Absolutely. That’s part of what I meant when I meant that the law should protect individuals’ rights. The law should support someone entering into a relationship and also leaving a relationship. Both the entering and the leaving should be much easier than it is. Currently, people often don’t get divorced because besides the emotional and logistical hurdles of splitting up, it’s also a legal hassle. It should be less of a hassle. The process and expectations for separating from a marriage or partnership should be simpler and more predictable. Someone who wants to leave a relationship shouldn’t have to think “I have no place to live.” These are the types of support that society should have in place.
It gets trickier, of course, when kids are involved. If a woman has three husbands, does the bio father have to be identified? Are they all equally fathers? If one wants to leave the union, does he pay all the child support, some part of it? If they adopt, are they all equal parents? If there are multiple women and men, are they all equal parents or does the bio mother get special rights? If another woman or man joins later, are they also equal parents? If they leave, do they have child support obligations?
None of this is impossible to solve, but it argues for some barriers to entry and exit, at least when kids are involved.
How about
– no marriages involving anybody under 18
plus
– no marriages involving more than a 10 year age difference between the oldest and youngest partner unless all parties involved are over the age of 28?
You’re telling me I’m old enough to drink, die for my country, and enter into contracts but I can’t choose who I get married to? I think the best you’re going to do is 18.
At the moment you can’t choose to get married to more than one person.
The age difference restriction could possibly not be applied to two-person marriages; in which case, your options would be increasing, not decreasing.
Feds told Utah to become a state they needed to get rid of polygamy. And right after that God told the Mormons to ban polygamy. Amazing timing .
Thanks for correcting that. I should have looked it up. What I posted is something I was told by an anthropology professor, but I know even people who should know better spread inaccurate information . . . like I did. 
None of those age restrictions will do anything for the FLDS situation anyway. They don’t have to get legally married, just married in their church. The legality or illegality of polygamy wouldn’t really affect them.
But we can set up the law in such a way that anyone who wants out of such a situation has legal protections.
I’m not really disagreeing with you, but girls and young women who find themselves in a de facto marriage with a bunch of other girls and women can walk away today whenever they want with legal protection. It’s not like they’re legally married right now. There are cultural and societal reasons they stay, similar to why other people don’t leave other abusive cults.
The FLDS question seems like a separate question from advocating for legalization of polygamy in my view.
Plural marriage would do something same-sex marriage didn’t, which is change the definition of marriage.
By the time same-sex marriage came to pass, the definition of marriage was already “A union of two adults into a coequal partnership with defined benefits” such that removing the little tack-on that the adults had to be different sexes was a non-issue. That definition came about due to the end of coverture, in which the wife’s legal existence became subsumed under her husband’s, such that each role had different properties in a vastly unequal partnership.
Plural marriage would require us to think hard about things we don’t need to think about with a union of two people, such as what happens when a person A marries two others and they disagree what to do when A is grievously injured. That’s only one example of how the privileges of marriage are not easily shared. Another is, how many people will we allow to marry each other for tax benefits? A shelter for two is not much of an imposition on the tax base, but a shelter for twenty? A shelter for two thousand? Where does that end? Similarly, the legal privilege which prevents spouses from being compelled to testify against each other could be abused much more easily were it expanded to include, say, the entire board of a company or similar operation.
I’m not morally opposed to plural marriage. I think it can be done well. I merely note that it would be a legal undertaking unlike the one we finished with Obergefell.
It would be great if we could make this kind of thing work today. Forget divorce - any woman can leave any man at any time. But that causes economic hardships in many cases. A man having many wives practically guarantees that some have no independent income flow, and thus can’t just leave.
Providing support for women to leave would be great - but I can just hear the right start yelling about how the government is breaking up marriages by encouraging women to leave.
As for contracts, today we have a default marriage contract based on the laws of the state. You really want every marrying couple to have to hire lawyers (two, since the rights of both parties have to be respected.) And there would be a danger of the party with the most money getting to hire the best lawyer and creating an unfair contract. Anyone wishing to do contracts (like prenups) now can - so long as they don’t violate any laws. Why force everyone to do so?
This is a first world solution.
I started a thread on this topic almost a decade ago. I started it because of a hijack in another thread about how if refusing to change marriage laws to allow SSM had no rational basis (constitutionally speaking) than not changing laws to allow polygamy would also have no rational basis. I disagreed due to the fact that no one could even tell me at that time how the laws would need to change.
For the same reason, I disagree with the OP here that polygamy is in the same position as SSM for the same reason I disagreed back then. Morally and ethically I have no problem with it. Decriminalizing polyamorous living situations and modifying other laws not to directly discriminate are things I support. Deal with the abuse issues as abuse issues. Many of them are also present in some two person marriages.
But SSM was a simple change. Remove the gender specific wording, and presto everything works just fine. Multipartner marraiages (MPM?) are not so simple.
I stand by the challenge I made 10 years ago. Come up with a model that works for almost all forms of ethical MPM that does not fundamentally change the current marriage laws or put an undue burden on the family court system to deal it.
I am obviously not in charge, but I would vote for said law if it met the following conditions:
- Had broad support from the people who want the various types of polygamy.
- Was equitable to all concerned
- Did not change existing marriage laws extensively. Add things like stricter age limits would be fine, but I really don’t want to have to go to a lawyer and put all the current protections my family has in a contract or lose them.
Doesn’t this sort of raise the issue that pregnant teenagers wouldn’t be able to get married, if that was their choice?
What’s an example of a country that does this where it works well?
Yes. But there’s no stigma to being born out of wedlock these days. If the parents still want to marry when they are of age, they can. There are lots of countries where there are no exceptions for early marriage, but most have that rule exactly because they are trying to discourage it, and it isn’t always well enforced.
What’s an example country where that kind of policy is working well?
According to this site Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania have a universal age of 18 with no exceptions.
Oh. I thought you’d mentioned in another thread that you were from the UK, so I hoped you might tell us how things work over there. I must have been mistaken about where you were from.
Probably true for the child in most, but not all communities. Giving birth out of wedlock though, still lots of stigma there in lots of communities, don’t you think?
You can get married at 16 with parental consent in England and Wales, and without it in Scotland, so I don’t have any personal experience. (Twelve year olds cannot marry, however. That’s sick.)
I’ve never heard of teenagers marrying because of pregnancy. What would be the point? They couldn’t support a family anyway.
In some religious ones, I guess. Those are also the sort where minors are likely to be pressured to marry against their will, though.