If the legal issues are just a matter of drafting, and the only question is how much society cares about the interests of would-be polygamous spouses, then we’re saying that the obstacle is moral – persuading people to care that polygamous relationships are real and worthy of recognition, just as is happening with same-sex relationships.
In the U.S., as befitting a secular society, all marriages are officially secular. They must have a civil marriage license and be recorded at the appropriate local administrative clerk’s office. They can be presided over by a variety of figures, from mayors and judges to religious leaders to a bevy of others who cannot be simply described. A few states may have residual requirements about the actual ceremony but mostly anybody can say any words and all that matters is that somebody signs the license and takes it to the official recorder. In fact, many people have a secular ceremony to satisfy the state followed by a religious ceremony to satisfy the faith.
What if this patchwork relic of history were to be replaced by civil unions? What would change except the lessening of hypocrisy? It cannot be argued that this would be a reversion to past practices; it’s a total break with them. Marriage is freighted with moral baggage and it’s one-size-fits-all nature cannot be reconciled with a modern and increasingly pluralistic society. You may not be able to understand from the outside how heavily certain aspects of Christian heritage get imposed on nonbelievers, though you probably get a sense of that from the SSM arguments. In America marriage as an institution has default assumptions placed on it that are purely historical leftovers from an age in which Christians could put their beliefs into law with impunity. The screaming often heard today is their being told that is no longer the case.
Marriage in this sense is nothing other than issues of religious morality. It doesn’t have to be. Many people want those issues removed from their lives, or at least replaced with separate issues of their own choosing. Members of SSM can choose to have religious weddings or secular ones, but they first needed to kick oldschool Christianity out of the law. Other aspects of it will follow.
Will polygamy follow? I don’t know. People like to scream that SSM is a slippery slope leading to other forms of once taboo marriages, and logically that is indisputable if marriage is a civil matter that only eases long-lasting relationships. Should brothers and sisters marry? In the future, the possible genetic damage to a child may be a obsolete issue. What about brother and brother or sister and sister? People “marry” horses and trees today, so the outliers of society will find ways to outrage the public. Saying that none of this will happen until society’s attitudes change and they may never do so is realistic but hardly touches the depths of change that the future will bring. All I do know is that the arguments will no longer be held hostage to one segment’s personal beliefs. And that’s a very good thing.
I suggest that, on a true view, marriage is a social reality which precedes both church and state. People make conjugal commitments to one another; they make them publicly; they look for the acknowledgement and support of their families, their friends, their communities; that acknowledgement and support is acccorded. That’s marriage, and people were doing it long before we had either church or state.
When church and state come along they recognise and embrace this social reality because, frankly, they are both social institutions and it would be stupid of them to ignore social realities which are relevant to their concerns. And to some extent they not only recognise the social reality but influence it, change it, shape it in various ways - e.g. the Catholic church requires Catholics either to marry in a church or to get a dispensation from doing so or else their marriage “doesn’t count” as far as the church is concerned’ the state requires people to obtain a marriage licence before they marry or else, again, the marriage “doesn’t count” as far as the state is concerned.
But there’s a limit to what either church or state can do in this regard. Ultimately, if what either institution will recognise as a marriage departs too far from the social reality, the institution hurts itself. The Catholic church experiences this, e.g., in regard to its attitude to divorce and remarriage; I suggest the state has experienced this to some extent with regard to its attitude to informal marriages, which is why increasingly legal and administrative codes assimilate the position of unmarried cohabitants to that of formally married couples. Whether you’re talking about same-sex marriage, polygamous marriage or something else, ultimately neither the church nor the state can position themselves too far from the social reality of the communities they serve.
I wouldn’t have a huge problem with this; I’d just regard it as a bit silly. Accepting a reality doesn’t normally involve renaming it. In fact, coining a special term for something is often an indication of discomfort with it; an attempt to distance yourself from it. If this relationship is a marriage, why coin a new term for it to be used for official bureaucratic purposes?
I think it’s telling that, even in jurisdictions that don’t have common law marriage, cohabitation is often referred to as “common law marriage”. This highlights the fact that “marriage” is the term that our culture uses for committed conjugal relationships. We see the same thing at work when same-sex couples reject the label of “civil union” or similar for their marriages, even if it provides a legal status which is functionally equivalent to legally-recognised marriage. They want their marriages to be recognised for what they are - marriages.
Marriage is always going to be “freighted with moral baggage”. Its foundation is the exchange of solemn, public, personal, intimate commitments, and those always have considerable moral force. If marriage didn’t have such moral significance, I’m not sure that there would be any need for the state to recognise it - or, at any rate, the case for legal recognition would be greatly weakened.
As for “one-size-fits-all”, I think this is to a considerable extent inevitable. As I have already pointed out, marriage - particularly with regard to its recognition in civil law - is fundamentally about the relationship between the spouses and the wider community. This isn’t something each pair (or set) of spouses gets to design for themselves; these things are determined by their society. Or, to put it another way, marriage is legal status, with attendant privileges and obligations, like citizenship, or adulthood, or being a police officer. You can decide, e.g. whether to be naturalised as a US citizen, but you don’t get to decide what the privileges and obligations of US citizenship are. These things are societally determined.
Leave out the references to Christianity, and change the references to “America” to “any society” and this statement becomes universally true. Marriage is a social institution; it is determined societally. It has a moral foundation; it will be shaped by the shared morals of the society concerned, rather than by the individual morals of the spouses.
I’m afraid this just isn’t true. When a married couple fall out, they find their personal property rights may be significantly infringed by a court ordering maintenance, the payment of lump sum settlements, etc. That’s a very significant aspect of contemporary marriage law. Are you saying that in a non-religious marriage culture, this wouldn’t be the case - that courts would have no jurisdiction to impose financial settlements on separating couples? But if you’re not prepared to say that, you cannot claim that marriage is nothing other than issues of religious morality.
And that example could be multiplied. A hospital will treat your spouse as your next of kin, over your siblings or your parents; is that an “issue of religious morality”? Your pension plan may provide a pension to your widow(er) on your death; is that an “issue of religious morality”?
I don’t think this is true, unless you take the view that legal recognition of same-sex marriage itself amounts to “kicking oldschool Christianity out of the law” (in which case it’s just a truism).
For what it’s worth, I don’t buy the slippery slope argument myself. If we raise the age of marriage from (say) 16 to 18, does it not follow that we must in due course raise it to 21, and then to 25? No, it doesn’t. Recognition of polygamy may be desirable or it may not be, but it raises quite different issues from the issues raised by the recognition of same-sex marriage, and I think most people can see that without difficulty.
But I think the logic of your first statement goes against this. If you need to develop a social recognition of plural marriage in order to get to legal recognition, then what you need is a critical mass of people living in plural marriages, and a (considerably larger) critical mass of people whose family members, friends, co-workers and neighbours are living in plural marriages, and who themselves regard and treat those relationships as marriage. And in the course of getting to that point, you’ll have lots of lived experience in which all the nitty-gritty details of plural marriages and their practical operation, effects and consequences have been worked out.
We are nowhere near that point yet. Any legal code regulating plural marriages would have to differ in a lot of ways from the current code which regulates civil marriages, because plural marriages raise a lot of issues that dual marriages do not raise, and even with regard to issues which are common to both plural and dual marriages, the solutions which are apt for dual marriages will not necessarily be apt for plural marriages. Drafting a plural marriage code will not be a trivial exercise. The good news is that we are a long way off from having to draft such a code; the need doesn’t arise until a model of plural marriage demanding legal recognition becomes a social reality, and by the time we get to that point - if we ever do - a lot of the questions that have to be answered will have been answered.
Marriage is older than time and is intrinsically a moral recognition of commitment and it is also a changeable label that floats on current whims. Marriage is inherently larger than any couple and it is also a personal issue between those involved. Marriage is a moral institution created by religious society and its particulars can be dissected by secular courts.
This argument is very convenient and half wrong.
The thing we call marriage is a melange of a huge number of pairing rituals that have always varied by culture across the world and varied within a culture across time. What constituted appropriate pairings has always been determined by the dominant values-giving hierarchy in the culture and its strength or weakness determined by those values. In America - and I assume Australia - a loose bonding mostly concerned with ensuring the legitimacy of children hardened over time to a bright line separating immoral activities from moral ones - which included spousal beatings and rape - and creating a number of legal distinctions - which included the right of males to kill their wives’ lovers with impunity.
In short, there is literally nothing intrinsic to or inherent in marriage. It is wholly a temporal shared fiction that is almost infinitely malleable and has shown enormous changes over our very lifetimes. Christianity has been the dominant values-giving hierarchy over the course of American history. It still is but is rapidly losing that dominance. An increasingly secular society has been and will continue to shift the moral freight of marriage to better suit a new set of values and a concordant set of legal outcomes based on those new values. Christians and members of other religions who more or less shared their moral view of marriage will scream, but they will adapt just as they have to the new reality that people with black skin are not intrinsically and inherently inferior.
In fewer words, I flatly disagree with your opinions on the moral value of marriage. I think historic associations of the word have blinded you to reality. BTW, accepting a reality almost always results in renaming it. Single-sex marriage is just one pertinent example.
Historically, where polygamy exists, it usually means polygyny only, and produces a shortage of women, to the detriment of poor men. I recall a theory that the presence of houris in the Islamic Paradise results from a social environment where “all the women disappear into rich men’s harems.”
I don’t think this is quite correct. Places that legalized SSM didn’t need to change their already-existing divorce laws, except perhaps to change references to “husband” or 'wife" to spouse. The problem was when people who were married in Place A (legal SSM) later moved to PlaceB (no legal SSM) and then wanted to divorce. They couldn’t divorce in Place B because Place B didn’t recognize their marriage, and they couldn’t divorce in Place A because they were no longer residents ( or perhaps never had been ). Completely different issue than leaving it to get worked out later.
Perhaps I’m not explaining myself very well. The concept of marriage is societally determined, and I entirely accept that it can differ, and differ radically, between different societies and different times. There certainly can be a concept of marriage which embraces plural marriage, and its not difficult to point to real-world examples of societies which have such a concept.
All I’m saying is that that is a pretty profound difference, much more radically different from monogamous marriage than same-sex marriage is from opposite-sex marriage. You couldn’t introduce plural marriage in the US by changing US marriage and family laws to replace “spouse” with “spouse or spouses” on every occasion; what you would be left with would be meaningless, confused and fail to address a whole host of central questions. That’s what I initially came into this thread to say.
As regards whether you need a ceremony for marriage, you could change that very easily. As already noted, some US states don’t require a ceremony; they recognise common-law marriage, which arises out of facts, not rituals. You could easily generalise this to all states. Or you could take the approach of other jurisdictions which, without using the term “common law marriage”, assimilate the position of cohabitants to that of formally married couples.
If there are objections to this, I don’t think they are primarily religious or Christian. In the first place, as pointeed out, such an approach is entirely compatible with Christian thinking on marriage. In the second place, there are obvious non-Christian and non-religious objections. Such a regime results in a couple being treated as married even if they have not chosen to marry; indeed, even if they have deliberately chosen not to marry because they don’t want the legal consequences of marraige. It’s not difficult to think of arguments against that based on personal freedom or individual autonomy. Those arguments are of course moral arguments - all arguments about marriage are moral arguments, including the ones you are adavancing here - but they are not religious or Christian arguments.
Why shouldn’t rich men /women have more spouses?! I see no reason for that to be a point against it, at least it will give them something to spend their money on instead of hoarding it away from society,
I wouldn’t be interested in this myself but why shouldn’t people be allowed, as mentioned before if it’s no harm to anyone (I don’t accepting reducing others chances to be a a valid point either) just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean we should not do it -a famous JFK comes to mind…
As for post marital support -what is the alternative? The people live together unmarried (or perhaps one couple married) and then one unmarried person leaves -should they get no support even if they have been a core member for years? Difficult to sort out -yes, that’s no reasonnot to try if members of society will benefit and perhaps it will make society just a little better! Let’s hear it for the minorities!
I’ve suggested it before; don’t adapt marriage law to polygamy - adapt partnership law. The frameworks for adding and subtracting partners are already in place.
The only real societal problem with polygyny is that we have a 50:50 sex ratio.
In a world where the sex ratio was very different (and it’s not impossible that might exist in the future, since we now have the technological capability to do it without resorting to war, abortion, dueling or other gruesome means) polygamy would be more workable.
Alternatively, we could avoid the ‘sex ratio’ problem by encouraging women to take on multiple partners.
Even if it were codified, how many people in the US would actually engage in it? While there are some benefits to polygamy, even monogamous marriage is complicated enough that we’ve become fairly lousy at it.
Im sorry if I don’t understand but so what if we have a near 50:50 sex ratio? Does that mean we should just draw tickets and match one guy up with one girl?! At the end of the day relationships are controlled by people and their will (or at least should be) and sex ratio shouldn’t come into that, anyway I’m off the view we need less people in the world, so maybe what we need is single sex marriages for multiple people, imagine a man having five husbands or a woman with five wives!
Where is the necessity of ensuring every man has a partner? If some women would rather be a rich man’s third wife than a poor man’s only, why should there be institutional barriers to their choice?