partly_warmer: First, I don’t see the complexity as all that complex. It’s adaption of existing law, not entirely new law, so there will be plenty of landmarks to help navigate the terrain.
Second, I don’t care if it adds complexity. The excuse “it would be too hard to write law to handle that” is a lame excuse. The rights of the citizenry should never be curtailed for the convenience of the government. The governments exists to serve the people, and when you start putting the government ahead of the people, you have lost your focus.
On your specific objection regarding wills and living trusts: these instruments can be used to transfer the estate to whoever the testator/grantor desires. While they commonly transfer to a spouse (in part because of the beneficial tax treatment of spousal transfers) this is not obligatory. Ultimately the testator/grantor makes this determination, and multiple marriage will not change it. (If anything, these approaches are used to prevent the marital estate from passing to the children, as it would otherwise under intestacy law.) The same thing can occur under current law through a series of monogamous marriages, although it rarely does. I think that this concern is unlikely to come to pass, is contrived, and can be legitimately dismissed as an invention concealing a substantive objection to the concept as a whole.
In the US, non-fault divorce is the standard: a divorce can be had upon request. No proof of “failure” is required. I approach these issues from the assumption of no-fault divorce.
It is not true that “every other country in the world” does not accept multiple marriages. Many nations (especially the Arab nations of the Middle East, as well as some other nations with traditions of polygamy) permit multiple marriage, with various rules and limits. This is not really an issue, either.
The gain to society is in allowing people to structure their lives in the manner that makes them happiest. Why is that a bad thing?
I´m sorry Dr. Lao but things work the other way around. You have to provide the evidence. After all if you try to change the system you should be ready to provided all the scientific arguments.
I can’t find any study but I heard on tv that single mother kids tend to be more promiscuous (girls) and having more trouble with the law (boys). The source is 20 20.
Didn’t I ask you earlier specifically not to post evidence suggesting that two parents are better than one? I recall doing that. And yet you go ahead and do it.
I’ll repeat what I said earlier: evidence that having two parents is better than having only one parent is irrelevant to your argument in support of heterodominance.
Also, you’re wrong; you have to prove your position because your position is the one asserting a reason for discrimination. It is the duty of those who seek to discriminate to prove that the discrimination they seek is necessary.
Sigh. You wouldn’t be a lawyer, by any chance, would you?
I realized after posting there was a loophole in the statement about all other countries not allowing multiple person marriages. What I was imagining (and surely you could have guessed) is the Arab states would take a look at a marriage with one woman married to several men, and laugh. Unless I’m mistaken. Perhaps they’d spit.
The idea of society is to make the greatest number of people happy. Multiple marriages may “please” 2% of the people, but if they displease 50% would you be willing to drop it? If not, you’re arguing from a tenuous position. And if I presented the question to USA Today readers this way “How would you like the duration and cost of marriage litigation trials to be increased an average of 10% on account of additional laws and procedure to support multiple marriages?” There’s not much doubt an overwhelming majority would say: forget it.
I don’t see you answered the question of how to avoid perpetuities in multiple marriage. Saying there is a way to avoid it in some cases still leaves other common cases. I agree the problem could happen (as you say very rarely) in marriages today. Multiple marriages would change this to a common occurence. I can easily imagine couples whose children have left home deciding to “spice up their lives” by adding someone slightly younger to their “marriage”. Surprise, kids! Suddenly, unexpectedly, there’s no hope of inheritance from your parents to help you with retirement! Oh, and by the way, there’s another “parent” for you to take care of in old age, who had nothing to do with raising you. We’re thinking of adding a couple more in a few years, so start saving!
You seem to be ignoring every social cost. Divorces are enormously disruptive to children. Having to spend time with a father, stepfather, mother and stepmother causes divided loyalties and much friction. Add to that the complexity of things like visiting rights of a half dozen “parents” who are no longer a part of one several “marriages” a child might be involved with … it produces a horribly uncomfortable situation for children, and an opportunity for endless bickering between not just a couple, but potentially a dozen spouses and ex-spouses.
Marriages are to support the community, not to increase the chances of litigation.
I’d like to point out that there is hardly a shortage of children waiting for adoptive parents, at least in the U.S. There is a shortage of babies, especially white babies, but according to this page there are 131,000 children waiting to be adopted in the US as of the year 2000, and about 51,000 of them will be placed with adoptive families.
80,000 children, scattered throughout the foster care system, waiting for families. 24% of children waiting for adoption have been in foster care for five years or more.
There are a lot of kids out there in need of homes.
If, in your country, this is not the case, then congratulations. There are a lot of countries that are worse off than yours, though; international adoptions from China, from the states of the former USSR, and from various other countries are becoming commonplace. If you were to make adoption easier, you could not only be taking care of the children of your own country, but those of the world as well.
And, in the US, laws vary state to state, but most states have no laws forbidding gay men or women adopting. Therefore, Estilicon, you are the one actually proposing the change to the status quo in the US.
Argentina may be different, but if its like the US, the thought that gay people might want to adopt was so ridiculous that the states that do have laws have had to pass them recently.
partly_warmer: I think your inheritance argument is DOA. Under existing law, there are so many ways to keep your money from going to the kids that adding another is irrelevant. And, as I pointed out already, you can accomplish the same thing anyway through serial monogamy, or for that matter just by writing a will that gives all the money to the Universal Truth of Infinite Fluffiness.
We have the American With Disabilities Act, which benefits a minority, creates massive amounts of litigation, and annoys a lot of people, not because it makes a majority happy but because it is the right thing to do. I think going out of the way to increase the happiness of 2% of the population (that’s 6 million people, by the way, or roughly the entire population of the state of Massachusetts) is worth it, and as far as I can tell your arguments at this point are merely histrionics lacking any substantial merit. You are fearmongering when you claim that permitting multiple marriage will prolong divorces and rob children of their inheritances (especially the last one).
I wasn’t aware that kids were ‘owed’ an inheritance. I hope I receive nothing when my parents finally pass on. They earnt and saved it, I want them to enjoy it. I should earn my own money for retirement, not rely on my parents saving their’s and giving it to me.
I also wasn’t aware that kids were ‘required’ to take care of their parents in old age, even if they single-handedly raised you, let alone if they had nothing to do with you.
Nice strawmen.
As to everything else, I agree with what KellyM has been saying.
I’m curious how a marriage among multiple people would be run. For example what would be required to admit another party to the marriage or eject (divorce) them. Would it have to be unanimous or would a simple majority rule? Could I be stuck married to someone I didn’t want simply because I lack the voting power to stop it?
I’m not really arguing against the idea. I’m just unclear on how people believe a multi-partner marriage should be conducted and recognized by the law.
Vodkahead: I think it is very reasonable to require unianimous consent of the participants of the existing marriage to admit an additional partner.
What you have for ejecting a partner is the remaining partners all agreeing to terminate the marriage and immediately remarry sans the ejected partner. Obviously, if anyone fails to agree, they can continue on with the rejected partner, or leave the marriage entirely. Since individual freedom is key here, no person whatsoever would ever be required to remain in a marriage against his or her will.
Most parents want their children to benefit by the fruit of their (the parent’s). When parents are gone, and don’t need the money, they WANT their children to have it. Creating marriages which much more frequently would effectively freeze the money (in an honest attempt to protect the surviving member of the marriage) could freeze the money indefinitely. In fact if a dishonest multi-marriage group were trying to avoid inheritance tax, it would be the perfect method.
It isn’t only children who’d suffer. I was trying to suggest just how extremely complicated this situation is. And how much it would change society. Answering Goo, the problem is indefinitely tying up the money, not that children necessarily deserve anything. Charities and churches are critically dependent on gifts made by people after they die, and no longer need the money. The laws against perpetuity (in America) are designed to stop someone who’s long dead from controlling money that needs to be used. It ties up assets and hurts the economy. That’s what indefinitely prolonged marriages would do. I’m talking here about a 200-year marriage, not a limited time from now until your great Aunt drops off watching World Federation Wrestling.
The Disabilities Act is entirely different. Anybody could become disabled. So society as a whole benefits. It’s a form of insurance, which this idea most certainly is not. Only a few people would choose multiple marriages, and everybody else – with no expectation of gain, and no prospect of ever being personally involved – would be stuck with the cost.
partly_warmer, the estate and trust instruments you’re talking about are used by people who do not want their money going to their children. These people are going to withhold their inheritance from their children by whatever means the law allows. Multiple marriage isn’t going to change that.
You also clearly do not understand the rule against perpetuities and its purpose, or you wouldn’t make the argument you do. The rule against perpetuities is not intended to prevent “dead-head” control of property; it is intended to avoid the situation where it is unclear or uncertain who owns a certain hunk of property. Note especially that the rule against perpetuities does not void a conditional grant where the reversion is to the grantor, no matter how distant the executory condition might be.
I also think you misunderstand the handling of the marital estate in probate in the United States today. The archaic form of marital property ownership called “tenancy by the entireties” (in which the husband held all the property of the marriage until either spouse died, and then the survivor became sole owner) has been all but abolished in the United States. Property and marriage interact in complicated ways in the United States, and the details vary from state to state, but in no state do they behave by default in the manner that you describe. To get the effect you are pretending is the “most common” behavior requires an affirmative act on the part of the cotenant spouses to create a joint tenancy. The default treatment, absent express intent to the contrary, is common tenancy, which at the death of each individual cotenant transfers to that cotenant’s heirs without affecting the interests of the other cotenants.
Disallowing multiple marriages in no way prevents three people who would otherwise be multiply married from titling all of their property into a three-way joint tenancy with right of survivorship. And, allowing multiple marriage does not necessarily require that, by default, all marital assets will be titled into an n-way joint tenancy with right of survivorship. In short, multiple marriage does not create the evil you seek to avoid, and abolishing it does not prevent it.
You also seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that a marriage is a “person” with existence independent of its members. There is no legal basis to that position now and I see no reason why such a position would come into being were multiple marriage made legal. There is no “infinitely prolonged marriage.” If Dick and Jane marry Julie, and Dick dies leaving his estate to Jane and Julie, then Dick’s no longer in the marriage and no longer in control of the money. (And if Dick didn’t explicitly leave a will disinheriting his children, the portion of his estate not held in JTWRS would pass by shares to his children anyway.) Dick gains no enhanced control over his estate by having been in a multiple marriage that he couldn’t get already get through existing property law.
Please stop beating this dead straw horse. And can’t we get off the relatively uninteresting property issues and deal with the far more interesting questions of parentage and childrearing instead? Why shouldn’t a child be allowed to have three or more parents?
I think that it depends. The State’s interest in marriage is primarily to promote the genesis of upstanding and stable children, since marriages provide a more stable economic base for child rearing.
Whether or not the bias against polygamous or homosexual marriages is the result of mere folkways, rather than a genuine interest in child welfare is another matter. That the laws enforce a status quo irrespective of actual State interest is hardly suprising. =}
Wouldn’t a three (or more) parent household at least give the potential for a more stable economic base? With a three-parent household two parents could work and still have one to stay with the child.
Let’s see… Estilicon believes that wealth, education, health, and age should be factors in deciding who is able to adopt children. How about the location where the children will be raised? Won’t they be better off in a country that is economically and politically stable than in Argentina?
[hijack]
I suppose genocide does result in a decrease in racial tensions. I doubt any of the handful of indigenous people who survived, or any non-white person you has visited Argentina for that matter, would agree with you.
You’re right, I was talking about a living trust, which is an entity dependent on the people in it being alive.
I’ve made my points that this ridiculously complicates the law for the benefit of basically a few people who want to “do their own thing”. And I agree, let’s drop it.
I feel the natural mother and father of a child have a moral obligation to their child that other people do not. But I suspect you don’t agree with that either. I can’t convince you, but I suspect you are in a very small minority. Not just now, but throughout the world and throughout the history of humankind.
If there are laws that desperately need changing right now, they are international laws about keeping peace. Not ones to protect people who want to live in interesting types of new relationships and be given tax credits.
partly_warmer, I too believe that the natural mother and father have a special obligation to discharge toward their children, but that this should not preclude fulfilling it by willing substitution (adoption), nor should it preclude other individuals volunteering to join the effort. People should be allowed, I think, to take on additional voluntary obligations, and then be held to them later. Such a choice is one not made lightly, to be sure, but I think allowing people to make such a commitment will, overall, benefit society. (It also takes away the power of an absent biological parent who refuses to surrender his or her rights to prevent a willing nonbiological parent from becoming a legal parent.)