There was a similar moral deficit when it came to foreign policy. The xenophilliac 68ers, could by and large, never grasp that there were two competing truths about Vietnam. Yes, we, the Americans shouldn't have been there. But yes, the Communists were brutal thugs. When after the war had ended and a million and half people went into the sea to escape the regime of the North Vietnamese Stalinists, the famously voluble moralising associated with the 68ers was replaced by sustained silence. Today, aided by the Bush administration's extraordinary meld of simple mindedness and incompetence, the 68ers are similarly unable to come to grips with Jihadism. Too self-absorbed to be self-reflective, they both denounce the neo-conservatives for assuming that everyone wants freedom and democracy, yet insist that we can negotiate without conditions with terrorist regimes on the grounds that we share a great deal in common.

Couples who live together are gambling and losing in 85 percent of the cases. Many believe the myth that they are in a “trial marriage.” Actually it is more like a “trial divorce,” in which more than eight out of ten couples will break up either before the wedding or afterwards in divorce. First, about 45 percent of those who begin cohabiting, do not marry. Those who undergo “premarital divorce” often discover it is as painful as the real thing. Another 5-10 percent continue living together and do not marry. These two trends are the major reason the marriage rate has plunged 50 percent since 1970. Couples who cohabit are likely to find that it is a paultry substitute for the real thing, marriage.

Of the 45 percent or so who do marry after living together, they are 50 percent more likely to divorce than those who remained separate before the wedding. So instead of 22 of the 45 couples divorcing (the 50 percent divorce rate) about 33 will divorce. That leaves just 12 couples who have begun their relationship with cohabitation who end up with a marriage lasting 10 years.

The British government has cleared the way for husbands with multiple wives to claim welfare benefits for all their partners, fueling growing controversy over the role of Islamic Shariah law in the nation's cultural and legal framework.

Bigamy is outlawed in Britain, but authorities have never prosecuted Muslim men who had legally married more than one woman abroad and continued to live with them after immigrating. Shariah permits men to have up to four wives at one time.

Now, after a review that began in November 2006, a panel of four government departments has decided that all the wives of a Muslim man may collect state benefits, provided that the marriages took place in a country where multiple spouses are legal.

Neither the review nor the decision was announced publicly, and their discovery by newspapers late last month triggered an uproar in the largely Christian nation — a fury exacerbated by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' remark last week that some aspects of Islamic law could be embraced within Britain's legal system.

The Left seems to believe that legalizing polygamy, or polyamory as they prefer to call it, will result in a Marin County Hippie Love Fest with all the Birkenstocked commune members sharing household and childcare tasks and getting along nicely. But once multiple marriages are sanctioned by the state, there will be no stopping Muslim-style polygamy, which, will not be, shall we say, a Hippie Love Fest. Polygamy as practiced in the Muslim world is a not a pro-woman institution. And because Muslim-style polygamy will certainly produce more children than the typical Leftist group marriage, it will not take long for Sharia-style polygamy to crowd out feminist-style polygamy.