More than a decade has passed since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriages across the country. As we recall the debate leading up to that decision, it is important to remember how advocates for homosexual marriages denied that it was part of a larger effort to destroy marriage altogether.

“No, no!”  they insisted. “Do not listen to conservatives saying we will want polyamorous marriage next! Including homosexual couples is the end of the progressive reform of marriage! We’re satisfied now!”

Well, try to remember that while reading this latest New York Times pitch for polyamorous marriage.

In an interview with the Times’s “Modern Love” columnist, Anna Martin, a morbidly obese woman with hair attempting to be some strange color between orange and pink while her arms are loaded with tattoos, tells her polyamorous tale. Lindy West is the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and is married to a man who told her in advance that he did not want a monogamous relationship.

Now, some might consider this a strange thing for a man entering marriage to admit to his would-be wife. Whatever West may have thought of it at the time, she consented. It turned out, nevertheless, that she was surprised to discover that her husband, in fact, meant it. He soon brought home another woman, with whom he wanted the same kind of relationship he had with West.

In short order, West—being a good progressive ideologue—undertook the mental gymnastics required to accept her new arrangement. One ventures to guess, too, that West’s coming to terms with her husband’s infidelity had something to do with her morbid obesity, which—whatever she may say to the contrary—puts her in a difficult negotiating position on the American mating and dating hierarchy. It is likely that, given her options, she determined it was better to avoid risking the dissolution of her existing relationship, however dissatisfying, than to risk ending it. Thus, she is embracing this extreme polyamorous ideology.

It may be unpleasant to admit this, but it is nonetheless true that the more psychologically and physically attractive a woman is, the less likely she is to find herself in West’s unfortunate dilemma. Indeed, the existence of a strong, monogamous marital culture in our society is one of the factors that help curb such impulses in moral deviants like her husband. This is a societal protection for everyone, but it is especially helpful for relatively undesirable mates, like West, who thereby have more power to expect and demand monogamy from their partners.

West’s ready capitulation to the radicalism of polyamory, and that of other radicals like her, will only further weaken the strength of that moral limit and make it more likely that other men will attempt to manipulate other women with the kinds of shenanigans her husband deployed.

Here is a telling excerpt from the Times interview:

West: “But it really was eye-opening to me how angry people are about non-monogamy. And I think it’s because everyone thinks that if it becomes normalized, then their husband is going to say, “Now I need to have a girlfriend.” And I just want to say that you don’t have to do that. I wasn’t looking for it, but it found me. And I too had that fear, and it came true, except what I found on the other side was a way better life than before for me.

Martin: Why? How?

West: I just feel so much more freedom for myself. I have two people who love me instead of one. And it’s really just three people that live in a house instead of two. And we all help with the dishes.

Martin: That sounds kind of nice.

Among normal American women, I suspect vanishingly few of them would think “that sounds kind of nice.” Yes, you have to share your husband sexually and emotionally, but relax, you’ll get help with the dishes!

Reflect for a moment on the unfathomable moral distance of the Times—which seemingly believes the obviously eccentric and unrepresentative Lindy West is Everywoman—from normative American culture. The Times must know that nearly every single person who hears West talking of her and her husband’s other wife exchanging photos of one another in their underwear thinks “What a truly weird bunch of folks.” Indeed, the transgressive nature of the story is the point. It earns the Times attention until such time as this view of marriage becomes normalized.

Still, one can only feel sorry for West and hope (though likely with no confidence at all that hope will be realized) that she gets the therapeutic help she so obviously needs. But the part of this that is most concerning is not West’s peculiar personality and situation. It is the Times’s ferociously ongoing effort to normalize pathology. People such as West, her husband, and his second wife are not models of a healthy culture.