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.
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.
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.
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.
And stuffing a few homophobes is good. They have been persecuting LGBT people for millennia so fair turnabout.
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.
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?
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.).
Quite literally, I imagine it would go something like:
Do you take this woman to be your wife? I do.
Do you take this woman to be your husband's second wife? I do.
Do you take this man and woman to be your husband and second wife? I do.
That's how three adults could all consent.
You can argue that someone is being forced to say yes, but you could argue that in any type of marriage or contract.
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.
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.
EDIT: added source; had previously assumed this was common knowledge
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.
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)?
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.
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.)
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.
'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."
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.
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.
Again, I'm not saying this argument is valid or should carry the day, only that it is defensible and non-bigoted.
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).
And yes, I read Moon is a Harsh Mistress too many times (I'm a sucker for that novel). :P
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.).
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.
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.
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.
I could be wrong. I haven't done extensive research into this. If you want to convince me, show me the data.
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.
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.
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).
You're going to freak out when you learn about the divorce rate.
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.
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?"
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.
"Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality, except in these modern times"?
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.
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.
News flash, 1 woman multi man, and (prepare to have your mind blown), multi women multi man communities can and do exist.
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).
Anyway - congratulations to the winners.
We really have quite a long way to go on this front.
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.
Bigamy requires being officially married whilst already being officially married. The state already has records, by definition.
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.
And this doesn't already happen? M/Dating does not require marriage.
I think we have yet to see all the consequences of this cultural change.
This is not meant as an argument against legalized polygamy, rather to point out some of the obstacles it faces.
This decision was awful IMHO. Government has no place in marriage.
So long as they are already involved with it, I'm happy that they're at least making the mistake equally for all genders.
But the real solution is to stop validating this religious rite at all.
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_idHow 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.
persons_table: person_id, name, age, sex
marriage_table: marriage_id, person_id
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
HN Headline: Polygamy upheld by supreme court
Comment:
While this is excellent news for my polygamous friends, I see no progress on [insert new deviation here].
---
So what do you all think will be the next big thing?
I would try to look up the reference but I don't want to do a search for "legal incest New Jersey" on my work computer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_Uni...
That's just gross.
Edit: Just remembered this is already happening http://travel.cnn.com/tokyo/none/love-plus-scourge-takes-ano...
Or indeed, on the fundamental issue, which is the need to get permission from a tiny group of powerful people in order to get married.
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.
There is simply no way to legally recognize poly* relationships under the law in a way that resembles binary marriage.
Marriage is a deeply troublesome arrangement, with a storied history of abuse.
Yes, there is probably more abuse in marriages then outside, but this is not an argument against marriage, but against abuse.
And where have we heard precisely these arguments before?
People are great.
Polygamy is 1 man to multiple women. Polyamory is between more then two people of any gender or combination of genders.
But you're also wrong! Polygamy refers to any marriage that has more than two partners, gender identity is irrelevant.
One man many women is polygynyz one woman many men is polyandry. Polyamory is multiple partners.
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.
"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.
As is traditional marriage, but to a much larger extent.
Isn't this literally the slippery slope that conservatives "warned" against?
I even just saw a politico article today saying basically the same thing:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/gay-marriage-...
I'm all for polygamy but I think it's just funny to see this called for as the next step, literally the same day that gay marriage was passed.
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".
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.
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."
Amen to that.
That's a common misconception. It was described, but not prescribed. The polygamy in the Old Testament is universally portrayed as dysfunctional.
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.
Every instance of polygamy has a bad ending in the Bible.
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
Correction: "Christian" refers to Jesus Christ, which does not appear in the old testament. Catholics, Ortodoxes and many protestant churches are against polygamy.
And while most modern churches have chosen to interpret Paul's prescription for monogomy strictly, some Christian churches and cultures continue to embrace polygamy.
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...
EDIT: minor edits.
Is everything really acceptable?
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"?
Second, that's it? Nothing more? Consensual, non-coercive between, say, a 70-year-old and a 9-year-old is fine?
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.