"But others see it as the first step toward more radical change. 'Obergefell is a veritable encomium for marriage as both a central human right and a fundamental constitutional right,' Joseph J. Fischel, an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale, has written. 'We, as an LGBT movement, should be ethically committed to endorsing poly relations and other experiments in intimacy.' He argues for 'relational autonomy' without regard for 'gender, numerosity, or affective attachment.' The campaigns of both polygamists and polyamorists to have their unions recognized point to the larger questions that swarm around marriage battles: what are the government’s interests in marriage and family, and why does a bureaucratic system sustain such a relentless focus on who has sexual relationships with whom? Surveys in the past decade have consistently found that four to five per cent of American adults—more than ten million people—already practice some form of consensual nonmonogamy, and the true number, given people’s reticence about stigmatized behaviors, is almost certainly higher.... In the West, champions of polyamory have included Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Havelock Ellis, and Bertrand Russell. Still, a particular ethos, rooted in Christian, European values, has created a presumption that monogamy is superior to all other structures. Immanuel Kant saw marriage as emblematic of Enlightenment ideals, claiming that it was egalitarian, because spouses assigned ownership of their sexual organs to each other."
