Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.
America just made it legal for homosexuals to join us married plebs in our misery. Hooray!
But why stop there?
Pictured: More than two
This is not a joke post, I am in fact serious. Relationships of this nature do exist and I do feel they should be recognised. I mean, why not? It's only fair.
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Because any notion of such a concept would give the average bible thumper an aneurism.
3183689 Just wait till they learn that I can scripturally justify it.
3183695 I was just about to type that, but I didn't want to seem too anti-Christian (I was Baptized and educated in Catholic schools). I've used the darn thing to dismantle so many religious arguments, it should be a crime :P
I agree with the sentiment, but as I understand it, execution is going to be a damn lot more difficult and complicated. Same-sex marriage is dead simple; you just alter the part where it says who two people can get married, and the vast amount of laws and rules where marriage is involved work the same way as before. Group marriages, however, require considerable amendments to existing rules, and a whole bunch of new ones to be set up. It can certainly happen, but it's not going to be as easy or quick as same-sex marriage turned out to be.
Probably because polyamory doesn't have as charismatic a spokesgroup as Twerpilee. It's not really on the popular cognizance radar, and when it is, it's usually part of a joke about Mormons.
Polygamous marriage is, in the real world, bad for civilization.
Like, objectively so; the countries which legalize polygamous marriage suck, and the communities which have polygamous marriage suck. All advanced civilizations in the world are monogamous.
There are a lot of complicated reasons for this, but a lot of it boils down to the fact that it typically is men that want more than one woman and that the maximized parent:child ratio involves 1:1 marriages for the population as a whole. Polygamous marriage often results in one side "running out" of available spouses and resorting to marrying children, the exiling of young males from communities to reduce competition for women, ect.
It is pretty bad.
From a legal standpoint, it also is hairy; how would it work?
I suspect that it will be legalized in the long term, but it would require for EVERYONE in a plural marriage to be legally married to everyone else. It would also require a lot of complex changes to a lot of laws to accommodate such marriages, as most of said laws are designed for two people (and a lot of insurance policies and the like are designed around the same).
Yep, requires rewriting of damn near all the family-related laws and half the tax code, rather than a "find & replace" on a few of them. Bureaucratic inertia is going to be the biggest obstacle here, followed by "but women might be oppressed somehow", with "but tradition" in third place.
Are you asking why this decision didn't legalize them, or why they aren't recognized period?
If 1: Because it wasn't the issue in question.
If 2: Because it would be a Hell of a lot harder to do. At least in terms of (high) Court decisions, we almost certainly won't see anything about polyamory for quite a while. In terms of laws, there may be a few. The main problem is that the most visible examples of polygamy in American culture are Mormonism and cults – and we all know how that works out for the girls involved.
The thing is, polyamory is fine, but polygamy allows for all sorts of abuses (see: cults mentioned above). It may be technically possible to do so in some States (I assume you live in the US), but I'm not aware that it's been tried. You could, but you should make sure to find a sufficiently accepting notary first so that they don't close that opening.
However, there is nothing stopping you from having a romantic/sexual relationship with multiple people. You just likely won't have it legally recognized.
3183855
He's a brit.
3183783 Leaving aside the issues of taxation, which I never said were simple (nor did I even address them), all the polygamy examples I'm sure you're thinking of are in fact polygyny - the marriage of multiple women to one man. You probably noticed that I tagged this as polyamory - a relationship between two or more people of whichever gender you might care to name. You're right that socieities in which polygyny is the cultural norm are fairly crap, generally speaking, but the normative state of polygyny in those cultures and its effects as a result are no argument against polyamory, which is an entirely different proposition.
I'd also take issue with your claim that men are more likely to seek out multiple partners. Men and women are equally likely to be inclined to seek out multiple partners for very sound biological reasons.
I never said this would be easy. I never once claimed it would be simple. All I said was that it would be fair.
3183695 I would be quite interested in hearing what that is. It'd be nice to have more tools on my belt for arguing these things. To this point I usually say something along the lines of how a doctrine of intolerance is terrible.
3184040 Wouldn't, like, the whole taxation thing be sort of the crux of the issue?
Homosexual marriage had a point. It was about getting the same sort of rights and benefits under the government that were provided to heterosexual couples provided to homosexual couples. This is right and fair and just.
What is the point of polygamy style marriages if you don't want to talk about the taxation, property rights or familial situations that would be a result?
3184589
Just think about divorce. N people are married, 1 wants out. Does the whole marriage need to be re-formulated, or is it just one member leaving? Do they get 1/N of the total assets? How do we handle children, especially if there are multiple biological parents involved? How does child support and alimony work? What about inheritance? Benefits? Now say 2 or more people want to split their marriage off from the existing one. What now?
While the legal system and government services were already prepared to handle two-person marriages (which makes gay marriage a non-issue functionally), having three or more people in a marriage requires a fundamental re-working of damned near everything, from taxes to case law to insurance. That doesn't mean it shouldn't happen, but it would be a massive undertaking with countless unintended side-effects.
3184040 It would be fair. But you asked why it hasn't happened. Legally protected polyamory –> polygamy –> abuses
==
==
3184953 Obviously, these won't be easy solutions, but...
"N people are married, 1 wants out. Does the whole marriage need to be re-formulated, or is it just one member leaving?"
Why would the whole thing need to be reworked? Unless someone else doesn't want to be in a relationship without them, in which case they could leave as well.
"Do they get 1/N of the total assets?"
Ideally they would get something along those lines, barring assets the remaining people need. Otherwise, they work it out among themselves; if they can't, that's what courts are for.
"How do we handle children, especially if there are multiple biological parents involved?"
How would you have more than two biological parents? And it would depend on whether or not the leaving person has custody already.
"How does child support and alimony work? What about inheritance? Benefits? Now say 2 or more people want to split their marriage off from the existing one. What now?"
Those can all be worked out on a case-by-case basis by either the affected parties, or the courts. That's how it works presently.
3184040
To play devil's advocate, historical group marriages tended to be one high-status man with many wives. Let's update that for modern times and say one high-status spouse with (statistically speaking) multiple opposite-sex spouses. Even leaving aside sex ratios, you wind up with a situation where lower-status people not marrying into a "harem" have fewer total options for marriage, as the pool of available mates has shrunk. I'd not be surprised if it became a significant class issue.
EDIT: you touched on this above, but is there any reasonable legal way to allow polyamory without allowing (functional, even if they all marry one another) polygyny or polyandry?
3185006
"How would you have more than two biological parents? And it would depend on whether or not the leaving person has custody already."
If you have a family of males ABC, and females XY, and six children (AX, AY, BX, BY, CX, CY), and A and X leave (whether separately or together), visitation and child support get complicated. As for pre-existing custody, assume they all lived together and raised the children communally, with no special emphasis on biological parentage.
3185086 If they all raised the child together, and all share (presumably equal) custody, then it shouldn't matter who is genetically related to whom. If the children are all close, they would presumably alternate between each parent.
Also, this is already very complicated now. Quite often the rights are not shared equally. If they are, that's wonderful; but usually it has to be worked out by the parents with possible help from lawyers/judges.
As for how to avoid the class issue, the system would have to be set up to enable polyamory, not harems. Meaning, each person would have to consent to marrying every other person, instead of just one. So a relationship tree would look like a polygon with all diagonals filled in, rather than a ring or wheel.
3185133
As I added in my edit, what's to stop (say) a group of men legally marrying each other and one woman, when they're really only involved with the woman? It's not like the state is going to audit their bedroom activities.
Edit: in case it isn't clear, I'm not against poly-marriage in principle, I'm just pointing out that (unlike gay marriage, where all they had to do was change "one man and one woman" to "two consenting adults") at present, our institutions are fundamentally unprepared to handle the entirely new complications that poly-marriage would introduce. It would take a lot of pre-planning and post-implementation trial and error to get even the most obvious bugs worked out.
3184040
It is, in fact, a very good argument against polyamory, as polyamory necessarily includes polygyny and other non-exclusive relationships.
We know from various studies that sexual exclusivity is a positive indicator for numerous other things; indeed, sexual exclusivity correlates with intelligence, income, non-criminality, ect. for men. For women, sexual exclusivity correlates with stability.
Polyamory is not illegal; indeed, numerous Americans and people in other countries participate in polyamorous situations. The government has limited control over the personal lives of citizens. However, they do have the power to enact policies for the social good, so they certainly are under no obligation to encourage or reward such relationships, and they are allowed to enact social policies for the good of society.
Child abuse is more common amongst polygynous societies, as is child marriage, and the question of consent is a very real one - can women in such situations even give meaningful consent? This is questionable in many cases due to physical, social, and financial issues.
And there is no clear way to ban such things if you allow poly marriage.
This is objectively false. We know from studies that men are indeed more likely to seek out and have multiple sexual partners, and men have more sexual partners than women. This isn't terribly surprising when you consider the biological situation.
Women are punished for having multiple sexual partners because of Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe - men have a much stronger incentive to require their sexual partners to be exclusive than women do, because that's the only way of ensuring that they're the father of their partner's children. Women, conversely, need physical security more from men, which nowadays takes the form of financial support and other forms of support. Women need men to be emotionally exclusive, men need women to be physically exclusive, as their #1 needs.
The other issue is the question of commitment and stability. Marriage is intended to be a long-term contract. Many polyamorous situations are not. This is a fundamental mismatch, and given the overall legal nature of marriage, this is potentially problematic.
A group of three people who are in a sexually exclusive relationship with one another, who live together, rear children together, and do not stray outside of the relationship can perhaps argue that they are being slighted.
A lot of polyamorous groupings do not appear to have this level of stability, though, and the question of real harms from groups like the fundamentalist mormons must be weighed against the social benefits to those who live in such situations. How common are such situations?
As far as we know, they're quite rare, and the polygamous mormons and similar religious groups are the more common set-up. And we know these situations to be problematic, abusive, and inferior.
The fact that you are actively harming some people - especially in these communities - is a real issue, and means you have to take much more into account. There were no demonstrable harms to anyone from gay marriage, but this is not the case for group marriage.
Moreover, the situation is not analogous to gay marriage - indeed, a number of states did not even specify the gender of the spousal participants prior to the whole gay marriage bru-ha-ha. It literally made no difference whatsoever to the legal status of the marriage, it was simply excluding some people from marriage for arbitrary reasons.
Polyamory is not analogous, then, because they're demanding non-trivial changes to the law in order to accomodate them. This is a much more complicated issue from a legal standpoint. The idea that it is "fair" to demand such changes is extremely questionable. That does not mean that they are wrong in asking for legal recognition, but it is not as simple of a situation as Loving.
I have known a very small number of people in stable triads, but the vast majority of polyamorous people I've known were not sexually exclusive at all, and the idea of them being "married" would be very questionable, given that was not the nature of their relationships to begin with. Moreover, many of them had what might charitably be described as "issues".
There are a lot of good social reasons why the government would want to promote sexual exclusivity, and while banning adultury is not really possible, sexual infidelity is a grounds for divorce, and no one really questions that. Not all relationships are the same. And it is worth remembering that sham marriages are illegal and indeed, can constitute fraud - marriage is in fact not a totally meaningless term. Indeed, the fact that it is not, and the fact that it has requirements to enter into, is part of why same-sex marriage needed to be recognized.
This is, of course, aside from all of the various legal issues, which are many, varied, and complicated. Death benefits, taxation, child care, and a huge host of other factors are involved, and these are non-trivial issues. Death benefits, for instance, typically assume that the person in question has no spouse, and in some cases end if the person gets remarried. If someone has one spouse die, but still has another one, should they recieve the full death benefit? Half of it? 2/3rds of it? Any of it? How about insurance - how should that be handled? Shared property, if one person leaves the marriage? How about child custody? How does divorce even work?
These are non-trivial issues. In same-sex marriage, it was analogous to any other marriage. But in a group marriage, the situation is not the same.
It also leads to issues with things like "who makes medical decisions for you if you are rendered incapable of doing so?" By default, this is your spouse, unless you designate otherwise; with multiple spouses, this could lead to major problems.
These are not trivial at all, and simply brushing them aside is problematic as marriage is to some great extent ABOUT said benefits from the point of view of the law.
3185208 "Child abuse is more common amongst polygynous societies, as is child marriage, and the question of consent is a very real one - can women in such situations even give meaningful consent? This is questionable in many cases due to physical, social, and financial issues.
And there is no clear way to ban such things if you allow poly marriage."
In those cases, the polygyny is an effect of the abuse, not vice versa. Obviously, certain types of marriage are already illegal; that wouldn't change if polygamy were made legal. The focus should be on ending the abuse, not stopping polygamy.
"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe"
Paternity tests.
"Women need men to be emotionally exclusive, men need women to be physically exclusive, as their #1 needs."
No. Biologically, it's generally better. But polygamy would be an option, not a requirement; anybody who wanted exclusivity could easily get it.
"Marriage is intended to be a long-term contract. Many polyamorous situations are not."
Many actually do last for a long time. Also, citation?
"A lot of polyamorous groupings do not appear to have this level of stability ... groups like the fundamentalist mormons"
And here is the problem. Fundamentalist Mormons do not practice polyamory. They practice forced marriage, which just happens to be polygamous in nature. Nobody argues against monogamy because of normal domestic abuse.
"the vast majority of polyamorous people I've known were not sexually exclusive at all"
That sounds like an open relationship, rather than a multi-partner one.
"Non-trivial issues" does not justify maintaining a status quo, ever. There are legitimate concerns that you raise, but they're all answerable – or could be worked out during the necessarily lengthy legislative process – and most importantly the majority of them are not inherent to polyamory, but rather to the abusive implementation common in the most well-known cultural examples of plural marriage.
3185633
Except this isn't really true, if you read stories about people who join polygamist sects - things get a lot worse after they join than they were prior to them joining.
Indeed, it is quite the opposite; the drive for more women to marry is why they practice child marriage and exile their sons to reduce competition for yougn women. That is the cause of their behavior.
I was talking biologically.
Sexual exclusivity correlates with length of relationship.
No true Scotsman.
They're polygamous in nature. The abusive nature of their relationships is indeed directly because of their culture of polygamy. The desire for more wives is a big part of what causes a lot of the bad behavior.
Dealing with the fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims and other religious types is a big barrier for polyamory being legally recognized.
Historically, marriage has always been a legal contract. Despite what some people claim, the average person didn't get married in a church until the late middle ages; for most of the Christian era, marriage had nothing to do with religion. So, it being a matter of civil law, there is no practical reason to limit how many people can decide to be bound by such a contract.
It isn't a slippery slope to marrying children and animals as some people claim, because only an adult (human) can sign a contract.
Too complex? (As some people claim.) The contract I had to sign (23 times) to buy my ranch was two inches thick. Lawyers deal with complexity every day; they love it.
It's open to "abuse?" Sure. So what? That's true of any sort of contract. Anyone who signs a timeshare contract is almost guaranteed to be screwed... but that doesn't make those sorts of agreements illegal.
No reason not to allow it. Some people just get all weirded out by government "approval" of what other people are doing with their personal plumbing. But that's still not a reason.
3185783 "things get a lot worse after they join than they were prior to them joining."
Right. Because of the abuse.
"Sexual exclusivity correlates with length of relationship."
That's not a citation.
"They're polygamous in nature. The abusive nature of their relationships is indeed directly because of their culture of polygamy. The desire for more wives is a big part of what causes a lot of the bad behavior."
1) Of course they're polygamous in nature. But they're not polyamorous, because there's no love.
2) The abuse is not because of the polygamy until you give proof. That's way too big a claim for you to not back up.
3) Yes, the desire for more wives. Not an actual mutual, loving relationship. It's a desire to gain social status or have more control.
"Dealing with the fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims and other religious types is a big barrier for polyamory being legally recognized."
This is definitely true. But we need to deal with that wrongful practice of polygyny specifically, not polygamy in general.
==
==
3185892 Did you just say the government shouldn't be protecting against abusive relationships? Getting screwed out of a timeshare is very different from having your life handed over for someone else to control.
3186006
No, that isn't what I meant. No marriage contract (polygamous or otherwise) can "hand over your life" to another person; that's slavery and illegal. A husband or wife isn't property and can't legally be physically abused or confined, and that wouldn't change no matter how many parties were signatories of the marriage contract. I meant the "gaming of the system" sort of abuse that one often doesn't see until the divorce rolls around.
3186006
Jay Teachman, in his study of premaritial courtship, sex, and coresidency (Premarital Sex, Premarital Cohabitation, and the Risk of Subsequent Marital Dissolution Among Women), found that women who have more than one sexual partner are much less likely to have successful marriages than those who have only a single partner, and that having multiple coresidential partners prior to marriage made it even less likely that it would be successful.
Divorce rates are lowest for people with the fewest sexual partners, and highest for those with the most. This suggests that having large numbers of sexual partners leads to long-term instability, or possibly that individuals who engage in such behavior tend to be unstable to begin with.
The Heritage Foundation did a metastudy based on government data which indicated that having two sexual partners increased the failure rate of marriage to nearly 50%, and having large numbers increased the failure rate to as high as 2/3rds.
While these are not direct studies of polyamorous populations (a population which is neither very large nor heavily studied), it is likely that the trends hold there as well.
1) No True Scotsman. They would claim there is love. Others would claim that no poly relationships truly involve love.
2) The abuse is directly because of polygamy. If you can't marry more than one woman, there's no incentive to exile your sons, because you already have a wife, and there's no competition there. Likewise, the child marriage is because the men want to marry as many women as possible; in a situation where you have one wife, you can't marry a child and cohabit with them.
3) How do you legally differentiate between them? They would (and do) claim that the relationships are loving.
How would you differentiate between them legally?
3186290 The examples you cite are all from societies in which women had essentially no legal rights, or significantly fewer rights than men. They couldn't choose to marry. They couldn't choose to divorce without immense barriers being placed in the way. All of that abuse you cite is a direct result of that.
Our society grants equal rights to men and women. That's the key difference and the reason why citing examples from regressive cultures is a bad idea.
3186330
The fundamentalist Mormons live in the United States.
3186331 And if we were living 120 years ago you might have a point in saying that.
Your argument in this case is no different than the argument used against homosexuality or homosexual unions. "These bad people want it, therefore it's bad". All the rest - the issues of taxation, assets and so on - are valid arguments that can be settled through legislation. Your argument here seems to be sneaking into morality.
3186333
What do you mean, 120 years ago? Are you not familiar with the fundamentalist Mormons of Utah?
They're an active sect which exists here, today. Right now. The abuses of the various polygamist groups in the west are pretty well-documented at this point.
It isn't a theoretical problem. These people exist, they're real, and they're problematic. And they're probably the largest practictioners of plural marriage in the US.
It has little to do with "bad people want it, therefore it is bad". The question is what is good for society.
The problems with polygamy are pretty well known, and we see these problems in real life. Banning such practices is logical if it often leads to abuse, even if it is not abusive 100% of the time, just as we have speed limits even though it is sometimes safe to exceed them. It also is logical to do if it leads to larger structural problems.
It is vastly different from homosexuality, which in any case was always a moot point - homosexuals are not going to engage in healthy heterosexual relationships regardless of the law.
3186340 120 years ago is when the mormon church officially ended the practice of plural marriage.
And again, you're citing the activities of a religious fundamentalist sect that indoctrinates its members to believe that their rights don't exist. It's a biased sample. You might as well start citing the Gay Aryan Nation as proof that homosexual marriage is bad.
3186357
I'm citing the largest group of practitioners of plural marriage in the US, who are surely relevant to any discussion about legalization.
3186360 You're citing an extremist group as normative.
3186362
If they're the largest group, then they are by definition the "norm".
EDIT: And for the record, I'm far more sympathetic to the cause of polyamorous marriages being legally recognized than you probably think I am. Indeed, I think that in the long run, it is inevitably going to happen. But "the long run" may be a very long time indeed, depending.
3186362
archonix, unless you have a legally-accredited psychic in your back pocket, or include an arbitrary "sexes must be represented in equal numbers +/-5%" clause (in which case we'd have a "gay polyamorous marriage rights" movement start up), any law that allows group marriage will also allow de facto polygamous marriages.
3186290
"Divorce rates are lowest for people with the fewest sexual partners, and highest for those with the most."
That could correlate to other things as well, though. For example, people with conservative religious views are more likely to view premarital sex and divorce as sinful, and so would have few sexual partners and be more likely to stay in an undesirable relationship.
"They would claim there is love."
The abusers might. The wives wouldn't (or at least not with such frequency it could be claimed to be true). And certainly no outsiders would.
"How do you legally differentiate between them?" & "How would you differentiate between them legally?"
The same way you differentiate between legitimate and forced marriages of any kind: Ensure that both parties have to give consent.
"The fundamentalist Mormons live in the United States."
But their culture is very different.
"If they're the largest group, then they are by definition the "norm"."
No. They're the perceived norm. The most visible examples of people with Personality Disorders are serial murderers and rapists; this is also the public perception. But the majority of psychopaths and sociopaths do not have double-digit kill counts.
==
==
3186439 I think you may be misunderstanding the issue. He's arguing for polygamous marriage, by asserting that the abusive practices that appear in the most visible examples of polygamy are not the most common practices.
I've had several discussions with Christians on the question, "Why are you so against polyamory when the Bible is totally okay with it?" Really, the New Testament is not what you would think from listening to Fox News.
Polyamory: OK, but not recommended for priests and deacons
Divorce: Absolutely forbidden
Family: Bad, distracts you from God; you should abandon yours today
High taxes: Pay them without complaining
Money: Bad; you should give it all away
Slavery: Totally OK
Abortion: No opinion
One potential problem with polyamory is that it reduces the strength of kin selection. In a 3-parent polyamorous family, your average relatedness to your siblings is not .5, but .375. We thus expect people in polyamorous societies to be less generous, loving, and altruistic. I'm not too worried about this; this is a threat that is beyond the horizon of when we all die or kill each other for other reasons.
I think that all relationships people want should be allowed, but the solution is not to legislate more and more kinds of marriages as legal. Rather, the law should have nothing to say about marriage. "Marriage" is a concept that's very useful in a traditional and illiterate society, where people are unable to consider their options or hire lawyers to go over legal documents. Marriage is simply taking one possible relationship and making it not just the default, but the only one, simplifying everything for everybody. Then you can make laws about the rights of married partners without worrying about the details of how many partners there are, what species they are, etc.
The state is involved in marriage because we have so many laws about how marriage affects taxes, health insurance, property rights, child support, inheritance, and so on. Laws assume that everybody has a job, gets married, has kids, buys a house, works untils they're 65, retires, and dies in their 80s. People who don't do all those things are problems and end up getting screwed one way or another.
The solution to marriage discrimination isn't to make more laws, but to remove or simplify some of the laws we have, so that people can make what contracts they want to make with each other, and not have the state make assumptions about how they'll do that.
3186290
You should say "divorce" rather than "failure".
3187660 I wrote a post or an essay or something about that exact thing a while back, but I can't seem to find it. The tl;dr was basically what you said about contracts, with the idea that anyone could enter into one of these agreements if they wanted to make arrangements for inheritance or asset sharing, or whatever else. People could all it marriage if they want.