We recently reported Slate author Jillian Keenan's opinion that "the fight doesn’t end with same-sex marriage. We need to legalize polygamy, too."

Well, just in case anyone should think this is idle speculation and thought experiment, consider news coming out of Canada today:

A Canadian court is assembling an unprecedented set of testimonies and legal briefs about the pros and cons of polygamy. The goal is to answer the question of whether Canada’s anti-polygamy law is constitutional.

But, as the story reveals, there is still cause for hope. The case to legalize polygamous unions faces an uphill battle, against some formidable forces -- for example, the scholarship of Professor Joseph Henrich from the University of British Columbia.

Henrich has written of monogamy that it is "one of the foundations of Western civilization, and may explain why democratic ideals and notions of human rights first emerged as a Western phenomenon."

This much, at least, is not news to us. Let's hope that the Court recognizes this fact enshrined in the tradition of marriage, too.