Polyamory isn't illegal in most 'progressive' nations.

You're missing the point. It isn't recognized as a legal family form either.

Earlier you praised democracy being the system by which the "population" decides "their own political matters." You go on to cite this democratic system where "46,000 neighborhood meetings" determine family law as being exemplary citizenship involvement and democratic process.

Then you take a viewpoint (legalize polymarous marriage, basically) that goes against the democratic majority in the US and Cuba. Wanting to force an anti-democratic solution while praising democracy as the solution is contradictory.

Do you want polyamorous marriage, or do you want democratic decision making on family law? Until the public opinion changes, you can only pick one.

Human rights aren’t something that should be voted on.

We can't vote on human rights, we can't vote on economic policy, we can't vote on foreign policy, then what is left to vote? How can you call this democracy?

I'd agree that your argument at least has merit, and I'd point out your argument is counter to 'pastacacioepepe' glorification of democracy as the tool for settling these rights.

Of course down in the weeds is 'what are human rights' which is often settled by democratic process. It turns out to be a nasty problem determining who decides what human rights really are.

It might surprise you but I want both. I want civil rights and I want a strong and partecipated democratic process. The democratic process will always win tho. Any right that is "imposed" rather than conquered will not last.

> that goes against the democratic majority in the US and Cuba

Maybe in the progressive US, not in Cuba, where 54% of the voters are in support of the proposal. The contrarians are not the communist by the way, but the Cuban catholics.

54% of Cuba is in support of polyamorous marriage? Citation please.

Did you just spend lots of time debating me without even taking the 10 minutes necessary to read the article?

Wow. This tells a lot about the quality of this discussion.

Read the reuters article that was linked. It's all in there.

I'm done debating with you, this is just a waste of time.

I read both articles but I went back to re-read them, as I'm willing to be proven wrong. Neither mention anything about polyamorous marriage, and definitely nothing about 54% support for it. They mention traditional (2-person) same-sex and cis marriages.

Abuse and violence.

Logically I don't see how a n>2 person marriage would be more likely to be abusive than a two person marriage.

The majority of people are heterosexual, every other orientation is in the minority. The natural state is 50% male, 50% female. Roughly meaning most people will find a match. We are not at some enlightened stage where genders are truly equal, this scenario at this stage would just lead to a situation where we just regress to multiple wives to one husband. 25% of the male population have two wives that's 25% of the population with no prospect of funding a partner, stretch that to three wives and that means half of men have no prospect of finding a partner. This stuff is well studied in countries that allow polygamy, men become angry sex offenders and jealous spouses take it out on other partners children. It's not good stuff, were not there as a society, we'd need to be at a stage where we all just date other humans and I don't see anyone doing that anytime soon.

Why are you assuming there would not also be women with 2 or more husbands?

>A comprehensive survey of traditional societies in the world shows that 83.39% of them practice polygyny, 16.14% practice monogamy, and .47% practice polyandry. Almost all of the few polyandrous societies practice what anthropologists call fraternal polyandry, where a group of brothers shares a wife. Nonfraternal polyandry, where a group of unrelated men shares a wife, is virtually nonexistent in human society. Why is nonfraternal polyandry so rare? [0]

While human nature can change, something as fundamental as human sexual family unit preferences radically change from favoring polygny over an order of magnitude more than polyandry seems unlikely to be overthrown simply because of changes in democratic opinion on legitimacy of polyamory. Using history as an imperfect precedent, one could make an educated assumption the balance will tip towards leaving lots of unmarried men on the sidelines rather than unmarried women. Evolutionary constraints may also push against having women on the sidelines, since the sexual reproduction throughput is rate-limited by females. There is little evidence to suggest polyandry is as common as polygny.

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda...

We're only now discovering that a significant chunk of society is not cis, because we've been forcing them to hide this fact over the past centuries because of religious anachronisms. Why assume it's different with polyandry?

I'm willing to be proven wrong, but it seems fairy reasonable to assume if a strong pattern emerges across a variety of different disjoint and poorly connected traditional societies with unique religious systems, that the pattern isn't likely to be explained away by simply pointing to recent (past few centuries) religious anachronisms.

Of course if a pattern were to emerge in the vast majority of religions across time and cultures I may be tempted to speculate it's a display of common human traits and rather than something to be assigned to a particular religion. In that same vein one draws the conclusion favoring non-cis behavior is probably a minority (but common) human trait (all humans may enjoy some non-cis behavior but most seem to favor cis behavior) and polyandry is unlikely to counterbalance polygny.

Religiously motivated persecution of sexual minorities isn't just "past few centuries".

"over the past centuries because of religious anachronisms" is your words. Were you lying? YOU were the one that attributed this persecution as 'anachronisms' of 'past centuries.'

>Religiously motivated persecution of sexual minorities

When did anyone say minorities haven't been persecuted? Total straw man out of left field.

"Past centuries" and "past few centuries" mean two very different things.

I guess I was foolish enough to think you would have said "millenia" or better if you were referring to more than a few (roughly 1-9 IMO, but that's semantics) centuries. Mea culpa.

In my parts people rarely use the word 'centuries' to refer to periods larger than 1000 years, and numbers less than 10 are generally ok to think of as a 'few.'

With your follow-up clarification, I amend my statement:

>I'm willing to be proven wrong, but it seems fairy reasonable to assume if a strong pattern emerges across a variety of different disjoint and poorly connected traditional societies with unique religious systems, that the pattern isn't likely to be explained away by simply pointing to recent (past few centuries) religious anachronisms.

TO

I'm willing to be proven wrong, but it seems fairy reasonable to assume if a strong pattern emerges across a variety of different disjoint and poorly connected traditional societies with unique religious systems, that the pattern isn't likely to be explained away by simply pointing to "past centuries" religious anachronisms.

Sharing a household with a genetically unrelated adult is one of the biggest risk factors for experiencing child abuse. This is well known and well supported by evolutionary psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_effect

Therefore, introducing additional genetically unrelated adults into a family would likely increase the risk of child abuse.

Poverty and systemic issues contribute way more than that. Can we abolish poverty before we abolish civil rights?

That's a strawman and nobody is abolishing your civil rights. Civil rights don't mean you can do whatever you want.

> That's a strawman

The fallacy is to say that we can't have legalized polyamory because it's negative for the children, while we allow sistemic issues to have a much greater negative effect on said children.

> and nobody is abolishing your civil rights

Hello Texas? What are we even talking about?

> Civil rights don't mean you can do whatever you want.

I never said this, but if you needed to remind yourself of it go ahead.

While I don't necessarily agree with your stance about systemic issues, I would like to point out that solving them would take a lot more work than simply not legalising polygamy, and I don't see why we should neglect taking measures we are actually capable of implementing in favour of a pipe dream that might never be implemented.

I agree. You do both. If revolution is not immediately possibile, you fight for reform instead, hoping that it will sow the seeds of the revolution in those who fought with you. Any small victory for social movements generates a strong taste for solidarity and the expectation that the victory can be repeated.

When the US legalized gay marriage (at least for now), one of the talking points against it was that men could marry their sons to avoid the inheritance tax, the same idea you are talking about. But the fact is fathers could marry their daughters and mothers could marry their sons to avoid taxes before that law was passed, yet it wasn't done. It was all just a smokescreen.

The other funny thing was that the people against gay marriage by and large were also against inheritance taxes, so you'd think they'd applaud a new loophole.

> But the fact is fathers could marry their daughters and mothers could marry their sons to avoid taxes before that law was passed, yet it wasn't done.

No fathers cannot marry their children. Nor can mothers. That is illegal in every state I believe.

That's true: in US you can legally marry a child ("the youngest girls to marry in 2000-2010 were three Tennessee 10-year-old girls who married men aged 24, 25, and 31, respectively, in 2001", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_S...), but not your own child.

Although I'm sure there are ways around it if you are wealthy enough.

(ps "Human Rights Watch pointed out that Afghanistan has a tougher law on child marriage than parts of the United States")

Tennessee law has changed and there are now minimum ages. Surprisingly, there is no minimum age in CA; it's up to the courts.