No, polygamy (or more specifically polygyny) is legal or semi-legal (i.e. under customary law) in much of Africa, including the non-Muslim parts. Quite a number of Christians and animists in Africa practice polygyny.
This is mere historical bias - marriage has signaled this for religious/moral reasons in the past. But those reasons have been heavily challenged over the past few decades as traditional religious morality has eased its hold on western society.
What about the fairly large numbers of us who don’t care a whit about signals we give to the world? My wife and I married after a very long period of living together solely because it was the only way of getting health insurance. As we’ve grown older we’ve found that a huge number of issues have been made easier because of that marriage as well. Nothing about our relationship has changed in the slightest. Just the way the legal structure of society treated us.
Numerous stories like ours can be found with minimal effort. Your argument seems to rest solely on moral grounds I reject out of hand. How is your argument any different from the religious arguments against SSM?
In other words, you did care about the signal you gave to the world. You wanted to signal your mutual personal and financial interdependence so that it would be taken into account in your healthcare arrangements.
Exactly. The point of marriage is to recognise and regulate the relationship between the spouses and wider society.
Because you don’t get to dictate unilaterally how the rest of society must regard and respond to your intimate relationships. The relationship between the spouses on the one hand and the wider society on the other is a two-way thing. If society considers it appropriate to make a particular accommodation for a conjugal relationship which is e.g. exclusive or permanent, you don’t have a unilateral right to have your non-conjugal or non-exclusive or transient relationship treated in the same way. You can try and persuade others that it ought to be treated in the same way; if you succeed in swaying enough other people to your viewpoint then society’s concept of marriage may change to embrace yours, and marriage law will in due course follow. (This is pretty much what is happening right now with respect to same-sex marriage.) But for the present American society doesn’t accept the notion of multiple marriage, and generally regards it as associated with the oppression and marginalisation of women. You need to challenge and change those perceptions to have any hope of having multiple marriage recognised in the US.
A legal structure for polygamous marriage could be readily adapted from partnership law. Three-parent custody is already a reality. And legalizing polygamy may not require any significant level of societal support; one court case could suffice.
This is a core mistake. I’m explicitly separating morality and legality; you are conflating them. Your argument is equivalent to the one some people use against atheists - that they are believers, just in a variant way. They are not. Atheism is fundamentally different from belief; so is my view about marriage fundamentally different than society’s requirement that marriage is a statement or signal. Civil unions could provide legal greasing, but they are not marriage. That’s a major reason why SSM advocates did not want to accept them in a world of beliefs that marriage is a privileged entity.
Two things. First, everybody except possibly the OP recognizes the need for changing societal values before polygamy could be accepted. I don’t see how that per se makes it different from SSM 40 years ago. Second, my responses to the OP were not at all about polygamy but about current marriage. You should not read into them any opinion on a subject I didn’t mention.
I may not be following you here and, if so, my apologies. But I don’t think we can separate morality and legality here. The accommodations we make for marriage with respect to tax, financial affairs, inheritance etc arise precisely because we recognise that the mutual commitments of support that spouses make to one another have a moral value, and a moral claim to societal recognition and support. If we didn’t think that, there would be no reason to accord marriage any legal status or recognition at all.
As for the belief that marriage is a privileged entity - that’s factually correct; it is a privileged entity. (It afforded you privileges with regard to healthcare, after all.) Which is precisely why excluding same-sex couples from the status of marriage is objectionable. If marriage carried no advantages, then excluding people from marriage would not prejudice them. But the only way to de-privilege marriage is to ignore it; to treat people who have made commitments of exclusiveness, permanence, mutual support, etc to one another as if they had not done so. Which is somewhat unrealistic if they have done so, and if they, their families, their friends and their wider society all regard that as significant and as deserving of societal recognition and support.
There is a difference, though. A same-sex couple wishing to make the same commitments of exclusivity, permanence, etc as an opposite-sex couple demands the same legal recognition that the opposite sex couple would get. But the polygamous spouses are making different commitments - there is no commitment of exclusivity - and are demanding the legal recognition they would get if they had made commitments which, in fact, they haven’t made.
You can argue about whether presence or absence of a commitment of exclusivity justifies the recognition/non-recognition distinction. But it does mean that the argument is a fundamentally different one from the SSM argument.
My apologies.
The issue you are focussing on - and forgive me if I’m putting words in your mouth - looks to me like the question of formality; we recognise a committed conjugal relationship if the couple concerned go through a prescribed public ceremony while (mostly) withholding the same recognition from a relationship which is just as committed, and just as conjugal, but has not been celebrated ceremonially.
It’s a mistake, though to think that that is basically an issue of religious morality. In fact, in the Christian tradition, what constituted a marriage was the mutual promises made by the spouses (commitment) plus consummation of the relationship (conjugality). In other words, every committed conjugal relationship was a marriage. (At least presumptively; obviously it wasn’t a marriage if, e.g., it turned out that one of the partners was already married to someone else.) A public ceremony - or at least a party - was fitting and appropriate and desirable, and as marriage came to be invested with religious significance it was seen as desirable that the ceremony be religious, but it wasn’t until the modern era that a ceremony began to be regarded as essential. And in fact it was largely secular concerns that led to this; as long as marriages could be informal and unwitnessed they could be clandestine, and clandestine marriages created uncertainty about who was married and who was free to marry, and about who was validly married (one of the issues surrounding Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was the claim that she was already clandestinely married to Henry Percy) and this created doubts about inheritance, legitimacy of children, etc. It wasn’t until the late sixteenth century that the Catholic church decreed that Catholics could only validly marry in a canonical ceremony, and of course that rule only applied to Catholics. It was another couple of centuries before most Protestant states had adopted a similar rule. (And in the US some states continued to recognise “common-law marriage” until quite recently; perhaps some still do.)
So the requirement for ceremony isn’t about religious morality at all; it’s about public certainty. Precisely because marriage regulates the relationship between the couple and wider society, society has an interest in knowing whether a couple is married or not, and this interest is served by establishing a formal procedure involving a ceremony, registration, or both. And this has the incidental advantage that it gives the couple a clear choice; if they don’t wish to have the status of marriage (and its attendant obligations) imposed on them, they can avoid it by not going through the procedure to marry.
The tide may be turning, though. In many countries legislation and/or administrative practice is increasingly assimilating the position of cohabiting couples to that of married couples as regards social welfare, immigration, tenancy rights, financial settlements on relationship breakdown, etc. You can see this, if you wish, as a reversion to the pre-modern practice of inferring a committed conjugal relationship from the behaviour and situation of the couple concerned, rather than demanding evidence of a formal ceremony.
I completely disagree. The commitment is the same; the difference is society’s moral disapproval of that commitment when it extends among more than two people. Remember, we’re still hearing remarks from places like the FRC about how gay relationships aren’t real commitments.
Besides which, a commitment to exclusivity within marriage is a social norm but in no sense a requirement. Married partners can sleep around as much as they want, with their partner’s permission or without, and society still recognizes them as married.
I think this is better suited to GD. You can still get factual information there.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The degree of commitment may be the same, but the commitment itself is fundamentally different. A person entering a monogamous marriage is committing not to marry anyone else. A person entering a polygamous marriage is making no such commitment. That’s a fundamental difference.
But they can’t marry anyone else while the first marriage subsists, and if they attempt to society will not regard them as married to the second partner.
Exactly. Only 23 percent said they were married when they first lived together*. That, and your own comment, addresses the fact that marriage is eventually resorted to not because the couples (or society) really care if they are married or not, but because our legal and economic systems confer benefits when there is a marriage. A law that obstructs marriage has negligible effect on couples inclined to cohabitate.
These are good questions, and ones I’ve given some thought to. My thoughts:
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Two people are married. A third wants to join the marriage. Does #3 have to marry both partners, or just one?
My inclination is to say “both.” The reason bigamy laws exist now is to prevent each of the bigamist’s spouses from relying on the exclusivity inherent in monogamy. If all three are joined, there is no inequality before the law. Robert Heinlein and others have explored “line marriages,” in which spouses marry in series, but this seems to create problems much like those of bigamy. Harems are just icky.
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As above, if only one, does the other spouse have an avenue to object other than divorce?
In my model, this wouldn’t happen, but in the line and harem models, there would have to be some recourse - a right of refusal, and provisions to preserve equal rights. -
If one person is married to two others, which one gets to make end-of-life decisions if there’s not a living will?
If they couldn’t agree, the law might presume the right of the senior spouse to make decisions, or require an arbiter. -
If someone wants a divorce, do they have to divorce everyone in the marriage or just the person they have problems with?
Again, in my model it would be “everyone.” In the line model, a divorce might break the line, or the law might provide that the break “heals” afterward - it would also depend on the extent of the divorce (are you divorcing both spouses, or just one?). In the harem model, contesting the divorce would be interesting - if the center spouse wants to divorce one of the others, but they all disagree, what then? -
If there’s a divorce, how is alimony decided?
In my model, a breadwinning spouse who leaves would be responsible for reasonable maintenance in proportion to the difference in wealth and income; a dependent spouse would be entitled to same. I think a harem would work the same way. In Heinlein’s Friday, line marriages were bought into (like a family corporation), and the departing spouse might be entitled to receive something back based on that. Otherwise, it could work like the others, but more likely and financial claims would be limited to the direct spouses. -
If there’s a divorce, how is child custody decided?
Every child has two parents, the mother and the declared father. Custody and child support are determined by the child’s best interest. Parents have no rights here, much less non-parents. -
If there’s a death, how is inheritance decided?
The estate is shared equally among the decedent’s spouses, whether one, two, or a dozen. Children will reduce the spouses’ share much as they do under current law.
Hold on. The fact that 77% of married couples moved in together before marrying doesn’t mean that they didn’t care about marriage, and only married to secure legal and economic benefits. They may always have desired and intended marriage for a variety of reasons, and have seen moving in together as a step along the road to marriage. All we can really infer from this statistic about their view of marriage is that they don’t see it as an essential precondition to moving in together - nothing else. If you want to know what value they place on marriage, there is no alternative but to ask them.
So, if I have one child by one spouse, and five children by another spouse, and I die intestate, my children have distinctly unequal expectations of inheritance?
I don’t see how that follows. Under Kentucky law, for instance, your children, whether of your spouse or of another woman, inherit equal shares of your intestate property if you have no spouse, and equal shares of 1/2 of your intestate property if you have a surviving spouse. Under California law, they inherit equal shares of your intestate property if you have no spouse, and nothing if you have a surviving spouse.
In a plural marriage, the result would be the same, only with spouses to divide the goods.
Perhaps I’m not following you. In post #31 you suggested a regime whereby spouses would share the estate equally, and “children will reduce the spouses’ share much as they do under current law”.
Under e.g., current California law, if there’s a widow(er) the kids get nothing. So are you saying that if I die leaving one wife, plus children by another deceased wife (whose estate, of course, I inherited) my living wife gets the entire estate (including what I inherited from my deceased wife)and my now orphaned children, who are no relation to my living wife and have no expectation of inheriting from her, get nothing? Whereas the one child I had with my living wife can expect, if she does not remarry or have further children, to inherit the lot?
And we can infer peoples’ intent and attitudes towards marriage based upon them not jumping into a binding relationship immediately, thus assuming that the only reason they will marry is due to MFJ status?
From the link: “48 percent of heterosexual couples ages 15 to 44 said they were not married to their spouse.” :rolleyes: And I am not related to my brother.
If I understand correctly, in the current situation, if the mother of your children is deceased, your second spouse gets everything upon your death and your children nothing. In case of monogamy, you married, divorced, married, in case of polygamy you married, married, divorced, in both case the second spouse gets everything, the children of the first spouse get nothing. So, I fail to see the difference. It’s not the result of a potential polygamous marriage, but the result of a choice made by the Californian lawmaker to favor spouses over children. And if you think it’s unjust, then it’s unjust whether or not polygamy is involved.
If the same situation were to arise in France, where the opposite is true, your children would get everything and your surviving spouse(s) nothing. Again, surviving spouses being reduced to poverty or whatever would have nothing to do with polygamy, being purely the result of current inheritance law.
If you’re unhappy with your children getting nothing, or getting everything, write a will or petition the state to change the law to something that feels fairer to you.
These are just circular reasoning, though: Marital commitment is different because it’s marital. Under current law, I can marry as many people as I want during my lifetime, as long as I go through a divorce in between each one. Polygamous marriage eliminates the intermediate steps. What’s fundamental about that?
Moreover, plenty of people used to say that spouses being of opposite sex was fundamental.
Inheritance questions are a trivially easy aspect of polygamy. If you die intestate, your heirs get what society has decided is fair – exactly like current law. If you want a different arrangement, you write a will.
Thing is, you don’t need a legally-recognized marriage for that; that’s the social-but-not-legal side, you can get it by shacking up without doing the paperwork. Curiously enough though, laws worry about legalities - not about pink unicorns and red hearts, but about what happens with inheritance tax.
But society hasn’t decided what is fair, in the case of polygamy. We could make such a decision, by passing a law governing it, but we haven’t. Nor, in most cases, could we apply the existing law: A law might state, for instance, that if a person dies intestate with a surviving spouse and children, that the spouse gets 50%, and the children divide the remaining 50% equally. If under such a law a person dies and leaves three surviving spouses, they can’t all get 50%.
No, it wouldn’t be too hard to make a new law which could cover this situation. But that’s just one problem that comes up. Now do this for each and every problem that comes up, and it becomes quite a task.
Again, I don’t have any fundamental objection to allowing polygamy. But I also don’t have any particular interest in it. If you want the law to allow polygamy, then you have to do the work.