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.

Civil unions are "separate but equal" which means separate but not equal.

And stuffing a few homophobes is good. They have been persecuting LGBT people for millennia so fair turnabout.

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.).

>How could it be consensual between all adults?

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'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.

>How could it be consensual between all adults?

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.

The key word there is "adults." Polygamist communities have a documented tendency to seek out younger and younger women for marriage. (http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1589/657)

EDIT: added source; had previously assumed this was common knowledge

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.

That seems like a pretty huge and likely misinformed generalization. But feel free to back it up and prove me wrong.

The most accessible summary can be found in "The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage" on http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1589/657

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.