If I married identical twins, could I be charged with bigamy? Given that they were into it (consenting), how could bigamy be proven? The “victim” of bigamy, as I understand it, is the second spouse. Wouldn’t proving which is which be difficult?
I’ve read that twins tend to choose very similar partners, and quite often fall for the same person. At least initially.
I did know twin girls in high school who dated the same guy. At the same time. He knew they did it, but couldn’t tell them apart except by asking questions about shared experiences. They thought it was funny, but he wasn’t so sure. He did walk with his arms around both of them. I don’t know if any of them got married. To each other, that is.
Peace,
mangeorge
Of course. You’ve just married two people at the same time. How could you think otherwise?
Count the marriage certificates. Subtract the number of divorce or death certificates. If total >1 then Bigamy.
Bigamy is a crime irrelevant of the attitude of the parties involved. Which is which is not relevant either.
Only if you married identical twins without fingerprints. :smack:
Seriously, dude, posting while drunk is never a good idea.
Even if they’re really, really identical, there’s still going to be three names on a joint tax return. Just like Al Capone – you think you got away with the big crime, and then the IRS gets you on tax charges.
I guess I should"ve been more careful with my choice of words. What I meant was wouldn’t it be difficult to prosecute for bigamy. So they wouldn’t need to prove which person was offended, just that one was. Two simultaneous marriages is all it takes, I guess.
But I could cohabit with both without any legal consequences. Odd.
Rest assured I wouldn’t want to marry, or cohabit, with two women. One was good, and so far once was good.
I’ve read about one twin commiting murder and the prosecutors having difficulty proving which did the crime.
Of course, bigamy isn’t murder.
Oh. I thought identical twins had the same fingerprint.
They do have the same DNA, right?
Technically, you could in Thailand, as bigamy was outlawed about 100 years ago. In reality, though, many guys here still take second wives – my father-in-law had an extra wife; she and their children even attended my wedding – so come over here and marry them.
Nope.
Right.
To elaborate, even though identical twins have the same DNA, they have different fingerprints because of random chance and variations in the fetal environment.
Here’s a cite.
Here’s another from some guy who seems like a real know-it-all.
How would you manage that? Who would legitimately perform a bigamous ceremony? For that matter, how would you do so? Have them chant in unison? Otherwise, you have a time lapse between ceremonies and the second is obviously the illegal one.
Not odd at all. Marriage is designed to be a legal contract. That’s why you can’t have simultaneous marriages. It’s like signing an exclusive contract with two people. It’s self-contradictory. By creating a marriage you put yourself under the effect of a zillion laws. Cohabitation doesn’t do that. So no legal consequences because the law isn’t involved.
OK, this is a real point. If two twins did both claim to be the one legal wife and there was no way to determine which of them took part in the ceremony, you might have a legal problem. But it wouldn’t be bigamy. Fraud, certainly, since one would have to be fraudulently misrepresenting herself. Beyond that the lawyers would have the billings of a lifetime.
In my first sentence, I meant technically you could be prosecuted for bigamy. :smack:
In reality, you could marry them. Not sure about simultaneously, though; you might need separate ceremonies.
Even if by some chance they did have the same fingerprints, and the precisely exact same mutation-free DNA, they’d still be different people. That’s the key concept here. They are not the same person, they are different people. They do not occupy the same space at the same time at all (or any) times. That is what makes them different.
Identical twins have different fingerprints? I did not know that.
That answers my question…
As for bigamy, I’ve long thought that as a crime it’s a bit of a red herring. The real crime, in cases where someone marries someone on the sly, while not admitting to the other spouse and kids three states away, is marriage fraud.
If three people want to get married together, let them, say I. But go after the marriage fraudsters like you would any other fraudsters.
A harem does have a certain appeal, but one wife is almost more than I can handle anyway, and I don’t mean sexually.
Forget DNA and fingerprints. Think Social Security Number. You can’t marry twice. The guy at the court won’t even know if they girls are similar or different or what. He just checks your SSN and sees that you are already married to someone whose SSN is not the one of the person standing next to you.
I repeat;
“Rest assured I wouldn’t want to marry, or cohabit, with two women”.
From above.
Right. I was just pointing out the possibilities.
My father-in-law actually had two households set up. He would move back and forth between them. His first wife, the main one, was my mother-in-law. I think that may have been an arranged marriage, with the second wife a love match. Whenever my mother-in-law got on his nerves, off to the other wife’s house he would go. He had three daughters and a son by the main wife and the reverse by the second wife. I was told that at one point, he wanted to merge the two households into one, but my mother-in-law raised holy hell about it, and the plan was abandoned. My in-laws are both dead now, but the second wife might still be around. My wife and her main siblings don’t seem to have much further contact with the other set.
Still a problem. Who’s SSN is who’s? Prove it.
Of course they are! 
And I meant simultaneous marriages, not weddings.
So why did you specify identical twins in the first place? Why not “any two women who both knowingly consent to marry you”?
Who said anything about a harem? I meant a marriage of equals.