From Blessing Same-Sex Unions by Mark Jordan (2005):
What then are the theological objections to blessing multipartner relations? …
Here I can only consider four principal objections, ancient and modern. Those objections are from procreation, adultery, asceticism, and intimacy.
The objection against multipartner unions from procreation is the most obvious and perhaps the most absolute: Multipartner relations violate the principles of well-ordered procreation. The objection is related to a grander principle that any moral use of the genitals must remain open to procreation.
The grander principle, literally interpreted, rules out not only same-sex activities that involve the genitals, but masturbation, oral sex, and artificial or (to my mind) “natural” means of contraception. If the principle stands unmodified in its most literal sense, then no same-sex erotic relations ought to be blessed in churches. Of course, the principle does not stand unmodified in any Christian denomination. Churches make exceptions of all sorts, from the marriage of sterile couples or the teaching of “natural family planning” to approval for masturbation and oral sex. I might also add, at the risk of being captious, that an argument from procreation does not by itself rule out multipartner relations in which many men are copulating with many women. To prohibit those relations, some other principle must be invoked. …
The next theological objection against multipartner relations holds that they somehow violate the biblical prohibition against adultery, known to Christians as the sixth commandment. The objection is nonsense historically, given polygynous marriages in [biblical] Israel. …
The reading of the sixth commandment is further complicated for Christians by a saying attributed to Jesus in the canonical Gospels. In Matthew, and as part of a string of contrasts between prevailing religious practice and the divine standard, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every man looking at a woman so as to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (5:27–28).
The dominical saying, taken literally, reinterprets the commandment as applying to all (unmarried? heterosexual?) erotic desire. It combines with systematic pressures to bring every species of sexual sin under the meaning of this commandment. The commandment then becomes the site for constructing whole treatises against sensuous self indulgence, from soft towels to bestiality.
The enormous expansion can only cause trouble. It ignores the plain sense of the Hebrew text to project a sexual morality constructed on other bases. The sixth commandment is taken to prohibit sexual immorality without giving any guidance about how to define it.
One might do better to interpret Jesus’ saying in other ways— say, as a challenge not to restrict sexual morality to external acts.
Read expansively, the commandment against adultery rehearses Christianity’s ascetic complaint against all sexual activity. It objects further against blessing polyamory by condemning it as undisciplined pleasure. The ascetic argument, like the expanded commandment on adultery, is an elastic clause that can cover any number of acts. It is a screen onto which mutating valuations, personal or collective, get projected.
On a scale from no sex to profligacy, different Christian commentators draw the line of licit sex at very different points. Some object to polyamory as too much pleasure. Other Christians object to remarriage after the death of a spouse. Others still reject marriage altogether.
The objection against multipartner relations is merely a cipher for the contentious and cycling history of Christian sexual prohibition. Emphasizing sexual prohibition diverts attention from more important ascetic practices. I have no doubt that Christian living requires discipline of the senses, but I wonder whether sexual denial is now the most urgent discipline. Resisting advertising or restricting hours spent before television screens or computer monitors might be a more significant and arduous ascetic practice than restricting the number of one’s sexual partners. So too the urgent Christian discipline for sex might be to engage in it generously and attentively rather than greedily and abstractly, with one’s partner or partners rather than with today’s selection from an Internet gallery of images.
A final objection against polyamorous relations, often presented as theological, is an argument from the psychology of intimacy: human beings can only be truly intimate with one person at one time. The claim is usually enunciated so broadly that it applies equally or more emphatically to the single and “promiscuous” than to the polyamorous.
Most arguments against “casual” sex now reduce to the claim that engaging in it violates, exhausts, or damages a limited and fragile capacity. Often the claim is not supported by any evidence, theological or secular. …The capacity for intimacy with multiple partners is probably another human characteristic liable to considerable variation—and one that has hardly been given public scope for exploration. Anecdotal evidence from male-male relations suggests as wide a range of abilities and experiences with intimacy involving multiple partners as with a single one. Some people do it well; others, badly.
While reviewing four objections against recognizing multipartner relations in church, I have kept one topic deliberately to the side: childrearing. Until recently, it has not much figured in public discussions of same-sex relationships, which were presumed to be intrinsically infertile. Advances in reproductive technology have challenged the presumption. They have also brought into public view older forms of queer childrearing, whether the children came to the same-sex relationship from a prior marriage or by adoption. The presence of children has suddenly supplied opponents of queer multipartner relations with one of the staple arguments against straight polyamory: It cannot be good for the children.
This argument clearly disregards the evidence of the Hebrew Bible—or else it supposes that God authorized reproductive arrangements that were not good for children born into them.
The scriptural evidence is not enough, of course, to address a range of questions about raising children in contemporary arrangements with multiple partners. The questions are worth pursuing further, especially because they are the only respect in which I will consider the issues of childbearing and child-rearing. …
