A very popular “argument” used by politicians who wish to stand in the way of progress… er, gay marriage, is that it would somehow create a slippery slope that would lead to other forms of marriage, such as polygamy, bestiality, pedophilia, even marriage with furniture.
Now, this is a rather odd tactic to take, in part because the same argument could have been used to prevent interracial marriages, which most people now are pretty okay with… or at least don’t seem to want to ban.
However, I am perplexed as to why polygamy always makes this list. The other issues run into the problem of consensuality. However, if all parties are willing and consensual - well, I don’t see the problem. Live and let live.
I just get a little irritated when the list of things that might come to pass if the slippery slope happens almost always includes polygamy… and they never get called out on it.
I think the actual main issue with it is the can of legal worms you’d be opening wrt property rights and stuff like custody of children or dependents and other legal decisions (such as what if one ‘spouse’ wants to pull the plug on another, but the 3rd doesn’t?). Also, stuff like insurance would be thrown off under our current system (this might not be a problem down the road if we get to something like a single payer system or UHC).
Certainly religious types are going to have moral objections similar to what you are pointing out with the slippery slope arguments (same as they have against gay marriage), but I think that the real issue wrt polygamy would be all the myriad legalistic can of worms having multiple partners would cause…which isn’t the case in gay marriage, since when you get down to it, the legal stuff is exactly the same.
Too many questions: when A marries B and C, are B and C married as well? What about children’s custody? Is C also a legal guardian of A and B’s child? What happens when one party wants to leave the marriage? Who inherits what? It just opens a huge can of worms whereas gay marriage doesn’t require any changes to existing models whatsoever.
Well, there is a great deal of added complexity to a marriage with more than 2 parties. Especially in matters of divorce. Let’s say two women are married to one man. If the man divorces both of them, are the two women married? Do they have to marry each other as well as him, or not? Can one of the women divorce the other and still be married to the man? What about children? Do they belong to everyone in the group or just the biological parents?
Not saying that these things couldn’t be worked out. After all, businesses can have one, two, or many owners. However, the complexity of group marriages is way beyond that of a two-party union.
As for the other “slippery slope” items - bestiality, pedophilia, inanimate objects, etc - that is clearly nonsense due to the concept of “informed consent”. You can’t marry a dog, or a child, or a lamp for the same reason you can’t enter into any other legally binding contract with one. Only a competent adult can do so.
Advocates of gay marriage generally argue that they have a right to marry whoever they choose. If such a civil right actually exists, it certainly can’t be denied to polygamists merely because doing so poses “too many questions”, adds “a great deal of complexity”, or opens “a legal can of worms”. Surely none of those things is a grounds for denying anyone their civil rights.
There are certainly good reasons why we should try to get rid of polygamy, but none that can be squared with the type of legal reasoning which views marriage as a civil right.
The arguments about complicated divorce issues are really just brought up to try and bring in some more objective reasons to be against the polygamy. The real reason is that the majority men did not like more powerful men taking all the women.
I think the slippery slope argument from gay marriage to polygamy is a false one. Even if we assume the worst case argument, that gay marriage is a redefinition of a man and a woman to any two people, it doesn’t affect the underlying social and legal structure all that much. Okay, so now instead of a man and a woman filing jointly, it’s two men. Or now instead of a company giving an employee and her husband healthcare, they’re giving it to her and her wife. In all of these cases, it just affects that person’s spouse, which may or may not be of the same sex.
But how do we define polygamy in a meaningful way and how does it affect these constructs? Let’s say it’s that it remains some sort of relationship between two people, so Alex can marry Billy and Alex can marry Charlie but Billy and Charlie are necessarily married. Does this mean if Alex has a job that their company then has to provide healthcare for both Billy and Charlie, but wouldn’t if either of the other two were their employees? What if Alex dies and they need to split up the inheritance, or Alex falls into a coma and they can’t agree on whether to pull the plug? Do we end up defining something like I’ve heard about in a lot of polygamy cases where there’s some sort of ordering among the spouses? What if Charlie commits a crime? As I understand, the spouse cannot be involuntarily called as a witness, so they can’t make Alex testify, but would that protection apply to Billy as well transitively? And, of course, I can’t imagine the sort of mess a divorce might be. And all this gets way more complicated if you start having even more people involved and different ways that people can be married.
Now, that’s not to say that polygamy should or shouldn’t be allowed, but if it were, there would be a substantial number of questions that need to be answered. That’s all the more reason why I think a legal marriage should be considered a different concept from a social/religious/spiritual/whatever marriage. In that sense, a legal one would basically just be a specialized and common legal contract between any two consenting adults that also has some other special benefits, and if a man wants to live with 6 wives, that’s fine, but at most only one of them gets legal wife status. Otherwise, it becomes a specialized sort of contract which, I suppose could be worked up and in many ways resemble a marriage with multiple people, but it wouldn’t exactly be the same either.
There are a couple of potential problems with polygamy that concern me.
One is that the availability of romantic companionship could easily become as imbalanced as wealth itself is in our society, with rich people - men, mostly - having as many spouses as they want, creating a shortage of available women further down on the economic totem pole. It’s one thing when you can’t find a partner because you just aren’t very good at hitting it off with the opposite sex, because that’s just you. But it’s a completely different thing if there were simply not enough women to go around, because the rich guys were hogging them all.
Another is the much greater potential for imbalance in the relationship itself. If I’m the rich guy with four wives, then each of them needs me a lot more than I need any one of them.
If consenting adults want to have polygamous relationships on an informal basis, I’m not standing in their way, but I’d not be keen on giving such setups official status and blessing.
I think we need to distinguish between moral opposition to SSM orpolygamy, and legal opposition to SSM or polygamy.
I have a feeling that if someone is morally opposed to one, they are generally going to be morally opposed to the other, and vice versa. The people making the slippery slope argument are usually morally opposed to both.
I think most gay rights supporters would be morally/ethically fine with polyamorous relationship if the legal conundrums others have mentioned can be worked out. I have yet to see a satisfactory answer to those legal conundrums, and it’s difficult to support something on a legal basis if those questions can’t be answered.
You want to live in a committed relationship with 7 women and 5 men? go ahead. You want legal, financial and medical right for all of them? You better explain how that works before I support it.
what if a person was a leg person why should they be denied marriage to a table? four legs is better than two. what about leaves and swing out legs? i’ll stop fantasizing before some serious wood happens here.
complex legal arrangements are drawn up all the time. groups of people own property for the good of the group in things like trusts and corporate structures. something could be developed to fit a groups needs by both general structure and specific contracts.
if available i don’t think that rich people will create a available spousal imbalance. people do stick to their culture frequently. there are also professional and kept playthings already in use by the rich anyway.
I’ve got no issue with it, one way or another. What ever floats peoples boat is my default setting. The OP asked what the problem would be, and I think it’s clearly the tangled legal and procedural issues that is the main stumbling block…that, and I doubt there is a very large percentage of the population who would even avail themselves to it if it were available (do even countries that have polygamy have a high percentage of such marriages?)…which means it’s not going to get a lot of public traction to go through the pain of ironing out all of those difficulties. If someone wants to do it though, I’ll gladly give it the XT stamp of approval, though I’m not as riled or active as I was for getting SSM through.
I don’t see either of these as good reasons for legally preventing polygamous marriage. It seems to use one of the same arguments against gay marriage - if you let people get gay married, there won’t be any more procreation!
If women want to get married to a man who already has a husband, so be it. I don’t think there would be many of them. Women get jealous just like men.
Also, perhaps some woman would have multiple husbands, increasing your odds again.
What? You don’t want a polygamous marriage? Neither do upwards of 90% of either sex.
The fact that you do condone ‘casual’ poly-relationships only adds to the argument. If these people love this way, why should society legally stop them?
I think the arguments against polygamous marriages come down to the legal and property implications, as mentioned above. Or stuff like fake marriages for green cards or health insurance.
If that could be sorted out, polygamous marriages are nothing the state should get in the way of.
Besides the complexity, the history of polygamy is one of unequal partners. A Man and his Stable of Wives, not simply more than two people married to each other.
We’ve gone away from marriage being an unequal relationship, and the government is going to be wary of legitimizing inequality in marriage.
Only if you try to define “those who want to marry more than one person” a class under any form judicial review above rational basis.
I have no moral objection to polygamy in the abstract (some forms are morally repugnant, but so are some forms of single spouse marriage). But the fact is that because the government offers privileges to one kind of contract involving a specific number of people, they are under no obligation to offer similar privileges to similar contracts involving more people. That is not discriminating on any basis that touches on civil rights any more than offering preferential tax rates to business in certain industries.
Complex legal arrangements are fine. And I for one am all in favor of decriminalizing consensual polygamy. But giving it the same status as the current institution of marriage is a much larger task.
Here is what I have said in several of these threads (which seem to keep popping up whenever we discuss SSM):
Before the government can legally recognize polygamous marriage in the way that single spouse marriages are, then the pro-polygamy groups (if they exist) need to come together and make some proposals for how it should work. Here is a short list of the top of my head of questions that need to be answered by the ones who will be affected. note these could be argued either way.
[ol]
[li]What level of consent is legally required to take a second spouse? If A is married to B and wants to also marry C, does B need to give consent? [/li][li]What is the financial and legal relationship between co-spouses? If A marries B and C, is B responsible for C’s debt and could C be compelled to testify against B?[/li][li]What if B marries E and C marries D, what are their relationships to each other?[/li][/ol]
These are non-trivial issues and need to be worked out by those who want this before the laws can be changed.
This. If you ask homosexual couples what they want same sex marriages to be like legally, they can just point at straight marriages and say “that!” Any movement to legalize polygamy on the other hand is going to have the extra hurdle that what they want is not legally defined yet. And given human nature it’s unlikely they all agree on exactly what they want polygamy to be like.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the answer would be no. B and C just happen to share the same husband. Even if same-sex marriage is going to be allowed, that will only create the opportunity for B and C to marry; it will not mandate it.
An excellent discussion with some very good reasons not to allow lawful polygamous marriages.
However I suspect this equine conundrum has already put two hooves through the stable door and is ready to bolt. What prevents three (or more) people today from forming a mutual household and agreeing with each other that they are “married”? They may not have specific legal rights but that doesn’t prevent the relationships from being formed.
There is a famous man the Wizard of Christchurch The Wizard of New Zealand - Wikipedia who has had three (common law) wives at times. There is nothing illegal about this and presumably the wives consent to the situation.
When I were a lad, homosexual acts were against the law. As indeed was abortion and prostitution. Today all of that has been swept away and men/women are on the verge of being able to marry - SSM. Abortion has been legal for decades. Prostitution is legal in NZ.
And life goes on in a more tolerant and diverse society - the sky did not fall.
I find it amusing that so many are willing to change the definition of marriage from “one man and one woman” for SSM but get hung up on the number. If the ability to marry the one(s) you love is a civil right then make new laws. The laws for marriage were put together at some point and I don’t think anyone was arguing that there should be no marriage at all because it’s too complex to codify.
You need a better reason than that to deny a group of people a civil right. If you disagree with poly marriages then it’s obvious that the real reason is that you think polyamory is icky, or that your gonna catch teh polys from them, or you just hate polys and are willing to discriminate against them.
The arguments about medical insurance are I suggest a peculiarly American perspective. Most countries have free health care or no health care (in the affordable sense). Being married is totally irrelevant.
Admittedly the laws required to cope with polygamy would be much more complex than the normal duopoly of marriage. However we are able to create vast tomes of taxation laws dealing with very arcane situations so I really don’t see why polygamy would present a problem.
Or that you fear that the result will be women treated as slaves, “excess” boys abandoned to fend for themselves, and social instability due to many or most men having no access to women.
Those are after all features of some versions of polygamy. Unlike opponents of same sex marriage, opponents of polygamy can point to actual real-world destructive effects of allowing it. Now, one can counter-argue that that won’t happen with properly written laws or that risking that is the price we pay for letting people choose their own way, but let’s not falsely equate the anti-polygamy and anti-SSM positions. The anti-polygamy side has actual rational arguments that need to be addressed, the anti-SSM side doesn’t.