This requires an assumption that only men seek out multiple partners.
I’m pretty sure my boyfriend would be puzzled by that one.
That being said: the legal issues surrounding multiple marriage are complicated, and would take a lot of figuring to work out. A friend of mine suggested that it would be better handled by common law than by statutory law, and I would not be surprised if he were correct, but that is extremely unlikely to happen.
That is a form of polygamy that I will never participate in – speaking here as someone who has always been interested in multiple marriage – because it would require that I lie. I am not married to either of my partners other partners, and I never will be; that is not our relationship. Legal and social acceptance for my family relationships is not worth pretending to be married to someone who is not my partner – I’m not interested in living a lie or swearing to it in legal documents.
I’m sympathetic to your point. In your estimation though, shouldn’t people who feel that way then be pushing for legislative recognition in order to jump the gun on bad court rulings instead of working for, giving money to, and supporting those that want to legislatively ban any sort of gay union?
Can you please tell me what marriage has to do with procreation? If we outlawed all marriages right…now, would people stop having children? Did cavemen and women not have children because there was no government employee around to issue them a marriage certificate? Are childless marriages not marriages in your eyes, or the eyes of the government?
I personally know more women than men who are strongly polyamorous by preference; if I expand to people I just know of, it’s about even.
Of the multiple marriage subset, I know more triads with two men and a woman than two women and a man, one all-female triad, a number of extended webs which work out to more or less even (though one goes M-M-F-M, if I’m remembering correctly), and otherwise have seen no evidence that there is any particular bias.
Mind, my social circles don’t include any of the sort of people whose romantic escapades get published in the supermarket tabloids, so I can’t speak to the habits of those ‘powerful, wealthy males’ you were concerned with.
You wouldn’t be required to lie. You’d be required to enter into a relationship where all parties are equal. If that’s not okay with you, you’re free to not enter into that relationship. If you feel the need to lie in order to get yourself multiple spouses than that’s the sort of polygamy I wouldn’t condone.
If all you want it an open relationship, you can have that now.
My partners have other partners who are not my partners. I am not going to claim that I am married to them, because that would be a lie. I am not interested in claiming to be married to them, because that would be a perversion of marriage for the sake of benefits, and thus degrading to something I value quite highly.
All parties can be equal without all relationships being marriages.
When this argument comes up, it amuses me to ask why legal polygamous marriage would be a problem. After all, unlike gay marriage, polygamous marriage is clearly encouraged by the Bible.
Not me, I would prefer to have 2 husbands, if we were to go poly. Back when I was young, single and a lot crazier I lived with 2 guys at once, and it worked out just fine. Only reason we all broke it off was I got a job in another state and had to move.
By that reasoning, really you would have to say that the path to polygamy began when marriage became something that people do out of love, instead of as a social duty.
If the basis of marriage is to fulfill a (common generally accepted) social role, than yes legalising SSM would be a path to legalised polygamy. But if we define the “goals” of marriage as some mix of any or all of the following three items:
As a show of mutual love
To commit to staying with each other
To create a family
Then nothing about OSM, SSM, nor Polygamy particularly conflicts with this. And since, I think, most would agree that the above are the primary intentions that people have who enter into a marriage in modern times, the switch to the path to legalised polygamy began when the above became the goals of marriage.
It’s critical to understand why. With that understanding in place, the procedural details follow, and are of little general interest. But they’re at no time the fundamental point of the discussion (and why do I feel we’ve gone over that with you before?)
SSM becomes legal when it is understood that there is no valid state interest in denying equal protection under the law to gay couples. That isn’t quite so obvious in a setup that has been used as a tool of coercion in a significant number of instances where it’s even been tried, though.
Polygynous, yes; not gender-neutral multiple marriage. But that gets into a whole bunch of problems with sexism, with the problems of basing law on someone else’s religious text, and other things. So while there is precedent for multiple marriage in that form, it’s not necessarily good precedent as a model of marriage that is not rooted in a system that many people find objectionable.
Who says they would resist ? 2 person monogamy is mostly for the male’s benefit, not the female’s; a great many women would prefer part of a rich man over all of a poor man.
Yes, I know that not all women put a man’s wealth above all else, but a great many do. Most, IMHO, although I’m not aware of any studies about it one way or another.
As for me, I’m rather of two minds on polygamy. On the one hand, I’m worried that it would return us to the days of rich men with a thousand wives, and poor men with none. On the other hand, I believe strongly in a person’s right to order his or her life as they see fit. I suppose I lean towards legalization, but I’m not at all sure I’d like what would happen.
If same sex adults can get married, why not two consenting family members? Why not polygamists? Consenting adults are consenting adults. To be honest, I think marriage should be banned for everyone.
Poly not being legal hasn’t stopped Hugh Hefner from collecting more than one trophy “wife”. I somehow doubt it’s the legality of poly marriages that’s keeping the wealthy from collecting all the hot chicks.
You seem to arbitrarily draw the line where it is convenient for you. At least polygamous marriage has a historical precedent, gay marriage does not. I don’t see how you can support gay marriage without supporting polygamy on any principled basis.
