Category: Editorial

Pagan and Poly – Beyond a Marriage – An Interview Series

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photo: frugivoremag.com

Jimmy and Michelle have known they were poly since their marriage, they have been in a blended family with a child together, and each having a child from a past relationship. Until recently, they have lived with their poly partners together as a family of seven. They have just decided to get a divorce.

How long have you known you are poly?

Michelle (M) : We started talking about it seven years ago when we got married, but we didn’t go into it right away. We decided to open up our marriage around October of 2006, five and a half years ago, when Jimmy was deployed to Iraq.

Jimmy (J) : From the beginning we thought of ourselves as poly. We went to one “swingers party” and looked at each other and said, “This is not for us.”

M :     The reason we did open up our marriage, when Jimmy went to Baghdad, was we believed that we could love other people, and still love each other. Neither one of us believed that love needed to be limited, right off, from the beginning. I wanted Jimmy to have any comfort and solace in Baghdad any way he could get it. If there was someone he found over there,  I told him to please take it. He told me he wanted me to have the same thing, solace and comfort, while he was gone. We knew that being with other people didn’t change how we felt about each other. Love is infinite and not limited by how many people you love.

We have had poly partners in the past  who have been single, had kids, and also who had other relationships. At one time we were in an extended long distance relationship where they also saw each other,  so essentially a quad.

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Pagan and Poly – A Poly Couple, and Friends – an Interview Series

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I talked with Iacchus and Delta about their long-term polyamorous experience and relationship. They are former members of the Church of  All Worlds, and Iacchus is an ordained Priest in that tradition. Delta is an ordained Priestess of SweetWood Temenos.

How long have you been poly?

Delta (D) :    That is complicated. About 1990, we realized before our marriage, that we were poly. Both of us had considered polyamory before we even had met each other.
Iacchus (I):      I was into the Horned God at that point.
D:     We were both into open relationships, so we did it consciously.

Are you legally married?
D:    We are married.
I :    We celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary on new years eve.

What has your poly experience been like?
D:    I wouldn’t say we have had a large number of relationships. We now have a circle of five, three others besides us two, as active lovers.
I:    We have a ‘condom compact’ with those three as active lovers.
D:    We have had everything from short-term relationships to a few flings once in a while. We have ground rules within our relationship, so we ask each other first. We  make sure we let each other know what is going on all the time.
I:    Early on we spent a lot of time  ‘cocooning’  with each other. We are really into our relationship, and still are. We talk about what we are comfortable with. In most of the cases, when we bring someone in, we have spent a lot of time talking.
D:    We were functionally monogamous for about three years, not that it was a conscious choice, that is just how it was.

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Pagan and Poly – A Poly Family – an Interview Series

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I talked to Johnny about his polyamorous family. His long term relationship was impacted early on by the birth of triplets. They are a family of six, with Ivy and Divi, and the triplets.

How long have you been involved in polyamory?
About 14 years, we had been looking for a third person for probably 3 or 4 years before we met Divi. We have been together almost ten years. It was something we felt might finish balancing our relationship.

Is your relationship legally formed?
With us it has been a matter of mutual respect  and honor. Treating the relationship as if it was a legal and binding marriage situation. You can’t do that in this society. Three people can own a home, it is hard for three people to own a car, it is even harder for three people to have a checking account with a money card for each. We have simply honored ourselves as a family, especially when it comes to the children. We have just always acted as though we have the same say, the same rights, same decision making authority. I am recorded as the father of the children.

Do you live together as a family?
We are a nuclear family. We went through the pregnancy together and are raising the kids together. We share the bills together.  Everything that the traditional nuclear family does, we do together, except there are three of us.

Photo: Jezebel.com

Were having the kids part of the motivation for polyamory?
Part of our search of finding a third was to open the possibility of having kids. It was something we had been talking about at the time the triplets came along. The triplets were spontaneously conceived, we weren’t using any fertility treatments. It is just the way things went.

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Pagan and Poly – an Interview Series

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This series of interviews with Pagan folks who have experience with polyamory (poly), will inform you of the diversity within poly and the challenges and benefits to this life style orientation.

Poly discussion and experience came early to the Neo-Pagan movement in part because of the article entitled “A Bouquet of Lovers,” written by Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart and first published in Green Egg Magazine (Spring 1990) . Poly relationships are as different as people and as difficult to define as polyamory.

The term “polyamory” commonly means open to, or engaging in, multiple loving relationships (of whatever form or configuration) wherein all parties are informed and consenting to the arrangement . Polyamory has many interpretations and no firm definition. The two essential ingredients of the concept of “polyamory” are “more than one” and “loving.”

Broadly interpreted,  relationships that are called; Non-monogamous, ‘swinging’,  polyfidelic (exclusive within multiples) and even casual ‘sex buddy’ arrangements can all be included, or alternatively, definitely not be included as a polyamorous relationship. Poly practice has developed its own language and terms to be more specific. Compersion, “the opposite of jealousy” ,  is a state of empathetic happiness and joy experienced when an individual’s current or former romantic partner experiences happiness and joy through an outside source, including, but not limited to, another romantic interest.

Tegan is in a poly triad with her best friend and their shared partner.

How long have you been involved with polyamory?
I have been in my current poly relationship for about three years . I have been poly on and off since I was nineteen.

How is your relationship structured?
We have no legal commitments for the three of us. I started seeing my partner about ten days before his other partner, who was not quite a partner yet had moved up from another city. We were pretty much a triad from the start. Originally we all lived in separate apartments and about two years ago we all moved into an apartment together, and have been since then. We all knew that a poly relationship was a  requirement from the start. He had known her for a number of years, and knew he wanted to be poly. We had met through friends but I didn’t really get to know him until we talked on OK Cupid, an on-line dating site. We were pretty clear that poly was one of our agreements, even though we were both single when we started dating. Continue reading →

Indefinite detention of US citizens? Yes We Can!

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While we were out celebrating on New Year Eve, our vacationing President quietly signed the National Defense Authorization Act.  Normally this is no cause for alarm as an NDAA Bill is a yearly Bill which authorizes general military funding.  This year was different.  This year the Bill contained a provision which gives the President of the United States the power to detain terror suspects captured anywhere in the world, even if they are U.S. citizens on US soil, and hold them indefinitely without charges or trial.  How’s that for bringing in the New Year?

Why should Pagans, Heathens, and polytheists care about this?  Isn’t it just aimed at terrorists?  That depends on the increasingly subjective term ‘terrorist suspect.’  Not convicted terrorists, suspected terrorists or suspicion of being a terror sympathizer.  Could you become a suspect for having more than seven days of food stored in your home?  Yes, you could.  Paying cash for a hotel room can also place you on a watch list.  Could simply being part of a marginalized and misunderstood minority, such as Paganism, make you a target?  Glenn Greenwald, a former civil rights attorney and current Salon columnist, had this to say about who governments typically target when they are looking to expand their power, “Typically, new powers are often applied in ways that people will feel comfortable with. So if the government wants to restrict speech they will pick the most hated person in the society and restrict their speech and nobody will care…The problem is that these things proliferate far beyond their original applications, in every instance that’s true. Historically, that’s how power functions.”

A more concrete way Pagans could come under the eye of the Department of Homeland Security is to be part of, or show sympathy for, the Occupy movement.  Although it has been local law enforcement that has cleared out Occupy camps and arrests protestors, it is the Department of Homeland Security that is directing and coordinating the actions to suppress the movement. 

… according to Rick Ellis at the Examiner, a Justice Department official says that the recent evictions of Occupy movement across the country including Salt Lake City,Denver,Portland,Oakland, and New York City were “coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.”

Author and political consultant Naomi Wolf detailed her experience being arrested during an Occupy protest in an interview with the Guardian.  The most troubling aspect of her experience, and there were many, was the Department of Homeland Security’s involvement.

Another scary outcome I discovered is that, when the protesters marched to the first precinct, the whole of Erickson Street was cordoned off – “frozen” they were told, “by Homeland Security”. Obviously if DHS now has powers to simply take over a New York City street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America, which is a serious departure from our days as a free republic in which municipalities are governed by police forces.

Another activist area that some Pagans are involved with is animal rights. Recent documents gained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the is keeping files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists.  Included in this list are persons whose crime was to illegally enter factory farms and videotape the conditions of the animals.  The terrorism they engage in is to cause economic harm to the animal owners.  Videotaping horrific conditions in a chicken factory can now redefine you as a terrorist.

But is NDAA 2012 really that bad?
The ACLU believes so.  In a Press Release sent out immediately after President Obama signed the Bill they said, “President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.  The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

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