Bigamy is a crime. Rape is a crime. Living with someone is not. If you have four adult men (not relatives) living in your house what are you guilty of?
Your second link provides no backup to actual laws. Adultery is a felony? Can you cite anyone in the last 30 years (or more) who has been convicted of felonious adultery? Christ, if it is a felony you’d be throwing a third or more of all people who have been married in jail.
Perhaps such laws used to exist and perhaps some ancient laws are still on the books. Show me that these adultery is prosecuted anywhere in the US as a felony.
Cohabitation?
Cohabitation is so common these days I am hard pressed to think of someone I know who hasn’t done it at some point. Again, you’d be throwing a substantial portion of citizens in jail for this.
I apologize; I thought I was responding to Whack a Mole.
Laws that deny fundamental rights are unconstitutional if they can’t hold up to strict scrutiny. you need not to be member of a protected class (like what Bricker said about skateboarders). i think there’s a fundamental right to form your own family, but lawrence was not even ruled on EPA grounds.
Sorry. I have a fever and flu thing of some kind. I thought Whack a Mole was doing the ‘doesn’t matter/not a protected class/irrelevant/illegal’ argument again.
I am rather exhausted with this argument. I think I made my points as best I can. Our anti polygamy laws were born out of racism and Christian-centric thought. I see little reason to continue them.
Whack-a-Mole, go read the case I linked for you where the Court called polygamy a practice of ‘Asiatic and African nations’ and not something that civilized people do.
Sorry, but anthropologically speaking, polygamy was not always a bad deal for women. And it doesn’t have to be. Sorry you can’t see that. As I pointed out, polygamous marriages (per law) are everywhere, and the practice was not unknown to gay couples in the 80s and 90s.
As I’ve pointed out, I do not want to get married, period, so I’m not ‘perpetuating’ any model. The FLDS church gives it a bad name, though. Kind of like how the Strip gives hookers a bad feel. Not all hookers are miserable drug addicted idiots who are being misused by men.
edit: I also don’t get drunk, but I don’t understand how we can draft 18 year olds into war and not let them drink alcohol.
In the US it is practiced by white people. Particularly Mormons which I am not sure are known for having a substantial Asiatic or African membership.
There may be a rationale for polygamy in some circumstances (e.g. your country was at war, most men were killed, there are now lots of women and few men).
Nevertheless places where polygamy is practiced and legal are places where women are horribly oppressed. Show me some place where polygamy is a norm and women aren’t second class citizens or near slaves to their husbands.
And you have yet to answer my questions on how you deal with the very real, very possible issues that arise in a polygamous household.
You want polygamy to be a reality fine. Show us how it’d work in the US and maintain an equitable relationship for all involved. If you can do that I will support the idea happily.
It’s debatable that it was historically any worse a deal than monogamy. Monogamy was promoted to benefit men, not women; historically most men had to settle for less desirable women that the wealthy & powerful didn’t want or had tired of, or simply died without children. Most women were arguably better off financially with a small share of a rich man than the full share of a poor man - and there wasn’t a real middle class between that.
To me this sounds analogous to you ending up in prison and getting friendly with the local strongman and being his bitch because your lot in life will be marginally better than getting gang raped in the shower.
It remains that countries which allow polygamy are countries where women are second class citizens. As I understand it even in these places polygamy is rare because only wealthy men can afford a harem. If you want to say polygamy is “good” because those women can enjoy a better lifestyle you have a point but it remains merely making the best of a shitty situation for the women.
It’s more like “That’s where the money is”. Remember; the idea that marriage is supposed to be about love is a pretty recent one, and from a purely self interested viewpoint why would a woman willingly marry a poor man over a rich one? Even today wealthy or famous men can attract large numbers of women; they just can’t marry them all at once. Good or bad, that’s just what humans are like; universal monogamy is a deliberate social & legal creation, not the natural tendency of human beings.
But the question remains; is that cause and effect? I’ve never heard that life for a single wife is better than that of a polygynous wife in those places.
Good luck eliminating the tendency for wealth to accumulate.
Which doesn’t mean there’s any causal connection between polygamy and the oppression of women; if anything monogamy has benefited men and cost women.
Making polygamy illegal doesn’t protect them at all. If anything the opposite since the abusive husband in question isn’t even outnumbered in a monogamous marriage.
