Is the argument that approving gay marriage opens the door to plural marriage illogical or not?

Great Debates
121

That is not limited to SSM though. My cousin was a gestational carrier for an opposite sex couple using a donor egg and the husband’s sperm. The legal issues apply to any couple who use donor gametes and/or a gestational carrier, same or opposite sex.

The SSM laws change only the gendered requirement, nothing else. You could argue that custody cases would be a little different if the courts could not give a gender advantage to one parent over the other, but that should have gone away already anyway.

Fine, then name the number. I am not saying it is impossible, just that a decision needs to be made. What is the “correct” number? How do you decide?

Way to dodge the point. Marriages of convenience do already exist. But if you can marry 200 people, then a business require all employees to join a marriage so it can avoid labor laws? With only one spouse at a time possible, this is currently not a significant issue. But if marriage is unlimited, then it could become a much bigger problem.

That is not what you said in the SSM thread. You said all spouses would have to marry each other. That would have to be spelled out by law. If A, B, and C are married and B wants to marry D, you can either allow it only if A and C also want to marry D, or you can allow it only if A and C give consent to allow B to marry C, or you can allow B to do what he/she wants and A and C can file for divorce if they don’t like it.

How about the children of the first couple? They will certainly care when their parent’s property passes to people their parents never met instead of them.
Family estates have very complicated legal requirements. IANAL, so I am not sure if those could be applied directly to this situation, but just making that determination is a larger barrier than SSM needs to overcome.

I am not making it more complicated. I am pointing out that it is complicated. The more parties and the more configurations the more complicated it gets. You want it simple? Let’s just let every man marry up two women. Does that meet your requirements? It meets some subset of poly people’s needs.

My point (as I have said repeatedly) is that it is not a simple step. It can be done. In fact, it can be done in many ways. There are many questions that would need to be decided, and you can’t just decree that your way is the correct way.

My imagination is just fine, in fact I can keep coming up with issues that will need to be addressed. Case in point, could you stipulate in the marriage contract that future spouses could be added later or that they specifically could not? Would you spell out default positions on child custody in the law, the marriage contract, at birth, or break up? Do you have one form of marriage for monogamous couples and another for poly marriages?

122

people make monogamous prenuptual agreements with terms customized to those particular people, like a specific asset after a date might have a certain split and different assets have another split. they can get very specific and detailed (who gets the dog, who gets the bedspread).

people who do poly successfully long term do so with negotiation about the relationship (yes some people do it on the fly and go with the flow and make it work, they are a lucky few) in terms of time, energy and emotional levels. people who do live-in/shared-assets poly also need to address the issue of money and property.

people share assets in different fashions in partnerships and corporations.

poly marriage would involve legal agreements for assets not more complex than people do already for other purposes.

custody of children would need to be worked out in agreement. new legalities about custody were created when the technology of surrogate parenting and donor egg/sperm became possible. proportioning of custody already exists for divorce situations.

yes new legal ground, though not hugely beyond what has been done already for other purposes. it will involve careful thought, it will involve lots of paper, it will involve lawyers. there are people wanting it and would are willing to do it if a legal vehicle exists.

123

  1. Yes people can do this but it is an expensive and involved process. Moreso in that it would behoove both/all parties to have their own attorney to make sure their interests are represented. So, if you have four wives then you will need five attorneys and negotiate amongst them all. Also, having a contract does not mean the arrangement is equitable for all involved.

  2. There are issues which cannot be contracted. If one person dies who gets the Social Security Survivor benefits? Who is the widow? Does spousal privilege only apply between the man and the woman but not between the other men/women in the marriage? Or is it covered every which way?

  3. I am not sure you can enforce a contract that would say, “If I die, wife Judy gets all the kids” or, “If I die, my wives can only re-marry one man that they all agree on” and so on.

124

The problem with this model of arrangement is that corporations are a separate legal entity–that is, none of the parties to a corporation own any corporate property directly, they just own an undifferentiated share of the assets of the corporation. This is also only workable in the specific situation of a poly family all joining one co-equal legal group, which doesn’t even come close to meeting the needs of most polyamorous people, most of whom (in my experience) have separate relationships in branching structures (by which I mean, A being married to B and C doesn’t imply that B and C have any relationship)

There is no analogous structure to that in business that I am aware of.

125

people do own property in partnerships and corporations in unequal shares.

people can also belong to more than one partnership or corporation.

126

What about the actual key difference–that ownership in those cases is abstracted into fungible shares? If I decide to no longer associate with, say, Red Hat, no one is guaranteed to buy out my shares for their fair market value. I have to put them up for sale and hope.

That model is not going to work at all when we’re talking about shares of a family home and car. And unless you abstract it that much, you’re not going to be able to analogize membership in more than one corporation to poly marriage.

As for partnerships? Those are one-off legal contracts, and deal pretty exclusively with monetary/property rights. They could analogize to that, but that doesn’t give us any indications about a just method of dealing with child custody, interest in a shared home/living space, or things like powers of attorney and hospital visitation.

Would you mind telling me specifically, preferably with cites to law or precedents, how corporation law analogizes to the scenarios I put forth in Post 120?

127

S/s relationships have definitely changed how we view family law. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve heard, “The court has never seen this before…”

and yet it was done.

Lord in Heaven, I don’t know. How do we decide what constitutes an adult? It is ridiculous that I can get married at sixteen and not vote, or that I can go to war at eighteen and not have a beer.

I never advocated for unlimited spouses.

It’s not hard. Anita & Sam want to marry each other. Later, Sue wants to join the union. All parties have to agree to it. If you treat Sue, Sam, and Anita like a board, then all of them have a vote.

Haven’t you ever been to a commune?

When you add caps to the number of people in a poly marriage, you’re less likely to have a one-man-rules-all scenario, as all parties would have to agree to this arrangement under western law.

Huh?

Poly marriages aren’t supposed to stand up to SSM marriages. They should stand on their own. BTW, it works pretty easily:

Sam and Anita get married. Sue joins. All together, they have six children.

Sam dies without a will.

His spouses split his property.

Marriage contract? That sounds like something religious people do. Are you talking about a prenupital agreement? Sure.

If Sam and Sue get married and they have two kids, and Anita joins them later, but Sam and Sue get divorced, then:

Sam, being the biological parent, pays child support, and

Anita, being the non-biological parent, does not have parental rights. Presumably, Anita stays in the children’s’ life as the kids would visit their dad on weekends and once a week or whatever the popular arrangement is these days.

It’s just like stepparents’ rights (they don’t have any).

As far as property division goes, Sue is entitled to 1/3 of it.

128

Name one precedent in family court involving a situation that arises due to SSM that could not arise due to opposite sex marriage. And I don’t mean cases that have decided differently because of the genders involved, but where the situation is different.

So what is your limit? The majority place that limit at 2. From your answers below, it seems that you want to place at 3. Why is 3 better than 2 or 4? If we set the limit the same way we did on age limits, it will be set by democratically elected legislatures. In which case until you can convince more people that 3 is the magic number, it will stay 2. Just like if you wanted to lower the voting age or the drinking age.

But what if Sue doesn’t want to join the union, but instead wants a separate union with Sam (or Anita for that matter)? Can Sam and Sue form a separate union with Anita’a permission?

What caps and how would they work? Does is it have to be communal, or could some be bilateral?

Reread the hypothetical:

In this situation, the children of the original would never inherit from their parents because there would always be surviving spouses, at some point the people in this marriage would not have been born when the original couple married.

Let me simplify it. A, B, and C get married. When A dies B and C marry D. When B dies C and D marry E. This continues forever. Any children of A and B would never inherit without a prenup, which C and D would have no reason to want to enforce on E and F.

The whole point of this thread and my earlier thread is that the reasoning behind courts granting SSM do not extend to poly marriage. In my and others opinion poly marriage need an act of legislature because they raise many more issues than SSM.
And the example you list is simple because it is only 3. But is still more complex than a binary marriage.

First, are Anita and Sue still married to each other? If not, how should they split his property? If Sam and Sue were married for 15 years during which their joint worth increased to $300k and then Anita came in with about $20k 5 years before Sam dies leaving a joint net of $500k, should Anita get $250k, $100k, or $32k? I could see an argument for any of the three.

Why one third? What if most of the assets were acquired before Anita?

As for the children, you hypothetical makes it easy. With one man, two women, the biological parenthood is easy to determine. But what if it 2 men? Do you require paternity testing at birth or divorce?
We could go on like this all day. The fact is that this is complicated and there are a lot of issue to be resolved, starting with the number of people allowed to marry. If put to vote today, the number would be 2. Proponents need to agree to a number and start convincing the rest of the country they are right. Then they need to figure out the rest of it. Because I am happily married to one woman. I will gladly support a sane, rational poly marriage bill, but I am not spending the rest of my life writing one.

129

I think you are making assets more complicated than it should be
kids don’t have a ‘right’ to their parents’ money. People can make specific provisions in a will. In regards to divorce, I assume it would follow the laws of the respective states.

We have courts for a reason. Let them figure it out. Can’t imagine the attorneys will complain for lack of business :wink:

130

What compelling interest does the public have in creating such a complicated and treacherous legal labyrinth as this would cause?

131

You can’t even talk about divorce yet, you haven’t addressed who might be getting divorced. Or what property might be considered community when any given player may have more than one spouse, none of which are necessarily in common.

The flippancy of this statement, talking as it is about (at the bottom line) the disposition of children and custody foremost, is incredibly callous.

Look, when you’ve got **Dio **and I arguing the same side of a polyamory issue with you on the other, you might want to consider that your position is lacking in merit.

I can see an interest in polyamorous marriage if and only if we as a society decide that marriage rights and privileges in general should be a la carte rather than an omnibus–and at that time, polyamorous marriage will be legally easy anyway.

132

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Laws need to be crafted to provide guidelines of what needs to happen. The courts take the laws and apply them to specific situations. You can’t just expect thousands of courts across the country to handle something this complex without any precedents or even a legal framework of what poly marriage should look like.

Look, CP, pretty much no one here is opposed to poly marriage in principle. But if we’re going to have it, there are a lot of complex issues with it that need to be figured out. You agree with that, right? What’s clear is that poly marriage involves a lot of questions that are as yet unanswered, things that have been already worked out with marriages involving two people. Opening up those two-person marriage laws to any sexes doesn’t require any changes to the framework we already have in place. We can do it with the stroke of a pen.

We may want to extend marriage to multiple partners as well, but that involves figuring out answers to a lot of questions that have hardly been thought about.

133

Not wanting to throw a huge mess to the judicial to try and clean up is probably enough rational basis right there to defeat a equal protection argument. SSM offers no new scenarios that do not also apply to OSM in the courts. If you think otherwise, please provide an example as I have asked twice before.

I will state it again, I am all for decriminalizing multiple partner relationships, but if you want me to support a specific form of government recognition you have to meet some requirements:

  1. Make it workable. Define the limits and the general exceptions. Something new will always come up, but you can’t just tell me the courts will figure it out latter.

  2. Make it relevant. If only you and two other sets of potential spouses want the specific form you propose, then don’t bother. If 1% of the population wants poly marriages and you proposal would satisfy 75% of them, then I can get behind it. If only 1% of that 1% can use it, then it is not worth the hassle.

  3. Don’t damage current marriages. If the way the law is written leaves the courts no choice but to remove spousal privilege, or require every couple to create a complex contract spelling out all factors of the relationship, then it will never pass. I personally would be ok if it got rid of the tax assumptions based on marriage, but it is not just me you need to convince.

And **you **need to do this, not me. You will never convince the majority of us who are happy with a one to one marriage to go through the effort to fix a problem we don’t have if you can’t be bothered to do it yourself. The ADA would never have been written without activists proposing drafts and convincing people.

134

There are plenty of men who have the right to marry more than one woman. That right exists in countries that have not been dominated by Christian or Buddhist morals. You know, the same morality basis opposed to SSM.

And that right has predominantly existed for millenia throughout the world prior to the existence or introduction of Christianity.

135

The penalty for marrying two women is 2 mother in laws. That has kept the practice down.

136

So what? Do you see a single moral argument in this thread? The point is not that poly marriages are recognized because they are immoral. It is that there is a significant difference in the change to the law required to allow poly marriages. Pointing to history is not a reason that someone with no interest should advocate for anything.

You have an interest? Take up the challenge I set to CitizenPained. Lay out what law should be changed to address all the aspects that marriage impacts on.

137

Any marriage is to be between one man and one woman. ( genesis 1:27-28)(1 Timothy 3:2)

138

You don’t have to change any laws except those that ban plural marriages.

Simple.

And rights are a moral issue.

139

I’m going to be as gentle as possible: your Bible is not a legally binding precedent, nor should it be. Perhaps you’d like to post again, addressing the actual question posed by the OP or the substance of the thread?

Please describe to me how the law, as currently written, should handle the situations in post 120.

140

First tell me which law you are refering to.