Except, John, that by saying that polygamy is more work to implement, you’ve just undermined your own conclusion that the same arguments can be used both ways.
Let’s take a look at a marraige under the standard definition: two people, one man and one woman. Now, let’s kill the ‘one man/one woman’ part.
Do the custody laws change? Not hardly; judges might show preference towards mothers over fathers, but to the best of my knowledge that’s not codified in any lawbooks. How about inheritance? Well, no, once they are married and one spouse dies, the belongings go to the other spouse. Divorce? No need for anything new. Health insurance and state benefits that support husbands and wives? All the same, gay or straight. So, homo and hetero marraiges are legally indistinguishable; there is no good reason for a state to ban one aside from bad science or bad religion.
But let’s change the ‘two people’ aspect. Suddenly, we have the state coping with benefits for three or four spouses. We have horrendously arcane legal entanglements as two spouses try to divorce their other two spouses. God help us if one member of one group marraige marries into another group marraige without consulting his first set of spouses. And when one spouse dies, the estate disputes would be endless. So, unlike homosexual marraige, the state has a legitimate and demonstrable interest in disallowing group marraiges.
Now I’m not saying that these issues are insurmountable, or that polygamy should never be legalized. But the difference between Gay marraige and Polygamy is academic, and arguments for one do not necessarily apply to the other.
Gays straights and bisexuals can have whatever living and sleeping arrangements they desire. If you want an open marriage or a three person partnership that’s fine. We’re talking about the legal rights of marriage here. The right to raise children, to oversee medical care for your spouse, rights of joint property etc. These rights are currently only granted to straights. Legalizing gay marriage would grant these rights to gay people. Legalizing Polygamous marriage would create a whole bunch of new rights and laws that apply to no one now. Who, for instance, would oversee spousal medical care if two spouses of the sick spouse disagreed?
A ban on polygamy means that no one can have a legally sanctified polygamous marriage. Three gays can’t get married, three straights can’t get married, a straight a gay and a bi can’t get married, etc. Everyone is equally affected.
As for people who want to join polygamous unions being discriminated against, well any law discriminates against someone. 55 mph speed limits discriminate against Sammy Hagar, who can’t drive fifty-five. But a law against polygamous marriage does not deny rights to one group and grant them to another, as laws against gay marriage do.
And just taking the speed limit metaphor a bit further. If I pass a law saying Women can only dirve 55 mph but men can drive up to 70 mph, that’s clearly discriminatory. However if I pass a law that no one can drive over 65 mph, that isn’t discriminatory, even if it does only affect those who want to drive over 65 in the first place.
I said “can”, not “must”. If marriage is argued to be a fundamental right, then saying it is difficult to craft the laws for polygamous marrigage doesn’t cut it. If it is indeed a fundamental right, then we must craft those laws. Laziness can be no excuse for denying someone a right.
This is not too different from what **Bricker **posted above.
Laws against having sex with minors only affect pedophiles, but we still have those on the books. I think that we would all agree that there are certain instances where laws specific to a class of people are a good thing.
You’re using the term “pedophilia” incorrectly. It refers to having sex with pre-pubescent children. I can guarantee you that if it were legal for adults to have sex with 16-year olds, more than half the adult males in this country would give it a whirl.
But that’s not the point. There are competing interests in the case of minors, and we make laws to protect them, even if it infringes on what adults might want to do. There are dozens of things that consenting adults may legally do, but which minors may not.
And so I think. If the law is changed so that my neighbor can enter in a same-sex marriage, on what non-religious, non-traditionnal basis are you going to oppose me entering in a polygamous marriage if I and my potential spouses want to?
It seems to me that the idea is the same “gay marriage is just wrong and shouldn’t be allowed” vs “polygamous marriage is just wrong and shouldn’t be allowed”. Excep that a signifiant art of people who disagree with the first statement agree with the second one.
"oh! But it would be complicated to change these laws! doesn’t sound as a very compelling argument.
Exept that I happen to know it can be done. For the following reason : in some of the french oversea territories, polygamous marriages were legal until a very recent time (two years ago or so). As the result, the laws regarding all these issues had to be adapted. And doing so was actually part of the job of one of my closest friend.
(it also involved writing said laws in such a way that the concept of polygamy wouldn’t be readily apparent in the text, so that PMs or their electors wouldn’t raise a fit, since the fact that these polygamous marriage were allowed in these territories wasn’t widely known).
Also, of course, there are plenty of countries where polygamous marriages are perfectly legal, and they too have pensions, inheritances, etc… laws.
Finally, “it would be a hassle” isn’t a very good argument to refuse to extend a right to a category of people.
You seem to have decided that homosexuals are a “class” of people that are being denied rights and that polygamists are not, but you haven’t supported that claim with anything. It sounds to me like you consider there to only be two basic classes of sexuality, gay and straight, and that polygamists are just gay or straight people with more complicated an numerous relationships. Although I don’t know any polygamists (AFAIK), I seriously doubt that that’s the case. Claiming that anti-polygamy laws are equally applicable to all is no different than the quote above. Anti-polygamy laws are just as injust as anti-gay laws because they only affect those who wish to take part in that type of relationship.
For what it’s worth, there are very simple and logical arguments that might cause one to approve of both SSM and Polygamous Marriage. I am in favor of both on the grounds that it is not the government’s business to legislate private sexual morality or the makings of a family between consenting adults.
I disagree with that. Gay people have currently the exact same rights as straight people : they can marry one member of the opposite sex.
What they can’t do is marrying a person of the opposite sex, and straight people aren’t allowed to do that, either.
They happen to want to be allowed to marry someone they fancy (a person of the same sex). A righ that is denied to them (and to everybody else). Similarily, if I’m already married, I’m denied the righ to marry the person I fancy (my potential second spouse). This right is denied to me (and to everybody else). There’s no difference.
If you want to have a partner of the same sex, that’s fine. You just don’t get the legal rights of marriage extended to this person.
Even if we do consider marriage to be a fundametal right, it still can (and should) be argued that we should push ahead with SSM now, and deal with polygamous marriages at a later date. Adding SSM to the books is a trivial matter (it’s already been done, in fact, in MA).
If this issue does ever make it to the SCOTUS (no sure thing), I fully expect this issue to come up in the questions the justices ask the petitioners. Waiving the idea off as unrelated to SSM will serve only to undermine the petitioners’ arguement. IOW, be ready to give a thoughtful answer.
As for the various argument raised about custody of a terminally ill person, inheritance, etc…they’re IMO just convenient arguments raised by people who favor same sex marriage, but for some reason, are opposed to plygamous marriages.
Inheritance? Under american law, apparently the spouse is normally the heir. Under french law, it’s normally the children. And a lot of people have several* children. an you imagine that? How could we ever deal with inheritance law if people happened to have several heirs instead of just one. That’s obviously too complicated an hypothetical to even be considered.
Similarily, what would happen if say a widow with several children was terminally ill? Who could make medical decisions? What if these different people disagreed? We obviously couldn’t handle such a situation. It would just be too complicated. Fortunately, it never happens.
I suppose that the reason I mention the confusion is specifically because the most compelling argument for gay marraige for me is there is no reason what so ever not to allow it, aside from bigotry. There are, however, legitimate concerns about Polygamy, which means that any argument for it must be shown to overcome those issues.
And I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss those issues as laziness. The problem is not that the laws would be complicated to change; the problem is that the laws would be complicated in and of themselves.
I’m not going to construct some eleborate “two spouses fighting over the medical care of the third” scenario, because you’ve probably seen it before. But even if there is a swift and fair solution, it will still necessarily be more complex than that of a one on one marraige. Thus even in the best outcome, medical care is marginally compromised; in a more likely outcome, the process is endlessly byzantine, undermining hospitals’ ability to act even further. And medical care is only the beginning; as I mentioned before, similar legal messes would show up in all aspects of life.
In short, with Polygamy, it is necessary to construct an argument that many state interests against multiple marraige are insufficiently severe to trump the fundamental right of marraige (an argument that’s entirely possible to make, I should add). With homosexual marraige, since every ‘scientific’ argument I’ve heard of has been discredited, no such argument is necessary. Therefore, I don’t believe that arguing for the latter requires support of the former.
Another option, completely opposite, is it to oppose the state’s involvment in any marriage, straight or gay, polygamous or monogamous, with a first cousin or a brother, with a human being or a flat tyre.
Let me clarify. In this case, the slippery slope argument is not a logical conclusion because the practice of polygamy is not an expected result of allowing SSM. They’re not the same issue or activity, and we have the freedom to decide for one and not the other. As a society we have the ability to say “We are comfortable with SSM, and we will allow it, but we are not [yet] comfortable with polygamy, so we will not allow it [at this time].”
Arbitrary? Perhaps, but societies and countries are made up of individuals who do not change in lockstep unison, and a particular attitude may take years or decades to be acceptable to a given society. Nearly 100 years passed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act in the US, 100 years where America struggled with and fought against racial integration. Polygamy has been around a lot longer than the SSM issue, but there is a persistent cultural bias against societies where it is allowed, and I think that has prevented it from becoming a legitimate issue.
As far as the changes to society proposed by SSM and perhaps by polygamy, I would argue that it is up to those proponents to show that their desire would not harm society. For SSM, we have seen gay couples stay together as long or longer than hetero couples, with few differences between the two types of relationships. We have also seen that same-sex parents can and do raise happy, healthy children. Western societies are now at a point where they are willing to address the SSM question and allow SSM. People interested in polygamy have not done so, and it has not been a part of the mainstream discussions. Governments do not have a desire to make polygamy legal or to even entertain the idea at the moment. That could change if the idea of polygamy became a popular issue.
Speaking of marrying a brother, I’d mention something else.
When the law about gay unions (not marriages) was debatted in France, the first drafts allowed also the same unions between blood relatives. The idea was for instance two old bachelor brothers who would want to live together and have the same rights (like for instance, one not being expelled from the house if the other died, same taxe rules, custody rights if needed, etc…).
This was eventually left out of the law (in part at the insistance of gay advocates, IIRC). I can’t see why.
On what basis exactly could we deny equal rights to people in a similar situation? They choose to live together for some reason, and would want to enjoy the same protection. The only difference : they presumably don’t have sex and do not intend to. But I don’t think married people are under any obligation to have sex, either. If people can be granted various benefits on the basis they claim that they love each other (which might not be true, they could want to marry because it happens to be financially sound), why not on the basis that they claim thy care fo their old sibling?
Especially since marriage-related laws essentially deal with purely material issues (pensions, inheritance, housing, debts, etc…). Many people would want to marry someone based on romantical ideals, but nevertheless most don’t forget to notice the material aspects of a marriage. And anyway, the law isn’t much concerned with romantism (or even lust) , and shouldn’t be.
IMO, either everybody should be able to benefit from the same protections and/or benefits, for whatever reason (we love each other, it’s convenient, I’d rather have him take care of me, it strikes my fancy, etc…) , or nobody should. If you want to marry your same-sex partner, let me marry my brother too (and when I think about it, I could someday actually want to marry my elder brother, since we’re both single and both want to keep the family country house).
Thee’s IMO a conflict between what most people have in mind when they think about marriage (proclaiming their love-based union to the world) and what a marriage legally is (a contract granting various material rights, advantages, priviledges, etc…). Not mentionning for convenience people for whom a marriage is mainly a religious issue, further compounding the problem.
In those jurisdictions that still have fault divorce, an absence of sex is a cause for divorce. So, yes, in some sense, married people are supposed to have sex.
But then, you can’t criticize someone who would oppose gay marriage, either. Let’s assume I’m a muslim, strongly oppose gay marriage and strongly favor polygamous marriage. According to your principles, it’s perfetly OK for me to do so. And you can’t critiize me if i’m opposed to both, either. If you have the freedom to decide for one and not the othr, then I’ve the freedom to oppose both.
Then I’m eagerly waiting for the masses of people who are going to help change this anti-polygamy mentality. For instance the advocates of same-sex marriage, who should understand the issue.
Yes. In the same way a cultural bias has prevented same sex marriage from becoming a legitimate issue for a long time.
Do you require the same from gays? Or should the burden of proof applies to the people who want to deny this right?
Hmmm…I seem to remember reading many people thinking otherwise. According to your first paragraph, they’ve have every right to decide aginst it, try to pass law banning it, etc…
Actually, polygamy is a serious issue. At least here and i suspect in the USA too. That would be because there are a significant number of immigrants, mainly from sub-saharian Africa in France, who are polygamous. And it’s a major issue for them, because their marriage aren’t recognized, denying the spouse any right, and creating a lot of problems.
But…polygamy is just “bad”. So, the end resul is that, despite the existence of a non that marginal problem, it’s not adressed at all. Or rather…it’s mentionned…to decry said immigrants, that is. Do people even explain why it is wrong? Yes…some do. But the overwhelming majority of people don’t. The mere mention of polygamy is taken as an evidence that there’s something wrong. No question asked. And the issue debatted is never : “is it OK or not?”, but always : “how can we eradicate this evil custom?”.
It seems my posts are going in all sort of directions (morality of polygamy as opposed to morality of homosexuality, nature of marriage, material and psychological issues, immigration, etc…). Sorry for that. I should probably have concentrated on only one issue.