For over a year, the American Psychological Association (APA) has overseen a “Consensual Non-monogamy Task Force,” which advocates for relationships like polyamory, open relationships, swinging, and more. This task force claims that people in such relationships are marginalized and need their practices to be normalized. Social conservatives have long warned that the legalization of gay “marriage” and the normalization of homosexual activity would follow a slippery slope, leading to the normalization of other aberrant behaviors like polygamy.
“The APA Division 44 Consensual Non-monogamy Task Force promotes awareness and inclusivity about consensual non-monogamy and diverse expressions of intimate relationships,” the task force website explains. “These include but are not limited to: people who practice polyamory, open relationships, swinging, relationship anarchy and other types of ethical non-monogamous relationships.”
Yes, “relationship anarchy” enjoys the support of an activist APA task force. Could two words be any more at odds? Anarchy is the death of all relationships, and relationship anarchy breaks many hearts. Painful immediate breakups are “relationship anarchy.” One-sided divorces are “relationship anarchy.” In what world are such practices “ethical?”
The APA task force warns that “the ability to engage in desired intimacy without social and medical stigmatization is not a liberty for all. This task force seeks to address the needs of people who practice consensual non-monogamy, including their intersecting marginalized identities.”
The task force aims “to generate research, create resources, and advocate for the inclusion of consensual non-monogamous relationships in the following four areas: Basic and applied research; Education and training; Psychological practice; and Public interest.”
The APA’s Division 44 is the “Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity,” which seeks to normalize LGBT lifestyles in psychology.
It is unclear when the Consensual Non-monogamy Task Force first launched, but its first Facebook post dates back to May 5, 2018. Two co-chairs with Ph.D.s in psychology run the task force: University of California-Berkeley licensed counseling psychologist Heath Schechinger, and Amy Moors, an assistant professor at Chapman University and a research fellow at The Kinsey Institute. That institute was founded by Alfred Kinsey, an activist researcher who pushed the normalization of all kinds of aberrant behavior.
The Christian Post’s Brandon Showalter first drew attention to the task force in an article Tuesday.
Andre Van Mol, a board-certified family physician in Redding, California who co-chairs the committee on adolescent sexuality for the American College of Pediatricians, told Showalter this task force represents the victory of Sexual Revolution ideology over science.
“This is the entirely expected and predicted consequence of what happens when ideology replaces science. The APA is yet again showing us that they are a professional guild and not a scientific organization,” Van Mol told the Christian Post.
“Their sexuality divisions have long since been taken over by extremists. Unless parents push back, it won’t be long before this will be taught to our children in school with the usual emotional blackmail that to do otherwise is to stigmatize,” he added. “Since American mental health experts have largely given up on their job of investigating underlying factors that may be contributing to marginal sexual behavior, this is what we are left with, the cult of affirmation.”
Showalter also referenced Princeton University Professor Robert P. George’s August 2015 essay in The American Interest, asking “Is Polyamory Next?” George was responding to the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which redefined marriage as a union between any two persons, not one man and one woman. He noted that a “throttle” in Massachusetts was already pressing for the normalization of polyamory.
“If gender doesn’t matter for marriage, they ask, why should number matter? ‘If love makes a family,’ as the slogan went when the cause being advanced was gay marriage, then why should their family be treated as second class? Why should their marriage be denied legal recognition and the dignity and social standing that come with it?” George asked.
Indeed, Christians have been asked to embrace polyamory, with one particularly daft pastor praising the Holy Trinity as a “polyamorous relationship.” Three Canadian adults in a polyamorous relationship have been declared legal parents of one child.
Conservatives have long warned of the slippery slope of redefining marriage, and it appears the APA is working to confirm their fears. Indeed, why restrict marriage to humans? One crazy lady in England has declared herself “engaged” to her chandelier.
Sadly, heterosexual couples began the degradation of marriage with the institution of “no-fault divorce.” As Jennifer Roback Morse catalogued in her book The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologues Are Destroying Lives And Why the Church Was Right All Along, elite institutions and big donors advocated for no-fault divorce laws. After Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law in 1968, the American Law Institute (ALI), founded with support from the Carnegie Foundation, crafted model legislation to insert the state in between husbands and wives — and favor the spouse who wanted a divorce.
With marriage redefined as easily dissoluble, then as no longer male and female, it seemed only a matter of time before it would be redefined to include numerous people or inanimate objects.
The APA has decisively shifted left, declaring war against “traditional masculinity” earlier this year. It seems the rush of institutions against the traditional family continues apace.
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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