Dan Savage Quotes
My husband Terry and I are mostly monogamous. . . . There are times — certain set and limited circumstances — when it is permissible for us to have sex with others.
Savage, Dan. The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family. Dutton, 2005.
This is a classic example of taking a principle and extrapolating it to an absurd degree. The Supreme Court did rule that there was a right to privacy and did rule that the state could not interfere with most consensual sex in the home including adultery. However the court did not permit bigamy or polygamy, sex with minors, and a host of other areas where the common weal is benefitted. Santorum and others with his view believe that the state should have the right to criminalize adultery and homosexual contact in a private home. And they indeed had this prerogative at earlier times. People were jailed for adultery in Virginia, for having intercourse in different positions in Alabama, for using condoms in Connecticut and others. However, most of the support for these sexual control laws came from religious fundamentalists who wanted the state to enforce their religious beliefs on all. That together with the privacy right, no longer allowed these state abuses if individual freedom. Ironically, most of the advocates for the state’s having the right to restrict sexual freedom. Think of themselves as advocates of individuality and the government not telling folks what to do or how to behave.
Notes was the founder of the Utopian Community of Oneida, New York. It was based on a concept of work distribution with an almost communal style of raising children and everyday living. In such a circumstance, the role of the married couple was far more complex that in the typical single family structure which permeated society at the time for the middle and upper classes while the poor had almost no structure that could be maintained. Monogamy rules were discouraged and some critics described the situation as free love. Notes, politically wisely, preferred the term "complex marriage" which did not have all the pejorative baggage that "free love" did. Oneida evolved to a more conventional social structure over time, and the community members developed skills like silver smithing that allowed them to be quite successful economically, and "Oneide Silver" was prized into the 21st century.
Daniel Keenan Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist, and LGBT community activist. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth. He has also worked as a theater director, sometimes credited as Keenan Hollahan.
