This past Saturday’s Wall Street Journal featured a story in the Mansion section of the newspaper headlined “Three’s Not A Crowd In This Duplex.” It’s not one of the section’s usual stories about homes of the rich and famous.

Instead, the article describes in great detail the living arrangements of three men romantically involved with each other while sharing an apartment that they own together, which includes an 8-foot-by-8-foot three-person bed.

When did polyamorous relationships become so mainstream in American culture that The Wall Street Journal, one of the nation’s flagship newspapers — known for its conservative editorial bent — would tout a home in which three homosexuals sleep together?

This is apparently where the editors of The Wall Street Journal were coming from in planting a three-page story on a polyamorous relationship of three men, who were confident enough about their behavior to allow their names and pictures to be included in the article.

This is moral relativism gone amuck. It’s also the progeny (so to speak) of the social revolution in the latter half of the 1960s and the 1970s, which attempted to abolish moral evaluation of personal actions. No more good and evil. No more binary approaches to life. You have your morals and I have mine. Who are you to judge me?

The principle claimed that as long as no one is harmed, as long as people consent to certain behavior, there is nothing wrong with it. This is when using marijuana, cocaine, and other illegal drugs (illegal at the time, anyway) became fashionable.

This un-moral reasoning also applied to non-marital sexual relationships of various kinds — although not so much simultaneous-multiple-partner sexual relationships, an arrangement unusual enough that it didn’t get a modern term describing it (“polyamory”) until 1990, which didn’t make the Oxford English Dictionary until 2006.

That there’s a word for it doesn’t make it natural, healthy, or moral. For that, you need money. This threesome’s domestic situation caught the eye of a well-known financial newspaper because the trio live in a luxury condo in Chicago ($1.7 million purchase price) for which they were able to pay a $405,000 design fee for interior decorating.

A real estate broker quoted in the story suggests there’s a financial justification for this behavior. “Monogamy in this economy?” she said, as if a man and a woman living together in a lifelong committed relationship is something people just can’t afford anymore.

This is nonsense, of course — as are multi-partner sexual relationships.

As with all of our fellow human beings, we wish these people well. But this sort of lifestyle is not serving them well.

Sex is a gift from God to human beings. It is meant to be given as a gift from man to woman and woman to man in a lifelong bond — for pleasure, certainly, but not primarily for pleasure, but rather for unity and openness to new life.

Self-directed sex, which is what a threesome is, isn’t a gift, but a taking. Who is getting hurt?  The people in the relationship, for starters, who are distancing themselves from God and from happiness.

In a free society, no one is going to stop such people from making whatever sort of domestic arrangements they want.

But should the rest of us applaud?  Should government encourage it?

Some say yes, including here in Massachusetts.

The drive to make government accommodate such relationships is relatively recent. NewBostonPost was the first to report an early rhetorical push in June 2020 from a public official in Arlington, Massachusetts, and we’ve tracked subsequent legal recognition of multiple-partner relationships in Somerville (July 2020), Cambridge (March 2021), and Arlington (June 2022).

This is the stuff of civilization decay. Ancient Rome, ancient Greece, and Weimar Germany embraced sexual hedonism on their way to the ash heap of history. Every strong, vigorous, thriving culture sees this kind of unnatural sex as immoral — whether Judeo-Christian, Confucian, Muslim, or Hindu. This kind of behavior means decadence and ultimately leads to a failed society.

Success or failure in this sphere isn’t financial, it’s moral. And it’s a choice.  Individuals make such choices. So do societies.

Such choices are often influenced by those we admire.

Every Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal publishes a selection from William Bradford’s Plimoth Plantation, about the Pilgrims braving the elements to come to Massachusetts in 1620.

Similar-minded Puritans founded Boston ten years later. In March 1630, while on the Atlantic Ocean on their way to the New World, those Puritans heard a sermon from their leader, John Winthrop, in which he told them that their new community would be “as a city upon a hill,” an image he took from Jesus’s words to his followers during the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14):  “You are the light of the world. A city set upon a hill cannot be hidden.”

Jesus’s words, delivered right after the beatitudes, were a warning to his listeners — you can go one way, toward Me, or you can go another, and become like salt that has lost its taste (Matthew 5:13).

That’s the way John Winthrop took this “city upon a hill” business in his sermon, which he called (in modern spelling) “A Model of Christian Charity.”

“The eyes of all people are upon us,” Winthrop said. “So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. … We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.”

It's not all doom and gloom, though, because there is another choice. Here’s how Winthrop ended his sermon:

“Therefore let us choose life, that we, and our seed may live, by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.”