination ordinances, but it is a barrier to passing domestic partnership ordinances, which is one of the things that they look at legally is the issue of what is called preemption, which is, every municip – every sort of tier of government is not supposed to do things that will interfere with the next higher tier of government.
States can't pass laws that sort of directly conflict or substantially preempt areas that have been regulated by the feds. And localities can't pass things that are going to substantially conflict with what states are trying to do. Because you just imagine that, otherwise, there's going to just be some governance problems from the inconsistency between these different tiers of law. And when those instances exist, courts then go in and sort of basically resolve whether or not a particular thing that you're trying to pass is preempted by something else.
And the issue is that one of the things that would cause some court to say this is preempted is if it's unconstitutional. And one of the things that would make it unconstitutional is if it flat-out contradicts an aspect of the regime that you have at the state level.
At the state level, California is one of only a handful of states that have redefined bigamy to include not just when you are married to multiple people, but when you are domestically partnered to multiple people. And they did this in 2017 as a legislative amendment that was supported by a number of different kinds of groups. Including some of the LGBT advocacy groups. And I think it was kind of out of this idea of, well, it is trying to sort of elevate the status of domestic partners to being equivalent to spouses.
And so, one of the ways that you can do that is by enhancing the criminal penalties that attach to different classifications. And it to me is a great example of how, as a social justice manner, generally speaking, you should not advocate for there being higher levels of carcerality or higher criminal punishments for anything as a matter of solidarity with other movements, but also as a matter of like it sometimes comes back to like hit you in the rear end as well.
Because what now that means is that it's very difficult to say we should legally provide for domestic partners in a city like, say, Berkeley when the state has said that that would be a crime. Right? And in the days before the sodomy bans were considered to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, one of the biggest impediments of passing civil rights protections is, well, how can you say that there's a public interest in protecting a minority that is so despised that their primary sexual activity is considered a crime?
And so, that's both a legal problem for us and a political problem. And unfortunately, it's a problem in California. And only a handful of other states actually. Because most states don't criminalize having multiple domestic partners as bigamy. But in California, that is. And that is a barrier both to having that passed here. But also, because then there are some concerns that people from California have about, "Well, what if I go to Massachusetts and I get domestically partnered but I'm already married? How would California law look at that?" And so, it does create these various issues on multiple levels.
[1:01:23] JS: What's next on the policy landscape? Just continue to go after the local ordinances and non-discrimination at the local level?
[1:01:30] HS: I think that the other landscape that is really important to focus on or maybe acknowledge here is in the workplace. Because, certainly, in the workplace, there's a long history of employers even being the ones that are out front in making these changes.
And I will also say that we're working with and having conversations with a number of employers and rather large employers as well that are wanting to bring about inclusion in the workplace to, in part, attract and retain this large and growing population. But also, to protect their employees and the increasing number of employees who are starting to be visible about this topic.
And so, one of the things that we're running into right now with these conversations is there's a number of employers that are interested and a number that have already made that change of integrating and protecting on the basis of family and relationship structure.
But one of the issues that we're seeing now that they're running into is that they don't have legal protections themselves to do so. And at the end of the day, I think there's a number of them that don't want to be the first domino. And we're kind of in this point that it's going to take in some regards either us passing city and state-level protections. But I think what will happen first is that a number of employers will take that plunge even before there's those legal protections.
[1:02:55] JS: This is also really fascinating. I did want to get to that. So, I'm glad you raised that, of just the policy level, the organizational level. And I think it's really interesting. Again, you talk about starting at the municipal level and then kind of the cultural change and political will shifting so that you can go after – right? And in just the really interesting interconnection between these policy shifts, the cultural shifts. And how can you set that reinforcing feedback loop into motion in order to facilitate that?
[1:03:25] HS: An additional point is I think even challenging this paradigm of how we can form relationships and have that relationship recognized through domestic partnership. I think at the Modern Family Institute and other colleagues were having conversations about, I think some interesting policy that's being passed in places like Europe and Germany where there's this concept of a responsibility union and to where why can't two close friends who are wanting to make the commitments that someone in a domestic partnership might make in terms of forming consistency or care? Why are we rooting that on love, or sex, or romance? Why can't we have these agreements where people are making decisions to get some of those benefits that we allocate to that form or that structure? Why can't those be allocated with me and my grandmother if that's what made the most sense for my particular circumstance?
[1:04:21] AC: Right. And that I guess what I'll say is that there's nothing in the domestic partnership ordinance that rewritten that would preclude most of those things except somebody who's related by blood. And that going to what you were just saying, Jenny, about just the relationship between cultural change, and political change and legal change is to me one of the most fascinating topics. And as you suggested, it's a dialectical relationship. Actually, sometimes one spurs the other.
In general, however, I think when it comes to issues that involve identity categories like this, there's a lot of literature that shows that I think that it's one of those things where it tends to be the case that law is actually downstream from culture and not the other way around.
And there's a lot of evidence that what has changed most people's minds about things like LGBT rights is knowing one gay or transgender person in their life is the biggest predictor of what they're going to think about this issue. And what we've seen in these municipalities is we're starting like that they have really been passing these things in large part because these municipalities have had openly not poly legislators. And it was an openly poly legislator, J.T. Scott, who kick-started this whole thing by simply passing an ordinance that protected his own family and people in his community. That wasn't technically the most perfect piece of legislation we've ever seen, but absolutely was the spark that lit the flame of, "Okay, there's now momentum happening here." And now lawyers, and social scientists and researchers can come in with our stats, and our figures and our technical assistance. But it doesn't get anywhere without communities on the ground. Without people being open to them. Without people who are representing us who are open as well.
And so, I really fundamentally think that we also have to think about that as part of our strategy. How do we encourage more people to be open who are in positions of influence, and power and cultural visibility? Because that is super key to continuing to make these victories happen.
[1:06:02] JS: Well, I think a key piece that we haven't talked about, which is really important to this, and I think about the importance of this in a really critical fast-moving adjacent movement, which is around psychedelics. Which the whole strategy of the psychedelic revolution has been based on evidence. That there's so much cultural resistance to this. And when we build an evidence base and there can be more political or more capacity to change.
And so, I'm curious about, from a research perspective, Modern Family Institute is first and foremost a research institution. I'm just curious, Heath, what's your perspective on what research is out there? What's at the forefront of the research agenda to like complement both the cultural change aspect of it and the policy aspect that we've been talking about?
[1:06:49] HS: Yeah. And I would say that that's what's interesting about this, is that one of our first research items or our agenda is to do a listening tour. And it is so scarce in terms of even doing research on this topic, right? And even one of the conversations that we are considering is that do we propose this to be a new subdiscipline.
Even, for example, before positive psychology was really in our framework, we focused a lot on what's wrong with people. And it's a simple idea. But really, we could coalesce and bring people together and really focus on bringing additional research and even funding by potentially establish in it as a new subdiscipline.
And so, that is one of the things that we are considering and even just starting by doing a needs assessment of what are these issues? What are the areas? What are the gaps that are currently in the data so that we can really speak to these issues with a lot more clarity? But I would say, right now, there's a dearth of awareness broadly on family and relationship structure studies. And so, that's one of the ideas that we are currently exploring.
[1:08:06] AC: And I'll just say one thing that's maybe a little bit more nuanced or complicated, but I think is really a part of what I'm really interested in in terms of where this particular area of advocacy goes. It goes back to something that you referenced at the beginning of your conversation, Jenny, which was the idea that maybe being poly and having the kinds of relational values that poly people have could change some of the different ways in which advocacy tends to go when you're looking at social justice and civil rights issues.
Which is to say, one of the things that historically happens is that the American legal system silos different kinds of advocacy into different discreet categories that are based around identity, right? And it is both a sort of political thing and it's also a doctrinal thing about how things like equal protection and [inaudible 1:08:51] due process to students and how our statutory categories are written for the purpose of federal anti-discrimination law. That really encourages this idea that you are siloed-off identity by identity right.
And Kimberle Crenshaw, who invented the idea of intersectionality, that's now a byword and a buzzword for social justice. But originally, it was actually a legal concept that specifically referred to the idea that, when you have two different kinds of intersecting identities, you actually experience worse discrimination. It's not just overlapping. It's worse discrimination from the legal system's inability to separate out those forms of identity and understand that both of them play a constitutive role in the discrimination that you face.
And so, unfortunately, that siloing effect has had a pattern in American Civil Rights advocacy of groups feeling like they're separated across these identity categories that people often overlap on. And then not collaborating or working together well enough. Or even working together well enough within these subgroups as you've referenced of like these divisions between, for example, trans folks in the LGBT movement, poly folks in the LGBT movement, black women in the [inaudible 1:09:47] justice movement, where people feel like that siloing effect has an impact on the substantive priorities and on the goals and the outcomes of what we advocate for.
And I really, really hope that people in this community, having these stronger relational skills and these abilities to be compressive, will allow us to build a movement which is more genuine in thinking about these as holistic issues that impact multiple kinds of people in multiple kinds of ways and being genuine in the way that we actually are trying to engineer policy outcomes and the way that we're building coalitional power and who we're putting at the forefront of these issues.
I don't know if that's going to happen. Because there's a lot of other structural pressures going the other way. But I hope that that can be one thing that maybe will make this time a little bit different.
[1:10:31] HS: Right. And to add to that point, Alex, as well, I think an area that really is under-studied as well is, even from a paradigmatic standpoint, we're not asking the question what is the impact of mono-normativity? How might an indexing on one relationship structure be lending itself to – I don't know, an epidemic of codependency, for example?
Or with a third of monogamous relationships experiencing sexual infidelity. A third. And it continues to be the leading cause of families fracturing across cultures. I think it's time that we start asking ourselves, "Is having this monolithic commitment to monogamy really serving society?"
I also think of the frequency of sexless marriages, but also with domestic partnership, domestic violence and romantic jealousy being the issue that is what drives the majority of domestic violence cases. How is us, by not teaching principles of compersion, to your point, Alex – how is that potentially needing to increased domestic violence, divorce and sexless marriages?
[1:11:33] AC: Right. And that we bring a lot of the same values of scarcity, and competition and jealousy to nonprofit and social justice advocacy work. And those are things that are incentivized by the same types of structures that are causing us to be structured in this way in our family relationships. This idea of, "Well, somebody's got to win. Somebody's got to be number one. And somebody's going to lose out. And who is going to take credit?"
And, unfortunately, these kinds of issues are just perennial in social justice work. Because people are feeling that scarcity we've got to keep the lights on. We have to keep the work going. And we can't work together. Those are all the pressures that are going to have and will continue to and increasingly bear on upon this movement as well. But my hope is that a lot of what polyamory is about is the idea that there actually is enough for everybody if we figure out how to share.
And in that way, it is profoundly anti-American, anti-individual and anti-capitalist. And also, it doesn't have to be. Because there's so many different narratives of what America is, and what has been and what it can be. And so, I think that this is an entry point or a way of thinking about how we can be relating to each other that actually could have consequences or implications for a lot of aspects of how we live in American society that aren't satisfying many of us.
[1:12:42] JS: I love that this is what you guys have phrased. Because it so touches on the key point that we made in last week's episode or two weeks ago about the relevance of the work for broader systemic change. Bring it specifically to the social justice phase. But even this broadly too, the broader systemic change. And it underscores why we're having this conversation on the Denizen podcast and the relevance of it. And I know we're past time. So, I want to be respectful of your time and just say thank you so much for the work that you're doing. It's so amazing to watch both of you at the forefront of this and seeing it so brilliantly and strategically from various levels. I'm super excited to be officially an adviser to the Modern Family Institute, so I get to roll up my sleeves with you in this work. But I just want to really thank you for helping us better understand it. But even more deeply for the work that you're doing in this world.
[1:13:41] HS: Thank you, Jenny.
[1:13:42] AC: Thank you, Jenny.
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