Ed Whelan, president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, claimed at a hearing on the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) Wednesday that “the left” was currently working to make polygamous and polyamorous unions legal.
“The principles invoked by advocates of same-sex marriage in their ongoing attack on traditional marriage threaten to pave the way for polygamous and other polyamorous unions, one of the current projects of the left,” Whelan said in an oral statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on repealing the law which bans the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage.
In his written testimony, Whelan, a regular contributor to the National Review Online, also falsely characterized a TPM story that quoted a DOJ on the difficult position the Obama administration had been in when defending DOMA in court. Whelan’s testimony said that DOJ’s Tony West spoke to “a group of liberal bloggers,” when his comments actually came in response to a question from a TPM reporter at at pen-and-pad briefing for Justice Department beat reporters.
