While this is excellent news for my gay and lesbian friends, I see no progress on polygamy.
Which, unlike same-sex marriage, is an institution with deep roots both in America (the Mormons were forced to give up this sacrament as a condition of statehood) and in the majority of world cultures, where it ranges from condoned to celebrated.
Without getting unduly personal, let's say that I have a stake in that question being resolved. I know several triples living quietly among us; they face the same kind of problems (child custody, hospital visitation, inheritance rights) as same-sex couples faced prior to this decision.
What the polygamists of the nation lack is a powerful lobby. <shrug> One may hope that nonetheless, reason and freedom will prevail here as well.
EDIT: nation, not world. Worldwide the situation is different. America is suffering from its Christian legacy here. Most Christian countries are adamant about denying this right to their citizens.
I have no problem with polygamy, as long as it is a consensual relationship between all adults involved.
The real problem is that government has gotten into the marriage business and it doesn't belong there. The issues you mentioned (child custody, hospital visitation, inheritance rights) really have nothing to do with marriage and should all be assignable without a government endorsed marital contract.
That's much more along the lines of what I think. It's kind of the libertarian dilemma - with Gay Marriage, there's one huge, loud camp of religious homophobic bigots demanding that big daddy Government say that Gay Marriage is an illegal abomination, and another huge, loud group of homosexual-rights activists demanding that big daddy Government say that Gay Marriage is a-ok and governments everywhere are required to perform it. It was never really about marriage or anything - it's about getting the Government to bless your side of the argument with a magical scepter of rightness.
Meanwhile, my/our camp of libertarians saying hey, the Government really shouldn't be in the business of deciding who can be in what sort of relationship with who else or blessing either side of a controversial argument is disappointingly small and quiet and usually ignored.
It is politically unviable because it would basically take away the current benefits from straight married couples to further a libertarian pipe dream.
Politics is the art of the possible: extending marriage benefits to gays and lesbians is a lot easier than clawing it away from all straight couples in order to satisfy a desire for libertarian ideological BS.
I'd say that the proper libertarian solution is not to eliminate those benefits, but to detach them from marriage. Handle inheritance, hospital visitation, benefits sharing, and other such things directly, instead of linked to marriage. I think it would solve what the gay marriage proponents say they want, and probably a lot of other edge cases too. Who knows how many other people out there the current options aren't working for, but will never have the level of support gay marriage does to write new laws for their case?
But then, this was never really about benefits in the first place. If it was, they could have had civil unions a decade ago. This is about getting the Government to endorse it as Marriage to stuff it in the face of all the homophobes out there. This has always been entirely about ideological "BS", but not the kind the myself and any other libertarians are spewing.
You're not being ignored. Lots of people agree that, in an ideal world, the government not having a role in marriage would be a decent solution. This is not an ideal world and that political position is not feasible; in the art of the possible, that is not.
On the other hand, we have people being harmed by the unreasonable jank thrown at homosexuals who wish to marry. The perfect must not be made the enemy of the good out of a sense of ideological purity.
Well, I do know that, which is why I'm not really all that against it. I'd like to see it happen a different way, but I can't see actually opposing it in any meaningful way, especially when it would inevitably mean allying with the types of people who are actively against it now - there's a lot of hate and negativity in that camp.
The thing about Government power, though - everything seems all nice and cool when it's pointed in a direction that you like, and it makes everything happen real fast and lays the smack down on your ideological opponents. But that power can turn on a dime and get pointed right back at your side, as has happened a great many times in history. Think it can't happen here? I hope it never does, but it does have a nasty tendency to happen in places and to people where they thought it couldn't, where they keep on doing the simple and efficient thing, because that couldn't possibly ever happen to us, right?
How could it be consensual between all adults? The marriage "license" in polygamy is between man and women, yet by secondary effects the women are fully entangled with one another. Yet if you watch any show on polygamy you'll see that a guy will keep adding new, younger wives while holding their current wives hostage (due to their lack of another option in terms of housing, money, etc). It's absurd to think that any thinking person would get in on the wife side of the polygamy pact when in the end they have their equality divided by X wives.
Smart folks have said that the reason homosexual marriage even became a thought was because of the transformation of marriage from a bond of ownership of man over woman to a shared partnership. A polygamous arrangement (as per the mormon church, not the polyamorous relationships of the hippies, etc) ends up with a hierarchy of power with one man controlling multiple wives, with the power to divorce, ruin, etc the others if they don't allow him to wed again.
I think an argument for polyamorous marriage could be made, but polygamy is essentially a raw deal for whoever isn't the hub of the marriage wheel (one man in the case of traditional mormonism, islam, etc.).
That's a polyamorous (group) marriage, not a polygamist one (at least as per my definition of those somewhat amorphous terms)
That said all of the legal agreements become far more complicated and likely null and void if one person drops out or is added. I think an argument could be made, but with the complication you're basically saying polymarriages would be like corporations, with their associated complexity.
Polygamy as practiced now is a "bring more childbearing women" into the flock type thing, which is by nature non-equitable. I doubt most folks in a polygamous marriage (by choice) would want to get involved in a polyamorous marriage and as such, I think you can't legally support a non-equal union of that sort.
>That's a polyamorous (group) marriage, not a polygamist one
Hmmm, please excuse my ignorance in such matters. I only married one woman and that is quite enough.
>you're basically saying polymarriages would be like corporations
Yes, exactly. Well put.
>with their associated complexity
I can't even begin to imagine the complexity, legal or relational. However, I can imagine situations where such an arrangement could be beneficial to the individuals involved.
Are you trying to say multiple adults can't all agree on something? Your argument is based on ignorance and you're no better than the people who oppose gay marriage. You've been fed Christian and feminist propaganda to make you believe that only two consenting adults can love each other and that if you happen to love more than one person you shouldn't have the same rights as other people who don't.
You basically don't think polygamists are equal. Now let's see you do a full 360 from being pro-equality to using the same arguments the bigots used against you.
You're perhaps confusing polyamory with polygamy/polyandry? To put it in hacker terms, polygamy / polyandry is forcing an edge reduction creating a hub and spoke architecture when the arrangement has to be a 1 to n-1 mesh. The equality of a mesh is an easy mathematical argument to make, but it isn't the argument polygamy/polyandry is making. Polygamy/polyandry is inherently unequal.
[edit] to get the math right a polygamous/polyandrous relationship maxes out at n-1 contracts. Polyamory would be (n*(n-1))/2 contracts and I would argue for equality that if n changed all contracts would have to be retermed. Polygamy / polyandry is unequal. Period. It's a mathematical fact. Polyamory I could be convinced of the possibility of legal equality, but not for polygamy/polyandry.
I'm not saying you're doing this, but this line of thinking is very often employed to minimize the damage done by discriminatory decision-making under the guise of "waiting for the perfect solution". Fixing what hurts people now is better than telling them to wait for something that will in all likelihood never actually come.
This has literally nothing to do with poly(gam|amor)y.
For one thing, looking for younger women / men is not wrong. As long as they're consenting, and old enough to consent.
Further, any relationship of any kind has the potential to be abusive. This is no ground to say it shouldn't be allowed. This is like the idiotic christian bigots that think homosexuals are bad because they're child molesters. No, they're not.
Scroll down to section 3.a.ii (or ctrl+f search for "Implication: monogamous marriage reduces the spousal age gap, gender inequality and fertility")
Anecdotally, this is what a family friend who worked as a counselor for Southern Utah University observed repeatedly. SUU is located in Cedar City, which has one of the highest concentrations of present-day polygamists in the US.
One problem I have with Polygamy is that I have never seen a 1-woman, multi-husband community. Sure, I've seen a few relationships in which this was the case, but when you look at the historic aspects in the US, it seems a very rare thing. That makes me wonder if there is a severe power imbalance in the relationships and what is truly occurring.
It's well known that in some modern US polygamy situations, there is a great deal of abuse of power, both in terms of controlling the wives, as well as controlling and abusing the young men who will not be allowed to have a wife. This further increases the societal costs and leads to more abuse of power, which is not what we need.
edit: I should add: It's a numbers game. Given that on average, there tends to be just slightly more women born than men, what happens with all the extra unmarried men (or women, though this is rarer)?
That same concern already equally applies to traditional marriage, in which some % are abusive. If you have a problem with polygamy on that basis, then you've got a drastically larger problem with the already existing system of marriage, in which millions of instances of abuse occur annually.
The best solution is to bring polygamy out into the open, legalize it fully nationally.
The government has no business dictating who can get married, or what the structure of marriage looks like, so long as the people in question are of sound mind and adults.
If I want to form a ten person marriage, with five men and five women, whose business is it to control us and stop us? There are only bigoted 'answers' as to why that shouldn't be allowed.
As to abuse in a typical 2 person marriage, yes, you're right, but this is also something that I believe society tries to deal with. There are always going to be abusive relationships, regardless of how many people are in them, but I do think that my question (opinion, whatever you want to call it), about how power and relationships change depending on the number of people involved is something to consider.
I totally agree with the fact that marriage is none of the government's business. But at the same time, we would probably want to change some tax laws and social benefits if polygamy became legal.
(I really couldn't care less if polygamy is legal or not. Yes, if there is a relationship of 5 women and 5 men, then there is no difference than traditional marriage system. But I really do wonder about what happens when you have 1 male with 10 wives, and 9 other young males with zero wives. In the past, this has traditionally lead to some form of revolutions. I haven't seen anyone actually answer this question yet, just people calling me a troll and a bigot.)
> I really do wonder about what happens when you have 1 male with 10 wives, and 9 other young males with zero wives. In the past, this has traditionally lead to some form of revolutions. I haven't seen anyone actually answer this question yet, just people calling me a troll and a bigot.
Most societies studied (83.5% of the 853 societies according to George Murdock, for example) preferred polygyny. In other words, what you describe as "1 male with 10 wives" has always been the norm in human history.
The real question is - why enforce monogamy, especially as extramarital affairs and unequal couplings continue anyway? Fairness and justice are human inventions; they do not exist in nature.
Not that I necessarily disagree with legalizing polygamy, but I think there is one non-bigoted answer: logistics. Our financial system in general, and our tax system in particular, has N=1 or N=2 hard-coded into it. There are other practical considerations as well. Suppose, for example, you have an N=5 marriage and three of them want to break away and take the kids. Resolving situations like that would be much more complicated than what we have now, and what we have now is already plenty complicated.
While true, it's not a valid reason for preventing progress on the deconstruction of marriage.
'Our system is messy and complicated, so if we add more variables, it will be an even bigger mess!' - so make the system less messy and enable more variables.
Can you imagine if someone came and said add this function/feature to the program and in response you said "the program is complicated and the code is long, no need to confound it any further with features."
In regards to your software development comparison, that happens all the time. Someone decides, this system is already so complicated it would be a mistake to try to bake in all this additional complexity. A more sensical solution would be to design a different system for handling these or deal with them in one-off cases if they are infrequent enough.
Vague metaphors aside, this happens occasionally in the industry I'm in (finance) when we trade small lots of non-traditional products. These products don't follow many of the rules that all of our other traded products do. Instead of re-writing our systems to deal with these(totally impractical), we manually shimmy these in to the database until they expire or are traded away, at which point we can forget about them.
On what basis would you argue it's defensible, when child custody isn't premised on marriage (or the lack thereof) to begin with?
I don't see what would change such that it would introduce any new complexity on that side of things.
The exact same complexity already exists today: step-parents. It's mostly a non-issue and is well defined. Step parents acquire no custody rights over the child inherently. If my wife remarries, and we had a child together, the parental rights are retained in myself and her. The same would be the case in a three-way break away on that ten person marriage; there would be (in this scenario) a two person custody of the child, eg the biological parents.
If I'm married and my spouse has a child then I am presumptively that child's parent too. That is, of course, not the only way I can become a child's parent, but it's one way. Polygamy complicates that. If one member of a N-way relationship has a child, do all of the other members become the child's parents
Again, I'm not saying this argument is valid or should carry the day, only that it is defensible and non-bigoted.
It doesn't complicate it, because the answer is: no.
Nothing changes about the legal custody system of children due to N-way marriages.
If two people in the N-way marriage have a child, it's not the N-way marriage that acquires custody, it's the two biological parents.
Marriages do not define custody, period. That is not how it works in the US.
Keep in mind that presumptively is not definitively. If there is a paternity test that later says otherwise, eg if your wife or husband cheated on you, then that other person can typically acquire parental custody, because they are the biological parent. All things being equal (not involving abuse or danger to the child), biology is the first line of legal custody.
What about adoption? The most sane thing to do near-term, would be to keep it the same - adoptions are max two people legal scenarios. If the system is cleaned up, simplified, or otherwise adjusted for N-way marriages, then perhaps later there could be N-way adoptions as well (and scientifically, we may eventually see N-way biological custody too).
You could recreate marriage as a form of incorporation which wouldn't be a bad idea if you think about the cost of growing old and having children. More adult partners equals more income to ensure the survival of its members and their children.
And yes, I read Moon is a Harsh Mistress too many times (I'm a sucker for that novel). :P
Nothing is stopping you from doing that today. In fact, if you're really serious about advancing polygamy, this would be the way to start: show -- don't tell -- us how it would work. Because right now the poster children for polygamy are (AFAICT) all white male religious nut cases who just want to use it as an excuse to keep a harem.
I never said I want to be in a group marriage, so I don't know why you seem to be suggesting that I should "show, don't tell" anything. I just said I could see it working out for some people. The fact that there exists an entire subculture of queer and pansexual individuals who are in such group relationships seems to me the proof in the pudding that it should be ratified as part of our civil law. And not some horny old man looking to recreate a Turkish harem painting.
I think it would be wise to consider the possibility that maybe the legal institutions involved in marriage aren't up to scratch in terms of what humans can possibly do in terms of romantic and intimate relationships. It's better, in my opinion, to incorporate a method by which we can address these issues by more effective methods (as in don't ban something just because you don't like it. You ban it because it's destructive to the social order.).
You realize that there are legal scholars already positing their legality right now, right? It's not too hard to search Google to see some of the more interesting papers being written on the subject from the legal point of view.
The social and psychological aspects are still scarce since we live in a society built around western European Protestantism (heteronormative). So, whatever research that does exist is relatively new or limited in scope.
> You realize that there are legal scholars already positing their legality right now, right?
Of course. On my list of social causes worth spending time and energy on, polygamy ranks pretty low. If it's near and dear to your heart I wish you the best of luck.
It's not so dear as you wish to be. I merely recognize the nature of law is not unlike any other logical enterprise. When you allow one form of inference the other forms that depend upon it must be analyzed to see the limits of it. Just like how legal scholars debate the limits of speech even today. It's both academic and practical.
If the white male religious nut case can provide and care for the woman and any resulting offspring and the woman are willing and knowing participants in the harem.
What's the problem? That you don't like it? That seems rather bigoted.
The problem is the religious nut case part, which often leads to the reality being very different from your rosy hypothetical. In real life, polygamous relationships often involve older men with young, often underage, women who have been coerced into the relationship and are often sexually abused. I have nothing against polygamous relationships among fully fledged consenting adults. But that doesn't seem to be what most polygamous relationships are.
I could be wrong. I haven't done extensive research into this. If you want to convince me, show me the data.
You realize the data is scarce because the phenomena hasn't been studied, right? You seem to be hung up on the Sister-Wives nonsense and see it as the only viable data point in a truly unanalyzed section of human behavior. The fact of the matter is that I personally know people who are polyarmous and none of them are the creepy Mormon/Branch-Davidian type. Most that I know who are poly are queer (like myself) and far from religious.
If anything, it should be you that should go and create a research program analyzing the nature of poly relationships in humans and the underlying causes, not me. I merely pointed out the reality that our law should consider accommodation for those individuals as it does for others. All you seem to be bringing to the table is scare mongering that depends more on the tiniest of slivers of human society for the proposition that poly relationships should be illegal. Such a proposition is not tenable on it's face nor in its contents thus far. Or in simpler terms: please do your own research because I'm not here to convince you either way (but you seem damn sure to convince me that my poly friends are some evil bad fundies wanting to rape children).
Edit: sorry for the rudeness. I take things personally sometimes.
Given it's illegal most everywhere, data is hard or little to come by.
There are two large groups: one with a pretty 'dirty' record regarding abuse/child marriages and another with a clean record. So this could come down more to an environment/community issue than a polygamy issue where, in one community/environment, abuse and child marriages are largely the norm and the other it isn't.
Warren Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints && Apostolic United Brethren. The former having the bad record and the latter having the clean record. (&& being the separator to avoid confusion) The former is larger than the latter but the latter is the second-largest church that practices polygamy.
E:
The burden of proof is also on you to prove that polygamy leads to abuse/child abuse as you are the one making the claim. Given there's little/no data to support either side, you'll have to wait for more research. Which would likely involve legalizing the practice and conducting studies.
I definitely agree on the complexity of our tax / govt financial and legal codes, and the problem that poses. The solution there is obvious too, and has been needed for decades anyway: simplification. Of course that's held up by political gridlock.
The easiest way to resolve the child situation would be to keep custody to two parents as it is today. Any children that exist in the N=5 marriage, would be biologically between two people. So the only thing that would be changing is marriage itself, not child custody laws (which today are not primarily built on marriage anyway, we can obviously marry other people that have pre-existing children without adopting those children as our own; and we can obviously have children outside of marriage).
Polygamy is simply very different than same-sex marriage. It’s associated with patriarchy and sexual abuse, rather than liberation and equality. It flourishes in self-segregated communities, Mormon-fundamentalist and Muslim-immigrant, rather than being widely distributed across society. Its practitioners (so far as we know) are considerably fewer in number than the roughly 3.5 percent of Americans who identify as gay or bisexual.
While some polygamists may feel they were “born this way,” their basic sexual orientation is accommodated under existing marriage law even if the breadth of their affections isn’t, which makes them less sympathetic than same-sex couples even if their legal arguments sound similar.
Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality. That's a modern attitude. Marriage is associated with the treatment of a person as property and arrangements for political and financial reasons, even to this day. And yet here you are, saying one type of marriage is okay and the other kind that you're not particularly close to is associated with Mormons and Muslims and antiprogressivism, while lauding a modern view on one marriage and taking the dated view on another.
The reason plurals doesn't flourish, to you, is because the people who practice it don't tell you, lest you tell them what you just told us, and the inevitable "are you Mormon?"
Marriage of course depends entirely upon the married, their culture and their interpretation. Especially in America where we have fused 100 cultures and traditions, there's little you can call universal truths about marriage.
Every single child has a mother and a father. If that's not a prime universal truth, I don't know what is.
Men and women have been found by psychologists in every culture and tradition to differ in aggression and general activity level, types of cognitive strength, and sensory sensitivity. The differences between man and woman are obvious to all but the most ideologically blinded deconstructionists.
Don't be silly. Sometimes its a sperm donor; often the father is not biological. Children are orphans; they are adopted; they are born to a surrogate. That's got to be about the silliest thing anybody has said on HN for a long time.
The term of art for 1-woman, multi-husband arrangements is "polyandry". The Wikipedia entry [1] has a citation to a survey that finds about 50 out of about 1230 known societies in a 1980 ethnographic atlas practicing polyandry, so it is a distinct minority community-scale arrangement.
The next public, conventional taboo to broach is group and line marriages. As economic conditions worsen for some nations' middle class in the upcoming decades, line marriage can potentially offer a coping mechanism, trading off resource collectivization and time in exchange for recapturing increased security of various forms.
The only plurals I know are multi-husband communities and everyone involved are happier than clams. Your concern trolling to equate happy relationships with domestic abuse, simply because you don't understand them and think that everyone in a plural relationship is FLDS and lives in Utah, is pretty striking and antiprogressive (which is odd, considering you're attempting the progressive argument against their happiness).
And no, what you're saying is not "well known." You are arguing against certain fundamentalist groups, not plurals. They are not equivalent, despite this thread's clear goal to say otherwise.
>Without getting unduly personal, let's say that I have a stake in that question being resolved. I know several triples living quietly among us; they face the same kind of problems (child custody, hospital visitation, inheritance rights) as same-sex couples faced prior to this decision.
I made that argument to a couple of friends - that they were not fighting for equality (which will be fairly easy to set up) but for inclusion in the privileged club. They responded with "Well marriage is between couples, but defining the sex of the participants is discriminatory".
One of the problems with polygamy/andry is that we could hollow out the lower social classes of mating opportunities (it happens in india and china right now due to girl infanticide and it is not pretty).
Worth noting that at least one of the triples I referred to is a woman and two men. At least one is a man and two women. I'm being vague here, because bigamy is a felony.
We really have quite a long way to go on this front.
> I'm being vague here, because bigamy is a felony.
I'm sure your vagueness is really slowing down the investigative arm of law enforcement that normally goes around searching the internet for evidence of dastardly polys.
> One of the problems with polygamy/andry is that we could hollow out the lower social classes of mating opportunities
Let's not bring up the argument of legislating for maximal gene propagation, unless you're willing to ban all forms of marriage that don't serve maximal gene propagation. Fertility tests before marriage! No marriage among the elderly, because what's the point! Let's set up a new 3-letter agency for matchmaking!
Marriage is not a government mechanism to encourage mating. Stop trying to put government in the business of animal husbandry. We're not animals.
Not so long ago it was culturally enforced; it was not impossible to date and raise children while unmarried but there were severe social consequences and as a result not many people did.
I think we have yet to see all the consequences of this cultural change.
Legalized polygamy could create a lot interesting legal issues, particularly marriages of convenience. It would challenge a lot of traditional legal structures that assume a union between two people. If there is no restriction on how many people you can marry at once then you can start giving out residence rights via marriage or multiple wealthy individuals can amass large estates via marriage. I am sure there is a lot more.
This is not meant as an argument against legalized polygamy, rather to point out some of the obstacles it faces.
I don't have any moral objections to poly-marriage, but I don't think it's the same thing as gay marriage. Prohibition of gay marriage is rooted in the identity of individuals, but prohibition of polygamy is based on the amount of participants in the union. No one is discriminated against in the face of poly-marraige prohibition because it has nothing to do with the traits of any individual.
> The difference between the number of participants vs the gender distribution of the participants is academic.
That's incorrect. The difference is critical as it pertains to discrimination against a certain type of persons. Prohibition of gay marriage means "this type of person cannot marry that type of person"; this is a restriction based on type of person. Contrast that with prohibition of polyamorous marriage which means "a person can marry up to one other person"; this is a restriction based on a factor that is detached from any individual members of the union, making each individual interchangeable with regard to the application of the law.
> The trait of whom you choose as a partner.
Prohibition of poly-marriage has nothing to do with whom you choose as a partner. There is no whom, the only factor is how many, a quality completely detached from the qualities of any individual.
> The trait of the structure of your union.
The structure of one's union is not a trait of an individual.
The difference is even more obvious when you ask yourself what type of information is necessary in order to enforce prohibition of either type of marriage. Here's a thought experiment that makes the difference even more explicit. Given the pseudo-schema below, consider the difference between the queries you'd need to write in order to return all poly unions vs all gay unions.
persons_table: person_id, name, age, sex
marriage_table: marriage_id, person_id
> The difference is critical as it pertains to discrimination against a certain type of persons.
How do you define "type"?
> Prohibition of poly-marriage has nothing to do with whom you choose as a partner.
Does it matter? It's still hindering people from being in the relationships they want.
> There is no whom, the only factor is how many, a quality completely detached from the qualities of any individual.
There is a whom: People who have multiple partners. The important quality of those individuals is the fact that they want more than one partner.
> The structure of one's union is not a trait of an individual.
If it were not a trait, then we'd see no preference one way or the other, and yet we do see preference; preference strong enough to lead to prohibition.
Your argument is absurd. My point is really very simple. Poly-marriage is a function of the marriage structure while same-sex marriage is a function of the sex of individuals.
persons_table: person_id, name, age, sex
marriage_table: marriage_id, person_id
If I drop "marriage_table" it is impossible to identify any poly-marriages in the database.
If I drop "persons_table" it is impossible to identify any same-sex marriages in the database.
No amount of pedantic quibbling will allow you to escape the fact that poly-marriage is defined by the TOTAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE in the marriage, it doesn't matter how many partners an individual prefers, the only question is the number of people, not WHO THEY ARE.
I understand that you're trying to suggest that "number of people I want to marry" is the individual trait that factors into the prohibition of poly-marriage, but that argument is disingenuous as well tautologically absurd; it's akin to saying "speeding laws target people who like to speed" which is obviously true but misses the point that the law is based on your actual speed not on your personal predilection for speeding; it's not discrimination because it's not about you.
I don't have to know anyone in the car to know that a car moving at 70mph in 50mph zone is illegal, just like I don't have to know any of the people in the marriage to know that a 3 person marriage is illegal.
> No amount of pedantic quibbling will allow you to escape the fact that poly-marriage is defined by the TOTAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE in the marriage
Obviously.
> it doesn't matter how many partners an individual prefers, the only question is the number of people, not WHO THEY ARE.
I should think that peoples' preferences and drives for partnering and sex does in part define who they are.
> it's akin to saying "speeding laws target people who like to speed" which is obviously true but misses the point that the law is based on your actual speed not on your personal predilection for speeding; it's not discrimination because it's not about you.
It's a prohibition against specific conduct, much like the now defunct prohibition against homosexual sex. One should not stop at the law itself; one must examine the law's effect on those negatively impacted vs everyone else.
The legal ramifications are the same as well: Property rights under the union, taxation, child guardianship, visitation, protection upon dissolution, and wills.
So the child of a divorce has to move between more than 2 homes now? A wealthy man can split his income with more than 1 wife that doesn't work?
It's not the same, it's qualitatively and quantitatively different. Is there a limit to the number of members? Can you join a union halfway through? Can you leave a union without dissolving it? Those questions don't come up under 2-person unions.
I'm not sure why you keep harping on the specifics of the rules. Any different arrangement will always have different specifics, even if the fundamentals remain the same (which they do in this case).
What is the difference between specifics and fundamentals? Aren't the legal ramifications the fundamentals? I mean, it is a legal institution that we are talking about, right?
I'm not saying you can't have a loving and intimate relationship between 3 or more people, I'm just saying same-sex marriage is much closer to heterosexual marriage in terms of legal ramifications because it's only 2 people. Lines and triangles are both geometric figures, but that doesn't make them fundamentally the same.
You said the difference is academic. No, it requires significant changes to the legal framework of marriage.
Consider the following programs:
1) A program that allows a PC to talk to a Mac
2) A program that allows a PC to talk to a PC.
3) A program that allows a Mac to talk to a Mac.
4) A program that allows any number of Macs and PCs to talk to each other all at once.
The point is that given 1, it's pretty straightforward to write 2 and 3. 4 is a just a lot harder to get right. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the difference in the patches required to support 2, 3, and 4 is not academic.
Laws are pretty similar to programs, and there's a big jump in complexity going from 2 of something to 3 of something. Anyone that was actually poly would know this from all the honesty, negotiation, and ground rules that are required to make it work.
These people are part of government, so that's roughly equivalent. Different parts of government disagree about the details, but it appears they all agree that the government should get to decide who can get married.
How does polygamy benefit the state? It's a serious question.
With regular two-people marriage, you're roughly giving almost everyone a shot at finding a partner for marriage. This means you don't get large roaming populations of one sex or the other without any hope of finding a partner, and all the problems that can bring (see China). Those people will not be able to participate in the state-approved stability that marriage can bring.
Gay marriage is actually positive for the state in these respects, since it expands the number of people who can participate in the current framework. Polygamy is much more complicated at scale, and I think you'd need to find solutions to many other potential problems before you could convince the state to accept it.
I would bet the biggest opposer to divorce will be the INS ... imagine the Green Card businesses that would enable! After all, it should make little difference to INS whether people choose to have their multiple marriages in series or in parallel.
Polygamy is a deeply troublesome arrangement, with a storied history of abuse. It has been steadily abandoned and outlawed as societies grant more legal rights and self-determination to women.
There is simply no way to legally recognize poly* relationships under the law in a way that resembles binary marriage.
In Europe in the modern era, the trend is more in the other direction: as society gains more respect for both men and women's choice of sexual self-determination, instead of being fixated on traditional opposite-sex, pair-courtship rituals, polyamorous relationships are becoming more accepted. They were once strongly disapproved of and even illegalized, but are now increasingly being seen as a legitimate personal choice. On the activist side, many (most?) LGBTQ organizations also include poly activists, especially the organizations which have a more left-wing flavor.
I think the more likely path than legal polygamy, though, is to expand a more flexible set of legal arrangements for families, as a replacement for traditional marriage being the legal framework. The fact that a huge proportion of couples here (Denmark) no longer get married is already forcing that for another reason. Since many families which otherwise look traditional — long-term cohabitation of an opposite-sex couple, jointly raising children of which they're parents, etc. — don't get married, marriage as the organizing principle of families is becoming less relevant, so the law already has to start handling things differently.
Same in Portugal. People I know are already doing alternative celebrations to regular marriage, influenced in part by the cost - since marriage celebrations are expected to have certain elements (catering, dresses, etc) which these celebrations do without.
"De facto unions" have existed (for both hetero and homosexual partners) for more than ten years already, and have many of the same rights as married couples, including inheritance, refusal do testify in court, etc.
Monogamy also has a storied history of abuse. Up until the 1970's it was perfectly legal for a man to rape his wife. This does not make it fundamentally impossible for healthy and consensual monogamous relationships to exist, and neither does the supposed behavior of 19th century Mormons make it impossible for healthy and consensual polygamous relationships to exist.
What behavior of 19th century Mormons are you referring to? The majority of polygamous relationships were about taking responsibility for widows and their families. Mormons were violently persecuted and polygamy was a support mechanism.
Yeah, I edited it to "supposed behavior" because I don't really have a good basis of knowledge about 19th century Mormons. It's just that, fairly or unfairly, they're usually the ones held up as an example of how polygamy is supposedly abusive and sexist.
Since it's about the civil aspects, same sex marriage is the logistically easier topic.
Take taxes: tax codes cover singles and pairs, optionally with children. Same sex marriage doesn't change much here, polygamy does. The same for lots of other provisions that are affected by civil unions (no matter what they're called).
It can be done, but it's a lot more work (and as such, a lot more legal attack surface) than declaring "we don't care anymore for the sex of the pairs' members".
Polygamy is a Christian institution. It was pointedly prescribed in the old testament. Modern anti-polygamists will argue that the old testament prescription was a matter of necessity, and that new testament language (particularly Paul's) prescribes monogamy, but to my eyes the new testament's position is pretty casual, while the old testament's is quite strong.
I think that's the wrong argument to make. There were a lot of things said in the Old Testament that aren't considered by most Christians to be applicable to them. The "Old Covenant" was, as the Jewish maintain today, between God and the Jews. For most Christians (more specifically, Catholics and several other groups), the laws in the Old Testament ceased to be valid when Jesus proclaimed the way into Heaven.
That said, it is true that the bible doesn't disapprove of polygamy. The Old Testament is filled with examples of God condoning it (Lamech, Esau, Jacob, Gideon, Solomon... The list of men with multiple wives goes on and on - God even gave Saul's wives to David), and the New Testament has a few "mentions", so to speak: Paul's letter to the Corinthians, which explicitly says it's his opinion and not law, Ephesians, and a few others that are suggestive of opinion and not law. But honestly, appealing to biblical authority is fraught with oppositions that focus on the numerous inconsistencies in the bible.
I believe that polygamy is a personal and/or moral belief, and while I'm personally an atheist, and personally do not have an interest or stake in debating the morality or religious support of it, I recognize that there are potential and actual inconsistencies with how rights and responsibilities are handled with respect to polygamists, and hope they're able to find the path to equality.
Selfless love knows no bounds, frankly. It's the selfish ones that need to find humility before they find peace.
> "For most Christians (more specifically, Catholics and several other groups), the laws in the Old Testament ceased to be valid when Jesus proclaimed the way into Heaven."
Those Christians may have a bit of a quarrel with Jesus himself:
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Matthew 5:17-18
One of the most important verses in the bible. It holds the tension between the judgement brought by the Old Covenant on the one hand, and our salvation and freedom in Christ on the other. Although its complexities are rightly subject to debate, there's simply no room to claim that the entire Old Convenant is invalid in Christian theology.
> "appealing to biblical authority is fraught with oppositions that focus on the numerous inconsistencies in the bible."
Polygamy absolutely was prescribed, in very strong terms, in the form of levirate marriage:
If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not be married abroad unto one not of his kin; her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her. Deuteronomy 25:5-6
And no, it is not universally portrayed as dysfunctional. Dysfunction appears when the subjects disregard specific instructions regarding marriage and sex, in the midst of polygamous relationships that are explicitly allowed by God. E.g., David's adultery, and Solomon's marriage to women from outside of Israel.
Um, yes it is. Levirate marriage is pretty simple; if a woman dies childless, her husband's brother is obligated to marry her so that she has a chance of bearing children, even if the brother is already married.
And for some entertaining context, go read the rest of Deuteronomy 25:5, where it says how the brother should be punished if he refuses the marriage.
> "Every instance of polygamy has a bad ending in the Bible."
This is simply not true. Tell me where Lamech's or Rehoboam's marriages caused a bad ending. And as I said above, King David -- perhaps the most famous of polygamists -- is never rebuked for his marriages. The Bible makes a very clear point of rebuking him only for his adultery:
David did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and had not turned aside from anything that He commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite. 1 Kings 15:5
> Polygamy is a Christian institution. It was pointedly prescribed in the old testament.
Correction: "Christian" refers to Jesus Christ, which does not appear in the old testament. Catholics, Ortodoxes and many protestant churches are against polygamy.
I'm not sure how to respond to this. Have you noticed that every complete Bible contains the Old Testament, including the Pentateuch in its entirety? Old Testament law and prophesy is woven deeply in the fabric of the gospels and of Paul's letters.
And while most modern churches have chosen to interpret Paul's prescription for monogomy strictly, some Christian churches and cultures continue to embrace polygamy.
> Have you noticed that every complete Bible contains the Old Testament, including the Pentateuch in its entirety?
Yes, I already had noticed this.
> Old Testament law and prophesy is woven deeply in the fabric of the gospels and of Paul's letters.
Just for curiosity, have you ever happened to actually read the Bible? There are plenty of prescriptions in the Old Testament that are not followed by Jesus. Jesus presented himself as "The Truth", and he often said he was giving "a new commandment". To rest on Saturday, to stone an adulteress, to be forced to marry your brother's widow have never been Christian commandments. And polygamy enters in this list.
The fact that for a small amount of time a small minority of Mormons (a small minority in the Christian world, less than 1% of the total) have accepted polygamy does not make this practice "Christian". Otherwise, if one follows the same line of reasoning, encyclopaedias should classify deers as "omnivorous", because in extreme conditions there have been reports of deers eating frogs and small mammals...
So then, if I understand you correctly, polygamy is in the same category as resting on the Sabbath? It's good to know that it's not forbidden, even though we're no longer obliged to do it :)
Saying it has deep roots in America is disingenuous, because Mormonism is the only religion, in a well defined geographical area to do so. There's a lot more to American religious (and demographic) history than Mormons.
EDIT: And hasn't been a part of Ashkenazi Judaism for a millenium at least.
Any relationship grouping that is greater then 2 requires very extensive legal changes before it becomes practical to implement. The law is incapable of addressing the possibility of a marriage which can outlast all it's original participants, for example.
The majority opinion in the comments here seems to be that polygamy would be OK. So is there anywhere where you would draw the line? Incest? Underage? Anything at all?
There was a time when homosexuality was considered morally wrong by the majority of people in this country. Polygamy was also considered wrong, as was incest, marrying children, bestiality, and probably some other things that I'm forgetting.
So my question is this: Given that the majority of people here seem to be so liberal-minded that they consider (consensual, non-coercive) polygamy to be fine, is there anything that anyone will still look at and say "That's actually morally wrong"?
Polygamy makes no sense from a power structure standpoint, it is inherently unequal. The man (generally) gets X women and each woman gets one man (the same man). If polygamy meant a web of relationships, where everyone was equally married to everyone else, that would be conceptually more fair, but as is, the power structure of polygamy as defined by the only religious sect with much influence in the US is an inherently less than equal partnership.
Which, unlike same-sex marriage, is an institution with deep roots both in America (the Mormons were forced to give up this sacrament as a condition of statehood) and in the majority of world cultures, where it ranges from condoned to celebrated.
Without getting unduly personal, let's say that I have a stake in that question being resolved. I know several triples living quietly among us; they face the same kind of problems (child custody, hospital visitation, inheritance rights) as same-sex couples faced prior to this decision.
What the polygamists of the nation lack is a powerful lobby. <shrug> One may hope that nonetheless, reason and freedom will prevail here as well.
EDIT: nation, not world. Worldwide the situation is different. America is suffering from its Christian legacy here. Most Christian countries are adamant about denying this right to their citizens.