A great many companies cover the employee, or cover part of the cost of insurance for the employee, but require a much higher portion, sometimes all of it, for coverage of the employee’s spouse/family.
It would save the government billions (well, probably) to disallow the home-ownership deduction, too. So what? This has nothing to do with polygamy. The only way both parents get the benefit of the child tax deduction is if they file jointly, and it’s on a per-child basis. It wouldn’t be affected by a legal polygamous relationship.
Two words: Advance directives. This is a problem that already has a solution, because in many cases there are elderly parents and there are multiple adult children with conflicting desires. People use advance directives to name ONE person to make medical decisions for them. So, in the case of a plural marriage, a person could name one spouse or another–or a child–or a friend.
I see that Cicada2003 has summed up my response a little better than I could.
Yes, I understand that insurance cost someone money. My employer and I have been footing the bill for my insurance for years now. Luckily, I now have an employer who covers (one of) my domestic partners. Now I pay more for insurance each month, and I’m very happy to do so. I would be happier to pay even more to get coverage for my other domestic partner under our plan.
I understand that polygamous relationship would have the potential to have a large number of people in the family. This would be unfair to other families if they paid the same simple family rate. It could easily be remedied by having an option for families up to, say, six members. And having the option to cover additional members at x amount per member. Just because we have no system set in place now that could handle polygamy, doesn’t mean that a system couldn’t be set up fairly easily. Systems/Corporations, etc adapt.
Cicada2003 answered the issue of health care directives. It seems that a system is already in place that could be adapted for polygamy. I believe there was another thread on polygamy that summed up some other current laws that could easily be adapted to polygamy. Specifically, what to do with property when only one person wants to leave the relationship. (I think it had to do with currect partnership law or some such… I’ll look for the thread)
Honestly, I have no hope of seeing any sort of polygamous union law being passed in my lifetime. I’ll be happy to see some sort of legal union for gays/lesbians. But I don’t see any valid reason to deny them, other than the same tired reasons keeping gays from having unions.
Anything that undermines the institution of marriage is OK with me.
Legally, “marriage” should be the union of two or more adults of at least one sex for unspecified purposes. Other laws should not differentiate between married and unmarried people, and discrimination for or against marriage should be illegal in all matters such as taxation, housing, insurance coverage, etc.
No, of course you don’t. If you prefer, you can engage in a self-righteous snit and demand your rights while stamping your foot. It won’t actually convince anybody who doesn’t already agree with you but it will make you feel good.
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You’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose, but you’d be hard-pressed to find many politicians, sociologists or policy wonks who agree with you.
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Poppycock. When trying to formulate social policy like this, the question is whether the game is worth the candle. Let’s take some numbers which I have made up to illustrate. 1 million heterosexual people get married and between them have 1 million children. Let’s say, for purposes of illustration, these married people get 1 billion USD in tax breaks from being married and filing jointly. That means that each child of married straights gets an average “subsidy” of 1000 USD from this particular tax break.
1 million gays get married. Between them, they have 100,000 children. These gay married people also get 1 billion USD in tax breaks from being married and filing jointly. That means that each child of married gays gets an average “subsidy” of 10,000 USD from this particular tax break.
Now it might be good social policy to subsidize households with children to the tune of 1000 USD each. But it might equally be true that 10,000 USD per child is a waste of money. If so, the smaller social benefit from gay marriage in re raising children does not justify extending the joint filing tax break.
Just to save time, let’s not see the predictable chorus of “but not all straights have kids!” and “then we should eliminate filing jointly and increase the dependent deduction.” This is simply an illustration — there are other social benefits of marriage as well. Also, let me say as a practical political matter that if the cost of gay marriage is going to be eliminating joint filing for married couples, it ain’t gonna happen. Ever. Period. I therefore advise those in favour of gay marriage not to advocate such a position. Gay marriage will only be accepted by building up a case for it, not by tearing down the case for traditional marriage.
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Cite? Analysis? Anecdotal evidence? Hearsay channeled f rom a spirit guide on Arcturus? Anything? Honestly, I don’t know how you can type while waiving your hands like that.
There is lots of evidence for various benefits from traditional marriage, not only to children but to adults as well. For example,
Points to Jeevmon for at least taking a stab at it, albeit without any actual cites. What advocates of gay marriage really need is something that looks sort of like this.
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I can’t help wondering what the Mormon church would do if ploygamy was ever legalized in the U.S. It was originally tought as a divine principal, and only abandoned when it became against the law. Theoretically, then, the Mormon church would be the first to jump on the polygamy bandwagon if it once again became legal. However, I don’t think that many of the current members of the church would actually feel comfortable practicing it. You see, when I was a missionary for the church years ago, a lot of potential members were bothered by the whole idea, and only decided to join the church after it was explained to them that polygamy was no longer practiced.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion…
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Oh, come on, TruthSeeker. There can’t be any similar statistical compilation for gay marriages because they don’t legally exist, so there’s no way to reliably identify a sample from which to extract such information. How do you decide who your “married” gays are for purposes of this study? Those who have been together five years? Ten? Twenty? Any number picked is going to feel arbitrary, whereas marriage (which today means heterosexual marriage) is a recorded event, making it easier to identify the people to survey. Figuring out what percentage of married people live or have lived to particular ages is a relatively straightforward matter of comparing marriage and death records (even if the conclusions drawn are invalid post hoc ergo propter hoc). You’re demanding that advocates of legalized gay marriage produce evidence that the law currently makes it impossible for them to produce.
And, of course, the idea that a gay couple will get tax breaks from getting married rather ignores the number of people who complain about the “marriage penalty”, and arguments to health care provision for multiple-adult families ignore the fact that there is no cap on the number of children that a given family can support on a single person’s health care access (if they have family access at all).
That’s life in the big city, jeevmon. How about coming starting with some data on something, “arbitrary” or not. If you can show lots of good things about gay couples who’ve been in a committed relationship for ten years, at least you’ve got something to work with.
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Then proponents of gay marriage are fucked.
Look, you can argue that the similarities between gay marriage and traditional marriage outweigh their differences. You cannot argue that gay marriage is exactly identical to traditional marriage and that only a drooling idiot could possibly think otherwise. There are differences and it’s not hard at all for either legislatures or courts to come up with at least a rational basis for refusing to recognize gay marriage. In fact, if you try and push this arguments too hard in the U.S. court system right now, you risk being “Plessied” and having gay marriage taken off the table for the next fifty years.
Gay marriage is a political issue, not a legal one. The way forward is to convince people that it is a good thing. You do that by marshalling data and arguments that support the idea that recognizing gay marriage would be a benefit to everyone, not just gays. You do not do that by belittling everyone who doesn’t agree with you. From what I’ve seen so far, there’s way to much of the latter and hardly any of the former.