I think I heard this D.C. Beltway question for the first time during the George W. Bush years, when I moved back to greater Baltimore and began teaching full-time at the Washington Journalism Center. It was a time of high expectations for cultural conservatives. As is usually the case, they faced disappointment when wins by the cultural left continued, even though W. Bush was “in power.”

The question: What happens to culturally conservative Republicans when they get elected to, oh, the U.S. Senate and then immediately start losing their nerve?

I heard an interesting answer during an off-the-record chat session with some Senate staffers. It helps to remember that this was back in the day when many people still had radios in their cars that had button systems that allowed them a limited number of pre-set stations they could quickly punch while driving.

The answer: There are two kinds of Republicans inside the Beltway — those who have NPR as the first button on their car radios and those who do not.

Unpacking that answer was crucial to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on media coverage, or the lack thereof, about a recent court ruling in an important LGBTQ rights case in New York.

Ah, but was this a case that LGBTQ-rights activists and Sexual Revolution evangelists wanted to see publicized? That’s one of the questions that host Todd Wilken and I discussed.

We will work our way back to the NPR symbolism angle. But first, here is some key material from the top of a New York Post report that ran with this headline: “NYC judge rules polyamorous unions entitled to same legal protections as 2-person relationships.” This is long, but important. First, there is this:

In the case of West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill, New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan reportedly concluded that polyamorous relationships are entitled to the same sort of legal protection given to two-person relationships.

West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill involved three individuals: Scott Anderson and Markyus O’Neill, who lived together in a New York City apartment, and Anderson’s husband Robert Romano, who resided elsewhere.

Anderson held the lease, and following his death, the building’s owner argued that O’Neill had no right to renew the lease because he was a “non-traditional family member.” The attorney for the property owner said that O’Neill’s affidavit, in which he claims himself as a non-traditional family member, is a “fairytale.”

Ah, but what is a “family” these days? This question is closely related to another: What is a “marriage”?

Thus, let’s read a long quote from Judge Bacdayan about the legal rights of this thruple:

“Before gay marriage was legalized in any state, Braschi v. Stahl Assocs. Co., 74 NY2d 201 (1989) was decided. The New York State Court of Appeals became the first American appellate court to recognize that a non-traditional, two-person, same-sex, committed family-like relationship is entitled to legal recognition, and that the nontraditional family member is entitled to receive noneviction protections. The Braschi court interpreted the Rent Control Law in effect at a time when there was no legal recognition of same-sex marriage, and broadly construed the law to effectuate its remedial purposes. Braschi is widely regarded as a catalyst for the legal challenges and changes that ensued,” she pointed out. “By the end of 2014, gay marriage was legal in 35 states through either legislation or state court action. Obergefell, et al. v. Hodges et al., 576 U.S. 644, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), the seminal U.S. Supreme Court decision that established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, was also heralded as groundbreaking. However, Braschi and its progeny and Obergefell limit their holdings to two-person relationships. The instant case presents the distinct and complex issue of significant multi-person relationships.”

Is this an important story? Is this an important story during the tense countdown to coast-to-coast midterm elections that will decide the status of who controls Capitol Hill?

A basic Google News search for some relevant terms related to this case indicate that the judge’s ruling obviously WAS a news story — but only in conservative and even religious-market media.

That’s very interesting, since this was a win for the moral and cultural left. So why the lack of mainstream coverage?

I think many would say that the term “slippery slope” applies in this case.

Here is some additional background information on a related cultural trend.

Two years ago, the Gallup organization released some fascinating information in a release with this headline: “Understanding the Increase in Moral Acceptability of Polygamy.” The focus was on some changing numbers in the "moral acceptability" section of Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll. Here is some key material from Gallup veteran Frank Newport’s essay:

When Gallup first included polygamy on the list in 2003, 7% of Americans said it was morally acceptable, and that fell to 5% in 2006. But over the past decade, this percentage has gradually increased -- moving into double digits in 2011, reaching 16% in 2015, and this year, at 20%, the highest in our history. In short, there has been a fourfold increase in the American public's acceptance of polygamy in about a decade and a half.

The key question, of course, is why? What's behind this upswing in the moral acceptability of polygamy?

That’s certainly a very “newsy” question. There’s more:

Polygamy has basically been part of a rising tide of Americans' acceptance of a number of moral behaviors. This means one explanation for the increased acceptability of polygamy -- and perhaps the most plausible one -- lies with the fact that it is part of a general trend of increased liberalism on moral issues.

To check this out, I compared the acceptability of a list of behaviors in an aggregate of our 2003-2006 surveys with an aggregate from the past three years (2018-2020). Between these periods, the acceptability of polygamy jumped from 6% to 19%, a 13-point gain. But other moral issues have also become more acceptable, underscoring the conclusion that views of polygamy are not changing in a vacuum. Americans' acceptance of gay or lesbian relations has risen 22 points, while having a baby outside of marriage, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce gained about the same as polygamy. Most other issues have become at least somewhat more acceptable over time, with the exceptions of medical testing of animals, the death penalty and wearing animal fur -- the only issues seen as less acceptable now than they were a decade and a half ago.

Newport looks at several trends, including the decline of marriage, in general, along with a surge of popular-culture depictions of alternative relationships and family forms — including polygamy.

That leads to what I think is the crucial material in the essay, looking at this from a journalism angle (and this important ruling by the judge in New York):

There is also the matter of the wording change Gallup instituted in 2011. In surveys conducted before 2011, the item read, "Polygamy, when one husband has more than one wife at the same time." In 2011, the item was changed to read, "Polygamy, when a married person has more than one spouse at the same time." That wording change was coincident with a rise from 7% of Americans who found polygamy acceptable in 2010 to 11% in 2011. But the moral acceptability of polygamy has continued rising over the past nine years, using the new wording, to today's 20%, suggesting that something more than a wording change is responsible for the increase.

Ah, but the new wording applies more to thruples linked to LGBTQ relationships, as opposed to old-style polygamy seen in some Islamic cultures and in separatist Mormon groups that have rejected changes in the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In the podcast, I suggested that we could be seeing a surge in support for “blue zip-code polyamory,” with LGBTQ roots, as opposed to old-school polygamy that the experts have always seen rooted in patriarchal systems.

This brings us to NPR’s love affair with polyamory in recent years. Here are just a few headlines from a basic Google search, in the order that they appear (which couple be based on WWW traffic):

The New Sexual Revolution: Polyamory On The Rise

'Open' explores polyamorous relationships through personal experience

A Cultural Moment For Polyamory

Encore: How To Reframe Jealousy In Relationships

It's Polyamorous Polysaturation — Unconventional Relationships Abound On TV

There are quite a few more. These examples are from the first page of the Google search. Clearly, this is a topic that’s “in the air,” so to speak, among the intelligent, hip, edgy, but mainstream minds in the NPR hive.

So we are back to the journalism question here: Why zero mainstream coverage (that shows up on Google) of this court victory in New York for the cultural left? Why is this “conservative” news? Maybe this is a topic to discuss AFTER the midterms?

Just asking.

Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.