Another boundary in America’s sexual revolution quietly moved this week.
Seattle’s City Council unanimously passed legislation expanding the city’s civil-rights protections to encompass additional sexual orientations, gender identities and people involved in consensual relationships with multiple partners.
The legislation explicitly adds pansexuality and asexuality to its definition of sexual orientation and says protected “attitudes, preferences, beliefs, and practices” include “consensual relationships involving multiple partners such as non-monogamous relationships.”
The legislation also deliberately removes the words “male or female” from portions of Seattle’s definition of sexual orientation, while the bill’s stated purpose includes recognizing “gender identities outside the gender binary.”
This isn’t merely Seattle saying adults are free to live however they choose. They already were.
Something more significant is happening.
The government is taking additional sexual identities and relationship arrangements and placing them within the framework of protected civil rights.
From Tolerance To Protection
For decades, Americans have repeatedly been told that changes involving sexuality are primarily about leaving people alone.
But there is an enormous difference between saying, “You are free to live this way,” and saying, “Your decision to live this way constitutes a legally protected characteristic.”
Seattle has crossed that line with multi-partner relationships.
The ordinance reaches into employment, housing, public accommodations, business licensing, policing, parks and other areas governed by Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. The city’s legislation specifically speaks of “multi-partner/multi-parent families,” consensually non-monogamous relationships and other relationship structures that historically were not explicitly recognized.
Supporters view this as straightforward civil-rights protection. People shouldn’t lose an apartment or job simply because their private relationships differ from conventional ones.
But there is another question society needs to confront:
What happens when virtually every new form of sexual identity or relationship structure moves from personal choice to protected identity?
Because the movement rarely stops at tolerance.
The Expanding Definition Of Identity
America once possessed relatively straightforward categories for marriage, family and sex. Those categories have been steadily dismantled and reconstructed.
Sex became detached from marriage. Marriage became detached from male and female. Gender became detached from biological sex. Gender itself multiplied into a growing spectrum of identities.
Now exclusivity is becoming detached from intimate relationships.
Seattle’s legislation doesn’t legalize plural marriage, and it is important not to claim that it does. But it does give legal recognition and protection to people in multi-partner relationships in significant areas of public life.
And Seattle isn’t alone.
The Guardian reports that Seattle is now the tenth American city to adopt protections for consensual non-monogamy, following communities including Cambridge and Somerville in Massachusetts and Berkeley and Oakland in California. Advocates are pursuing similar measures elsewhere.
What was once considered far outside mainstream American family life is gradually acquiring a legal vocabulary, advocacy organizations and civil-rights protections.
We’ve seen that pattern before.
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If Three, Why Not Four?
The uncomfortable question is where the limiting principle comes from.
If two consenting adults may define their relationship however they choose, advocates ask why three consenting adults should be treated differently.
But follow that reasoning one step further.
If relationship structure itself becomes a protected characteristic, on what non-arbitrary basis does society eventually deny recognition to increasingly complicated arrangements among consenting adults?
That question becomes particularly difficult once demands move beyond discrimination protections.
