Religious fundamentalists are trying to do it. And they’re using the rights-language that LGBT activists have relied on in promoting their civil rights agenda. Thoughts?
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- Anti-Choicers Defeat Birth Control Bill in South Dakota by Jill February 11, 2008
- Carrying the Organic Thing a Little Far by zuzu May 31, 2006
THey can HAVE their polygamous marriages, as soon as same sex marrriage/civil unions are legal and binding in all 50 states and upheld by the supreme court.
In other words, get in line! ANd no cutting!
Regarding the article: I thought it was practical. You really can’t throw ALL the polygamous Mormons in prison; there aren’t enough prisons. Concentrating the law enforcement on the polygamists who abuse women and children, rape, and enslave does seem to me to be a better use of legal authority than just ignoring the problem and pretending it doesn’t exist.
One big issue with the practice of polygamy is the fact that it often involves underage girls who have no voice and no say in the matter. Likewise, women are viewed as property and are abused as such–men who do not “toe the line” with the powers that be within the church get their wives taken away from them and parceled out to other men. There are so many other illegal practices going on beneath the umbrella of “polygamy” that make it a far more complicated issue than gay marriage.
If Mormons want their polygamy they’re going to have to obey all the same laws that the rest of married people do–that means only consenting adults are wed, and in order to get out of the marriage you go through a court…and bigwigs in the church can’t pass out wives like freakin’ pieces of candy.
Why doesn’t anyone ever suggest polyandry in the debate? I’d be much more inclined to see multiple spouses as “just a personal choice,” if they’d extend the same “right” to women. As it stands, it just sounds like….ohhhhhh… oppression and religious craziness? (Who wants to be stuck in a house 24/7 with 21 kids? My head hurts just thinking about it.)
I really don’t get women battling to legalize it. Even in societies where it was the norm, there was STILL jealousy and such among wives, because humans are just sorta like that. A woman sharing her husband and not being jealous… have there ever been any studies done on the sexuality of polygamous brides? Because if it’s a non-issue as she claims, it doesn’t sound like she’s all that into HIM…
Their biggest stumbling block is going to be property rights. Because that’s one of the fundamentals of marriage, even if people don’t really like to talk about it. Two people married to each other and no one else — regardless of the gender of the parties — is not a problem within current marital-property rules.
But once you start adding spouses, things get complicated. Let’s say you have a husband, H, and a wife, W in a community-property state. Right now the marital property is jointly owned by H and W, with rights of survivorship. Everything that’s considered marital property — the house, spousal incomes, joint bank accounts — is split 50-50.
Let’s say W wants another husband, H2. If W marries H2, does H have to agree to give up a portion of his claim to W’s income, which has been considered marital property? Does H2 have any claim on H’s income, or any property purchased by W and H after the date of W’s marriage to H2, and vice versa? If H2 cannot claim 50% of W’s income or any marital assets purchased after the marriage because of prior claims by H, doesn’t that put H2′s marriage into a second-class status? What if either H or H2 wants a second wife?
See, these problems just don’t arise when two men or two women or one man and one woman get married.
I haven’t read the article yet, but I doubt it would make much difference in my opinion: as long as those getting married are consenting adults, I see no problem with it. The legal issues (property rights, who gets custody of kids in the event of a divorce, etc.) can surely be worked out. (Yes, I know about the problem with the fundamentalist Mormons who are forcing teenagers into abusive polygynous relationships. I don’t consider that an act between consenting adults.)
Also: polygamy is a catch-all term for having more than 2 people married to each other. Polygyny is specific to when there are multiple wives, just like polyandry is specific to multiple husbands. It irritates me to no end that the generic term has been turned into “ooo, a man with lots of wives!” because the only form of polygamy that has been widely acknowledged/practiced in the US is of the 1 man, multiple wives, variety, but everyone with any familiarity with polyamory knows women who have multiple SOs of the male flavor.
Done ranting now.
I’m having a hard time understanding how they get married to more than one person anyway. Do they just not marry legally within the state and just through the church? It all sounds odd to me. Not only that but I agree with your point that there must be a lot of jealously mingling between the houses. Although, children seem to take priority over sex, so who knows. I say that if that’s how they want to live, go for it, so long as there aren’t children/women being harmed or forced into marriages or people being passed around like a Thanksgiving turkey. (I had to use it, it’s the holiday!)
For the most part, it just weirds me out that there are families out there with children in the double and sometimes triple digits. Could someone tell me how they even afford it? Sounds like one big spawn party gotten out of hand. Just think, there’s a whole bunch of kids just waiting to come knocking on your door at 8 in the morning to give you pamplets, scary!!!
I also agree that they do need to take a step back and let homosexuals get their deserved piece of the civil unions pie first.
I understand that a lot of what really goes on with polygamous marriages is shady; child brides and abuse and focusing on that instead of punishing everyone is the right way to go. As long as it’s between consenting adults (emphasis on the “consenting”) I have no problem with it. They probably have a means of diving up property in case of death but for the Mormon church I don’t think they’re too keen on divorce. Let me know if I’m wrong on that.
Having said that, what comes next might sound cruel but if this is the life that these people really then give it to them and let them get whatever comes to them. Unless they begin mass converstions of new people at some point the entire society would implode. You can have oodles and oodles of kids but the circle will wind in on itself and that’s where you’re going to run into problems. I’ve read, and I’ll try to find the article, about an underground polygamous Mormon community that had already reached a level of inbreeding. Add to that Mormons aren’t big fans of interracial marriages and they become severely limited. The question is, how many women outside of the Mormon religion would actually be apart of this for non religious purposes?
As far as polyandry goes, I am no expert on Mormons and have only known one in my life but from what I understand children are a big part of their faith and they are encouraged to have as many as possible (the wife of the Mormon student I knew was depressed because she’d only been able to have one child. They were having fertility problems and it was a constant source of pain/embarrassement for her even though she was outside of Mormon company). Having said that, a woman having multiple husbands is not going to have any more children like a man having two wives so no,and that’s their reasoning for not allowing women multiple husbands.
From what I understand of the FLDS church, in particular the Colorado City bunch, the church elders and/or the Prophet pretty much just pick out a girl or woman and tell her that God told him that He wants her to marry him. And off she goes, because she’s been raised to follow whatever the church elders and Prophet say.
I believe the first wife might be legally married to the husband, but the others aren’t, and there’s also a great deal of reassignment as wives are moved around like chess pieces in power games among the elders.
“Not allowing women multiple husbands”
But I thought polygamy was about freedom? I guess they mean freedom for real people (the ones with penises).
I still don’t think it’s as simple as the “consenting adults” thing. First, there are logical legal reasons why marriage is relegated to two people — property rights, like Zuzu mentioned, are important ones, but other things like end-of-life issues, child custody rights, etc are also complicated by plural marriages. Further — and this may not be an ideal reason to legalize it, but it must be taken into account — in practice polygamy is overwhelmingly men with multiple wives, and often includes abuse, including child rape/marriage. As Zuzu said, women in polygamous communities are passed around like chess pieces. It must be clear that this argument isn’t gender-neutral; it’s not about everyone’s right to plural marriages. While the law might be gender-neutral, in practice this would largely benefit men who want to have multiple wives. That has to be taken into account. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
I do think it’s fair to draw legal lines around what marriage can and cannot be. Same-sex marriage is different from plural marriage because you’re disallowing an entire class of people from marrying the class of people who they’re attracted to and who they’re most likely to fall in love with. You’re essentially barring them from marriage because of their identity, not because of their choices. Further, laws against same-sex marriage amount to gender discrimination — the only reason that a woman cannot marry another woman is because she is a woman. In that sense, it’s quite analogous to laws against interracial marriage — the only reason a black person couldn’t marry a white person is because he/she is black. Laws against polygamy aren’t analogous, and I’d argue that it’s well within the bounds of fairness to require that marriages only consist of two people. Marriage is a contract which includes a set of rights given by the state — the state has the right to set certain limits on that contract, provided that such limits don’t violate equal protection rights and aren’t irrationally disciminatory (and I would argue anti-same-sex-marriage laws both violate equal protection rights and are irrationally discriminatory, while anti-polygamy laws aren’t).
I agree that resources are better spent focusing on child rape, etc. But I think we have our heads in the sand if we assume that all of these adults are “consenting” or that consent is the only thing that should be taken into account.
This is how they commit welfare fraud as well (At least the Warren Jeffs followers). Any plural wives are officially single and rarely work, so they are listed on the state welfare rolls as an unemployed single mother with children. The more wives you have the more checks you get, and the more kids they have the larger the checks are.
Oh, and it’s not just Mormons who have plural marriages. Many conservative Muslims defend their “right” to polygyny as well. And in both religious traditions, that’s what it is — a man’s right to take multiple wives.
I think that you’d have to allow women multiple husbands, otherwise you’d run into equal protection problems, wouldn’t you?
One very important issue would be the consent of the first spouse to the acquisition of the second and the second spouses knowledge that they aren’t the only one. I wouldn’t approve of a system which allowed a person to collect spouses without the approval of all parties involved.
Well, yeah. That’s what I meant when I said that the law would be gender-neutral, but the practice wouldn’t be.
I have no problem in theory with polygamy, but it’s practice leaves much to be desired. As others have noted above, the practice of marrying very young girls, and the prevalence of incest and sexual abuse in FLDS communities is frightening. However, I do wonder if legalizing polygamy would go some way in ending the isolation of FLDS communities, and make it easier for girls and women who have been abused to get out of bad situations. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this will be the case. It just seems that these communities exist so far outside of the mainstream, and there is so much distrust of the outside world, making it extremely unlikely that girls and women will leave since it means leaving their communities and going into an outside world that they may have no experience with.
As for the issue of property rights, I firmly believe that we need to break property rights away from marriage/conjugal relationships. Part of moving away from sexism and heterosexism is recognition of a plurality of families and relationships. This has long been my frustration with the exclusive focus on same-sex marriage rights (granted, I live in a country where same-sex marriage is legal and we have universal health care, so the context is different).
I read Under the Banner of Heaven a year or so ago, and it discusses how Mormonism came about as well as the history of polygamy in the church and in the splinter sects. Unfortunately, I’ve lent out my copy, so this is from memory.
Mormonism, at least when it started, was fairly democratic in that it let pretty much anyone to make up the rules by claiming they had visions from God. Polygamy in the religion got started because one of the founders wanted to bone some woman and still keep his wife, so he said that God had told him that men could take multiple wives. And they jumped on that. Meantime, the wife said that, well, God had told HER that God wanted women to take multiple husbands as well. Founder pulled another revelation out and said that God was only kidding when he said that about multiple husbands, and by the way, God said He’s only talking to me from now on, but he wants everyone to know that, for sure, multiple wives are necessary to getting to Heaven.
Except when the US government said that Utah couldn’t join the Union unless polygamy were outlawed, then God lifted that particular rule. That’s what the FLDS split over.
Last year the Canadian government commissioned a study about decriminalizing polygamy. The final report recommended decriminalization. The chief author was a woman professor at Queen’s University.
Some of the findings:
“Criminalization does not address the harms associated with valid foreign polygamous marriages and plural unions, in particular the harms to women,”
“In light of the fact that we have a fairly permissive society … why are we singling out that particular form of behaviour for criminalization?”
“If there are problems such as child abuse, or spousal abuse, there are other criminal provisions or other laws dealing with those problems that certainly should be enforced,”
So to speak.
Why did I think that was funny? I don’t know. I think it might have to do with the incongruity of describing a church elder as “wanting to bone another woman.”
I mean, it’s totally apropos, but it also shifted my mind into junior-high-gear.
[...] like this of a star than this of a triangle or a square with diagonals. But now that Jill brought up polygamy again, I’ve thought about this more and real [...]
Jill, Zuzu, there actually is an infrastructure for poly marriages – just not the traditional polygamous ones. If you make marriage transitive, and cap it at, say, 6 people, then most of the existing privileges it grants can be extended to polyamorous relationships. In such an arrangement, divorce amounts to one or more partners withdrawing from the collective marriage. Polygamy can work the same way, since legally speaking, two people who share a spouse are in the same relationship as two people married to each other.
Then let’s support a system in which marriage is void unless all parties to it consent. Part of making marriage transitive is that if a husband takes a second wife, the first wife is automatically part of the relationship and may veto it if she likes (of course the husband can then divorce her, but then he’s not in a polygamous relationship).
Because it was supposed to be?
That’s fine if everyone wants to sign on and throw their assets into the marital pile. But not everyone’s going to want to do that.
Marriage on the partnership model — like, say, how a law firm is run — might work, but there would be costs incurred every time someone wants to enter or exit, because the existing partnership would have to be dissolved and re-formed every time there was a change in personnel.
It also doesn’t deal with end-of-life and care issues. I may trust my husband to make end-of-life decisions for me because he shares my views on life support and that’s something we’ve discussed in bed, but if I’m also considered legally married to his second wife — who neither shares my values nor has ever discussed extraordinary measures with me — does she have the same rights to make those decisions as my husband?
Oh, you selected the “jumped on” construction on purpose – I’m sorry I didn’t give you the credit/blame for that! ;)
You can insist that any second wife share your values on this matter, just like you can insist that any potential husband share your values. I know some pro-choice women will not marry an anti-choice man; they can just as easily say they will not enter any partnership unless all partners are pro-choice.
Or, of course, you can just say you won’t do polyamory. Legalizing polyamory won’t require you to stay in a relationship with multiple partners, just like legalizing anal sex doesn’t require you to let your husband butt-fuck you.
zuzu
I would say that it would be very unwise to enter a marital relationship with anyone if you weren’t able to talk about your views on life-support, medical care, and end-of-life measures. Before my sweetie and his intended get married, I kinda want to have that talk with both of them, because there may come a day when she and I need to stand up to his family about something, and I know he’d prefer it if she and I were reading from the same script.
Granted, since he can only marry one of us (and she got there first), she’s the only one who legally has a say in what happens to him, but emotionally, if anything happens, it’ll be much easier for all of us to be able to support each other.
Alon, do you really think it’s a good idea to legalize multiple relationships and then give other people veto power over them? Seems to me that under your system, you’d wind up with a situation not necessarily any better than what you currently have: the first spouse has a legally-recognized relationship, with all the protections that affords, and the second spouse is either legally married because all parties agree, not legally married and therefore without the legal benefits because the first spouse didn’t agree, or legally married with protections because the first spouse was browbeaten/coerced/blackmailed/threatened into approving the union and compromising his/her own interests.
I really don’t think that polygamy can be shoehorned into the current structure and way of thinking about marriage and its legal benefits. Same-sex marriage, however, is a seamless fit in the current bilateral system, which is where the fundie plural marriage advocates miss the boat.
I’d much rather the state got out of the marriage business entirely and set up some other kind of system or registry for inheritances and care decisions. Let marriage be only a social status, not a legal one.
Extensive polygyny creates its own problems, and can never survive as a complete isolated society – if men have multiple wives, there aren’t enough women to go round and so many other men must go unmarried. This doesn’t tend to go down well… In this structural sense it’s rather similar to killing female babies disproportionately – which, in ancient China, again gave rise to gangs of angry young unmarried men causing a major theft problem for the state. Notice that these ‘Fundamentalist Mormons’ are exiling sons and young men to the cities at quite a rate… A way in which patriarchy is not just oppressive of women but also of junior men.
Globally polyandry is very rare, existing only really in Tibet, I believe, where land pressures mean brothers want to marry the same woman so that their land doesn’t get split up further among their offspring into parcels too small to sustain a household. Polygyny’s more African, and in order to avoid the problems mentioned above, it’s usually only elite men who have the resources for >1 wife. This, plus the fact that men are more likely to die young, means that men and women are fairly equally able to marry.
In terms of studies of wives’ attitudes, Lila Abu-Lughod has done some work on Bedouin polygyny – a culture quite different to America’s, and yet, yes, the wives still get annoyed and jealous…
This isn’t just what’s happening though. If you get married (in a legal state sanctioned way) while you’re aready in a legal state sanctioned marriage to someone else, that’s bigamy. It’s essentially fraud, dishonestly trying to get two sets of benefits when you’re entitled to one. But that’s not what the Mormons are being done for.
What they do with the Mormons is declare them to be in “common law” marriages – when they aren’t legally married in any fashion what-so-ever to anyone – and use that to prosecute them for bigamy. They’re essentially prosecuting people for being in an intimate cohabiting relationship with someone while also being in an intimate cohabiting relationship with someone else. Of course, no-one would go after old-fashioned adulterers for this. It seems like a gross abuse of power.
I don’t think this is the case – it’s a great big distraction. Think about this. I’m married, and I have an affair with Jill who has my child. This has an enormous impact upon my wife in terms of property rights. The child has all sorts of claims on my estate, but no-one nowadays would make it illegal for me to have an adulterine child or to get my wifes consent before I do so. Why is this suddenly a problem when it comes to polygamy?
Similarly with end of life rights – we routinely deal with two sets of differing opinions when we’re talking about children. Nobody would oppose allowing a child to have two parents (or a parent two children!) on the grounds that it would complicate end-of-life issues. I can’t see why it’s an obstacle when polygamy and two spouses is concerned.
All these situations are already dealt with in family law all the time. If we struck of the you-can-only-marry-one-person-at-a-time clause out there’d be plenty of precident to allow courts to find their own way forward.
Except not. The difference is that people in plural marriages or bigamists are holding themselves out as married to the second or third spouse, whereas people who are having affairs are not doing so. And bigamy doesn’t require fraud on the other spouse to be illegal. Moreover, adulterers are not breaking any laws (usually, and certainly not against the state) by having affairs. Remember, Utah’s admission to the Union was conditioned on outlawing polygamy, so it’s arguably a more serious transgression than mere adultery.
You’re confusing the relationship with the rights. Children born during a marriage have automatic legal rights to support from both parents, and paternity is presumed. If the parents aren’t legally married, paternity must be established.
As for the end-of-life issue, the fact that you have a longstanding relationship and even a child with a woman who is not your wife does not confer any legal rights on her regarding YOUR care (or vice versa; if she’s not married, her closest adult relative would be the one who makes those decisions). Your wife would be calling those shots, and could bar your mistress from seeing you in the hospital, etc. These are issues that have come up time and again in same-sex relationships — partners of 20 years or more have been pushed aside by family who didn’t want anything to do with their relative until an inheritance was involved.
Zuzu;
Yes, it doesn’t. But I was talking about fraud on the state (but not clearly enough).
As I understand it this isn’t right. They deal with the Mormons by making intimate cohabitation while being married to someone else illegal. So this law makes both polygamists and adulterers criminals, but they only go for the polygamists.
The only time that there are multiple people involved with equal legal rights is when those people are blood relatives. Those relationships are automatic and are recognized, not created, by the law.
The problems that Jill sees is that having additional parties to the marriage creates many complications. Let’s say you have two wives, who have no sexual relationship with each other. What are their legal rights and obligations vis-a-vis each other? Vis-a-vis each other’s kids? Let’s say you go away with wife #1 and leave the kids with wife #2. Let’s say something happens to the kids — wife #1′s kids. Medical decisions need to be made. Does wife #2 have the right to make those decisions, because it’s a plural marriage? Same thing, but you’re away and something happens to one of your wives. Does the other one have the right to make those decisions?
Most of the arguments Zuzu and Jill seem to be making about the complications involved and the distinct difference in the social institution involved seem to cut against state recognition–but not against decriminalization. It seems like many of the arguments against criminalizing the burqa come into play here, no? Just as there, the (genuine) problem isn’t the specific issue but the social context of patriarchal oppression that we suspect is driving the practice. Is criminalization of the epiphenomenon really the way to help those we rightly feel need help?
But that sort of coercion can happen in any relationship. In particularly conservative regions of the world, women have no say at all in who they’re married to; still, that’s not an argument for criminalizing marriage. The veto power is no different from what there is in any healthy polyfidelitous relationship: if there are four people in the relationship, and one starts falling in love with a fifth person and wants to bring him in, then the other three people need to approve that fifth person for him to join the partnership.
Oh, I agree with you about that. Same-sex marriage is straightforward. Poly marriage requires some more work; it’s not especially difficult to resolve, but it requires some more work and I think it’s less pressing an issue than SSM.
Me too, but there will have to be a bundle of contracts that confer the same privileges now given to married couples: end of life decisions, property sharing, inheritance, the right to be present during medical operations. The privileges that don’t relate to property or child rearing can have any arrangement, but property sharing and what to do in case of divorce are huge problems.
Yes, and yes. The polyamory primers I’ve read make it fairly clear that in the polyfidelitous case, the answer is straightforwardly yes to both questions (the more common primary-secondary case should legally be no different from ordinary monogamous marriage). I think it also applies to harems, but I’m not entirely sure. What’s certain is that even if wife #1 is more attached to her kids than to wife #2′s, she’s still sufficiently attached to wife #2′s kids that if the husband and wife #2 are absent, she should be considered their legal guardian.
Having just read the entire thread, I want to make it clear that I don’t think Polygyny is a GOOD thing; I have read Under the Banner of Heaven and the practices of the FLDS are criminal and abhorent in the extreme.
I think not everyone has READ the article originally linked to: it tells of a law-enforcement guy in Utah who literally (and practically) says: there are so many underground polygamous marriages in Utah that we couldn’t enforce the polygamy law if we tried, there aren’t enough prisons, and what are we going to do, throw all these families in jail? (He seems to think it is something like a tenth of the state). So the law-enforecment guy makes the decision that what they will target is polygamous communities (like FLDS, whose “leader” they arrested) where young girls are enslaved and raped and exploited, and also meeting with polygamous communities and letting the women and young girls and young boys know that they can come to law enforcement about domestic violence and abandonment et cetera without having to fear prosecution for being in polygamous households.
In my opinion the Mormon “religion” is demonstably a fraud perpetrated by hucksters; but that ain’t going to make it go away. Also women whose mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers grew up in polygynous marriages, who know no other “normal” and WANT to have this kind of household, you aren’t going to be able to TALK them out of it, especially not if they are firmly entrenched in one. (Even for women with a mere 2 or 3 children, having another Mom around must be helpful).
I imagine one result of de-criminalizing polygamy would be this: if a man can legally marry two wives (or more) then he has to support them WITHOUT the government welfare handout to the “single” women and children in his harem.
Without the financial advantage, I bet the practice will shrivel and die, because these men will have to actually support all those kids. Right now, I think the HUGE number of children are being used as a money-making source, a revenue stream, and that is just an ABSURD situation.
That’s not true, for example, in the case of adoption these relationships are created by the law. But my point is just that people are saying that polygamy is a non-starter because we wouldn’t know what to do in cases with multiple people involved with equal legal rights. I can’t see that that’s the case, we already deal with these all the time.
It’s not a complication. People regularly have kids with spouse #1, divorce, remarry and leave the kids with spouse #2. Then something happens to the kids, spouse #1′s kids. Medical decisions meed to be made. People have to know whether spouse #2 has the right to make those decisions.
This scenario is not problematic for the law. They regularly make decisions over what rights you get over kids by marrying one of their parents. Just like happens in polygamy. I can’t see what difference remaining married when you remarry should make. It’s a well trod path.
And the obvious point is that if people think these ‘complications’ are so terrible, why don’t they seek to ban remarriage? I think it’s because this is an artificial objection.
I think if you are going to legalize polygamy, then at bare minimum, people should be required to be 21 years old to enter one.
Put that stipulation on it and watch how the Mormon cults continue to opt out because it’s not just about having multiple wives, it’s about humping 14-year-olds and pretending it’s god’s will.
Common law marriage is generally more complext than people make it out to be. Merely cohabitating is not enough; you have to act as married and often have to present as married. It’s acceptable to shoehorn people who have wedding ceremonies and present as married into common law marriages.
Well, no kidding, but the relationship of an adoptive child is equivalent to a blood relative. That’s not the case with marital status, which I’m sure you know.
Spouse #2 would have the right to make those decisions by virtue of an adoptive relationship to the kids, not a marital relationship with a spouse who’s also married to the parent of the kids. IOW, a relationship with the kids would have to be created.
I think you’re seriously underestimating the legal complications involved and just how much rethinking of the entire marriage and family structure would have to be done in order to achieve any kind of workable framework for different kinds of polygamous arrangements. The more people you get involved, the more permutations you can have. And where do you draw the line?
I really don’t understand why you’re not getting that parental rights don’t terminate on either divorce or remarriage, and that someone who gets divorced has terminated the legal relationship with the first spouse, and therefore, nobody else has any legal or financial relationship with them when they choose to marry someone else.
Also, stepparents have no legal relationship to the stepkids unless they adopt them.
Zuzu – I really don’t understand why you’re not getting what I’m saying either.
You say that if we allow a man to marry wife #2 the law will not know how to deal with whether wife #2 will have a right to make medical decisions about the kids. And people think this situation is so fiendishly complicated that we will suffer the legal equivalent of a logic bomb if it ever happens. I don’t think that’s so. There’s already plenty of law on that subject. In your own words:
And that’s your answer! Marriage does not give someone rights over their partners children. If we delete the “one-person-at-a-time” provisions, this stays the same, the marriage of person A to person B not give them rights over person B’s kids. The law can already deal with this, there are no ‘complications’.
I really think people are just imagining difficulties which don’t exist. The ‘what happens in an end-of-life situation if someone has two wives’ thing is a great example. The law knows how to deal with these situations: it does so all the time in clashes between two parents, or two siblings, and so on. But for some reasons people just ignore this and talk about an imaginary world where everyone has only ever has one decision maker.
Well, no. Because the rule now is that children born into a marriage are presumed to be products of that marriage (even where the husband isn’t the father). Obviously, where you have two wives and one husband, it’s easier to determine blood relations. But what do you do with the same situation where there are two husbands and one wife? Are both husbands presumed to be the father unless proved otherwise? What happens when they are okay with both being married to the same woman, but don’t want to have a relationship with each other or consider each other family? I mean, it’s very nice to think that all polygamous families are going to live together as one unit and be happy with sharing assets and child custody. But others are not, and that’s where things start getting complicated. Because if you’re going to enable people to enter into polygamous marriages, where they have legal relationships with more than one person at a time, you are going to have to consider all the possible permutations.
And polyamorous relationships, while they serve as a guide for the possible permutations, they don’t really help with the questions about legal rights. For instance, who has access to joint bank accounts? Does your second wife have access to your first wife’s second husband’s second wife’s bank account? Do they have the right to make decisions about each other’s children? Medical decisions? Increases in home equity? Would your second wife have to consent to your first wife’s second husband’s second wife’s taking a second husband? In short, where are these lines drawn when there is no real limit to the number of spouses who can be involved in a marriage — unlike the situation with parents, siblings or children.
Would you care to explain why you think I’m too young to make the decision to enter a polyamorous relationship, but not to make the decision to marry a single person (I’m 18)?
Actually, they do. The most common form of polyamory is primary-secondary, i.e. there’s one primary couple, whose partners are allowed to enter secondary relationships with other people. In that case, no tweak in the law is needed; none of the legal rights marriage confers applies to secondary relationships. The second most common, multiple primaries/polyfidelity, is the one my idea of making marriage transitive comes from. In that case, there’s no such thing as, “my second wife’s wife’s second husband,” at least not as distinct from “my husband.”
I think it makes sense to cap the number of people in a conjugal partnership at 6 (is “conjugal” correct if there are more than 2 people?). The primers I’ve read suggest that the most common polyfidelitous groups have 3 or 4 people. If it becomes a serious political proposal, the government will have to talk to the largest poly communities to get a feel of what a good number will be, but for now we can assume it should be 6.
Mormons don’t really want it now…my sisters would flip if their husbands suggested it. And something the article touches on but doesn’t really go into is how violent those polygamist communities are. Abusive and full of pedophiles. As well as the women in them having no say and no rights. And the inbreeding. The fact that it’s against the law and a bunch of men keep perpetuating it in closed communities for their own power and gratification makes most practitioners of modern polygamy victims of the silence. Making it legal may allow women more choice to get out because you remove the them vs. us mindframe. And the pedophilia that is at the center of these sects should be prosecuted hard core. Oh and Big Love is entertaining but not really what Utah or the Polygamists are like.
and don’t confuse mainstream modern-day mormonism with FLDS or the cracked-in-the-heads that live on the edges.
I’ve “fallen away” from the LDS religion in my grumpy old age but it’s making my spine twitch seeing everyone use Mormon as a general term. All those LDS alive were raised with the doctrine that it was something that had to be done before chirst could come back, something about all the things that happened in old days had to happen now and it happened, the US government didn’t like it (the laws were worded specifically to ALLOW adultry) and the Prophet had a revelation that it was no longer God’s word. Bam, Utah is in the Union!
The Founder is Joseph Smith. He wanted to diddle his wife’s (Emma) nieces? Had the revelation. Married them behind his wife’s back. Never heard of her fighting back with the revelation of many men or of multiple revelation. She did leave the LDS sect and started the ReformedLDS declaring her son as the Prophet after Joseph Smith was killed.
Mormon history anyone?
Personally, I think marriage should be a matter between consenting adults. Basic Western male-female? Fine. Same-sex marriage between two people? Fine. Multiple partners? As long as everyone’s an informed, consenting adult, fine again.
The real problems w/ modern-day polygamy (as practiced in the States) seem to center around abuse, incest, and fraud. If multiple marriages are legal, then law enforcement can concentrate on these issues.
Okay, a certain number of women are brainwashed into “preferring” this lifestyle. If they’re no longer criminals just for being married, they’ll have better access to help. Generally, the government doesn’t intervene all that much to save people from making poor choices: “Sir, put down that Snickers bar. You are registered as a diabetic, and we cannot allow you to consume that much sugar. Don’t make us pepper spray you!”
As for property rights and medical decisions, here’s a wild idea: Have all parties in the marriage sit down w/ a lawyer, and hash it out. For medical care, issues would be dealt w/ according to the individual’s wishes as previously expressed to the lawyer. Property issues…okay, that’s complicated. And since when do we outlaw stuff based on that? Hey, try it. Refuse to pay your taxes b/c the form’s too complex.
Any kind of spousal/child abuse, or incest is wrong and should be prosecuted. But I really think consenting adults should be allowed to commit to each other, w/o gender or numbers being an issue.
Why is 6 somehow less arbitrary and capricious than 2?
Ask a gay couple sometime if it’s as easy as all that. There are a huge bundle of rights and obligations that go along with marriage, and you can only contract for some of them. It’s the whole marriage vs. civil unions problem — civil unions sound great until you start really looking at what you’re not entitled to have because of that status.
Because it’s a fairly good bound for real-world groups that have relationships close enough to be considered marriage. The main point of having a bound is to distinguish marriage from collectives; a pair of couples in a four-way loving relationship is very much like a marriage, while a twenty-person co-op is not. As I said, the actual number will have to depend on the exact nature of real-world polyamory. If there’s a non-negligible number of groups with more than 6 people, then the bound will have to be higher than 6.
Arguing that polygamy shold remain legal because it has potential to foster abuse rings pretty hollow to me. Marriage between just two adults often goes down that same abusive road, but we’re not talking about abolishing that social institution. The fact is that statory rape is already a crime, and legalizing polygamy wouldn’t affect that. And yes, there are legal complications to putting together a polygamous marriage, but I have a hard time believing they’re insurmountable. zuzu brings up the difference between civil unions and marriage, but if as so many people think is already the case, civil unions were actually legally equivalent to marriage excepting the gender specifications, it wouldn’t be that bad a deal – and that wouldn’t be that hard to do, either. If nothing else, this is a chance to fix the broken parts of family law, not to use them as an excuse to gloss over the real problems involved in so many polygamous relationships – incest, rape, whathaveyou. For that matter, consider the lot of a wife unhappily stuck in a polygamous relationship as the law currently stands. She is likely not legally married to her partner, and has no claim to the shared assets. It seems like creating some legal partnership – something that could be arbitrated when it breaks apart, say – would have a greater chance of helping her out than just leaving her to twist in the wind would.
[...] e maintaining that the government should come down hard on polygamist Mormons. The two is [...]
D’oh – I meant “arguing that it should remain illegal…”
Why doesn’t anyone ever suggest polyandry in the debate?
Shhh! Because polyandry is automatically in the debate. They just don’t know it because they’re more than a little vague on that whole Constitution thing. If you allow one man to have multiple wives, why, Equal Protection rather strongly suggests that the law must also also allow one woman to have multiple husbands.
here’s a wild idea: Have all parties in the marriage sit down w/ a lawyer, and hash it out
This is a bit like that famous cartoon where a scientist has covered a blackboard in one huge, complex, detailed equation, and somewhere in the middle of the steps has written “And then a miracle happens”.
Umm…if Bob is a mechanical engineer, Bill is a homemaker, and Betsy is a ceramic artist, and they’re married…do both Bill and Betsy get to be on Bob’s insurance?
The insurance companies have vast political power, so I can’t really imagine the polygamy thing getting the big stamp of approval without that being limited.
The whole thing just seems rather hazy to me. What are the privileges of marriage under the law? Which of them make sense to maintain for polygyny/andry and group marriage? Would there be any legal difference between Bill and Bob both being married to Betsy, and all three being married to each other? How would it affect the citizenship rules around marriage? How will it affect tax revenue? I agree with whoever said toward the beginning of this discussion that same-sex marriage fits in an existing framework, and plural marriage would require a great deal more work.
It’s okay; by the time legalizing polygamy becomes mainstream even among American liberals, the US will have long had some public health care system. It could even get one in 2007 if the Democrats didn’t emulate 96% of extant animal species in not having a spine.
The answer to the first question is “yes” under the system everyone who supports legalization here is implying.
The answer to the second is “I honestly don’t know.” Personally I support open borders, but under current immigration law, it’s easy to generalize the rules to “A non-citizen who’s legally married to the same citizen continuously for a specified period of time [I think a year but don't quote me on that] is eligible to receive a green card.”
The answer to the third question is, “Do it in terms of quality of life comparisons,” which is how I’d like to see the tax system structured anyway. The federal government has the tools to find the amount of money a married couple with two children needs to match the quality of life of a single mother with one child who makes $30,000 a year; it should have the tools to find the amount of money a married quadruplet with two children needs.
Interesting question. In any number of debates on SSM, when the “slippery slope to polygamy” argument was raised, I’ve always seen an enraged response from SSM fans along the lines of “there’s no possible connection between the two! You’re just creating a diversion”
But of course it’s no diversion, as polygamy actually has an ancient history and is widely practiced in many countries, while SSM is a very recent European/American fad
There’s a far stronger case to be made for polygamy than there ever will be for the marriage of two grooms or two brides.
Well, wife-as-chattel has an ancient history and is widely practiced in many countries, but that’s not a strong case for going back to that system here.
Sure, if the only thing that makes something a “strong case” is its historical occurance. That might be true for natural events, but it’s not all that relevant to questions of morality, social structure, and rights. For example: There’s a longer world history of nation-states violating basic human rights than there is of nations respecting those rights. Does it therefore follow that there’s a “stronger case” for violating human rights than for respecting them? Of course not.
But of course it’s no diversion
Of course it’s a diversion. It’s the “once you let the perverts in the floodgates will burst” argument with handwaving in place of explanation.
The only change SSM makes to the law is to eliminate the gender requirement. Polygamy brings up constitutional issues as well as a tangled web of financial and legal obligations that require overhauling and rewriting hundreds of thousands of laws.
Care to explain that slippery slope again?
SSM I would think raises constitutional issues, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing all these court cases.
Sorry, its not just a matter of removing some “gender requirement”. It is a fundamental reorganization of the norms and structure of society in a way that no previous society has done. Unless we count what Amsterdam and Canada have done five minutes ago.
I’d sooner have us rewrite every one of the “hundreds of thousands of laws” and recognizing polygamy than redefining two person marriage as a travesty.
The “hundreds of thousands of laws” regulating marriage and subjects relating to it did not literally say “its gotta be between one man and one woman” because people would never have conceived of the possibility of parody marriages between two dudes or two women.
And please don’t use the lame riposte of interracial marriage, because if you do, I’ll be waitin’ on ya. Good night!
No, it isn’t. Gay marriage doesn’t change the structure of anything; it simply recognizes existing relationships. Since people don’t choose their sexual orientation, no social structure changes. Real changes in social structure involve some fundamental institution getting scrapped, added, or changed in a way that impacts a substantial number of people. Abolition of slavery, desegregation, giving women the right to vote, and compulsory education were real changes. SSM, striking down anti-miscegenation laws, and even recognizing polygamy isn’t.
I’m sure you will.
– Gay marriage doesn’t change the structure of anything; it simply recognizes existing relationships.–
This thread was on polygamy, for which there are large numbers of existing relationship in Utah and elsewhere. Its also deeply imbedded in the social norms of the countries where many immigants come from.
Recognizing existing relationships is not much of an argument. There are existing pedophile relationships, existing abusive relationships, etc etc.
–Since people don’t choose their sexual orientation–
Probably true, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? There are all kinds of sexual and social orientations that society may choose not to recognize as marriage.
– SSM, striking down anti-miscegenation laws, and even recognizing polygamy isn’t.–
Disagree on all three.
SSM is a radical change to the structure of society. I don’t think its honest to say that it is not, even if you think its a great idea.
Striking down anti-miscegenation laws was a significant change to the social order too, esp in the South. It struck to the heart of what had been a segregated society. If that was not a radical change, nothing was.
Polygamy absolutely would be a radical and bizarre alteration of existing relationships if it were to spread beyond its existing confines of rural Utah and other places. If recognized, it would spread. It should and will remain illegal.
Neither polygamy nor SSM should be recognized. Period.
SSM has gone down to defeat in all but one case where the voters had a say, and that battle, in AZ will be refought. SSM advocates, anticipating this, have placed most of their eggs in the legal tricknology basket.
But you can’t push human society in a direction it does not want to go, as even Pol Pot finally learned. SSM fans are a bit more thick, and the learning curve may be harder for them.
Sure, but you can shape society to become a more accepting and fair place. At some point, you have to push for what’s right, and I do think that on this issue the side of equal rights and justice will win out. I hope that in 25 years this blog is still up, so we can all look back on this comment and have a good laugh.
– I hope that in 25 years this blog is still up, so we can all look back on this comment and have a good laugh.–
Print it and save it.
In 25 years, people will be laughing at the very notion of “marriages” between two grooms. Just as most of the world is absolutely astonished at the concept today.
Legalizing polygamy is THE way to end it. If you could drag these old mormon guys into divorce court with all the wives as a class and let them all lawyer up and fight over his money, NO ONE would be in these marriages legally or otherwise. And I could use another husband. I could have all kinds of kids if I could have a nanny husband, a cook husband, another husbad who made a few bucks, a dog walker – you get the picture! And I’d just have them all sign the same prenup where they get one dollar on their way out the door. Yipee.