It’s not a religious thing; I know a large number of people who would have multiple spouses if they could and none of them have religious reasons.
Personally, though my arguments are of course strongly influenced by the fact that this is a personal thing for me (as someone with two spousal-equivalent relationships), I consider ‘you have the same right to marry one person as any monogamous person’ to be discriminatory on about the same level as ‘you have the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex as a straight person’.
Polygamy is forbidden by the LDS church, and while not completely prohibited in Islam, it is not mandatory and is actually discouraged by the Koran. Polygamy among Muslims is pretty much a cultural practice, not a religious one and it’s far from universal.
So no abridgement of religious rights accrues to either Mormons or Muslims by banning polygamy. Theoritically, of course, that doesn’t mean that a religion couldn’t madate polygamy and sue for the right under the first amendment, but I still wouldn’t say they were being discriminated against. They would have exactly the same rights as any other religion so there wouldn’t be any equal protection issue.
Like I said, I’m personally up in the air about polygamy. I see a potential for for exploitation of women, economic drains on the public for indigent, polygamous families, instability for children with revolving door “parents,” etc. On the other hand, I’m not sure that the government has a compelling case to deny the right to polyamorous marriages outright. I’m just on the fence about it. I personally am in no hurry to see it legalized but I don’t know that I could make a lead pipe argument not to make it legal.
Which is why I added the words (that you chose not to bold) “along with politicians”. It is true that at first, the Public did not want equality of blacks and whites, but a politician (the President) decided to call the National Guard and desegregate the high school. But after a while, the public in the south did realize that not treating blacks equally with whites was wrong, and their hearts and minds were won over.
Why can’t this top-down approach work in the case of gay marriage? (i.e. politicians decide what is right despite what the people want, then the people eventually realize that they had been wrong.)
It’s a lot less likely to work in the case of gay marriage, because the people’s beliefs are firmly rooted in the Bible and the morals, while racism and unequal rights of blacks and whites was rooted in people’s irrational fears.
As for the ethics involved with this approach (as well as the executive order you mentioned), the end is not justified by the means.
The Bible was used to back up segregation too. (The reference I’ve seen is to the Babel tale, and the notion that the involved god separated the peoples of the Earth at that point for a reason, thus that a mixed marriage was direct defiance of the will of the divinity.)
But the Bible was also used to denounce segregation:
The above is proof that Jesus does not see any one race (Jew nor Greek) or sex (neither male nor female) as superior to another. It also proves that God’s word cannot be used to promote slavery (there is neither bond nor free).
However, there is no counter-verse that is much stronger (than 1 Corinthians 5+6 or Romans 1) that says that homosexuality should be allowed. Which is why I think that it will be harder to sway people to allow gay marriage than it was to sway people to condemn racism.
Damn, I should’ve just shut up after the first part of that post. I walked right into that one :smack:
But I’m not asking from the point of view of religious abridgement. I’m asking based onthe following statement that you made:
It seems to me that the laws apply equally to everyone - the only difference (with gay marriage) is that homosexuals want to marry someone of the same sex, and heterosexuals do not. By the same token, everyone is forbidden from being polygamous - but presumably those whose religion allows polygamy have a greater desire to engage in the practice than those who’ve been culturally/religiously raised to reject it.
Polygamy is not a religious practice, so there is no first amendment right to engage in it.
And unlike homosexualty, there is no biological, fixed orientation for polyamory. Gay people do not “want to” be attracted to those of the same sex, they have no choice about it. They do not have the option of a loving heterosexual marriage.
I’ll put it this way. Marriage is a contract which allows two people to conjoin their household, finances and certain legal rights. The law- as it stands- dictates what type of genetalia must be possessed by any individual another individual wants to marry. There is no compelling reason in the oublic interest to do this. Gay people have the same right to enter into a contract with the person they love as heteros do.
Ironically, the governments makes no requirements at all about the level of emotional attachment or love which must be present for heteros. The law cares much more about a couple’s respective genetalia than it does about emotional committment. Something is wrong with that.
Tell me, cm, Wheteher you call it marriage or not do you think that same-sex couple should be entitled to visit each other in the hospital, leave each other money. etc. in the same respect that married couples are.
I just can’t see it as anything but cruel to withhold those things based on what is, frankly, a religious bias and nothing more.
Good point. In fact, you can make a pretty strong case that humans are “naturally” polygamous. Whether or not you want to codify that into law is another matter. But I think we can certainly say that the evidence that polygamy is “biologically fixed” would be at least as good, if not better, than the evidence that homosexuality is 'biologically fixed".
Personally, though, I don’t think it really should matter. If two people want to get married, why should we stop them? Same for three or more…
The size of the testes is only related to how promiscuous the females are. In a stable polygamous situation, that’s not an issue. Compare chimp, human, and gorilla ball sizes and you’ll see. Link.
Chimps have very large testes (lots of promiscuous mating), gorillas have pretty small testes, and human are somewhere inbetween.
Boy did THIS thread change. Turn your back for a day and it goes off the deep end.
From my half remembered anthropology in college I seem to recall our balls are somewhere in between gorillas (small) and chimps (large). In otherwords it can go either way. Sort of like our teeth is how my college prof explained it…they are good for meat AND veggies, a general design that is adaquate for either.
I certainly remember Morris banging on about all the evolutionary tricks both sexes have to cope with polygamy on TLC or History Channel. No idea if he’s even vaguely credible, but it SOUNDED good.
Personally, like with the gay marriage thing I think its different strokes for different folks. If the legalistic matters could be solved, I say let people do as they please. What do I care what happens in THEIR bedrooms?? :eek:
He often sounds good, except when he sounds like a complete raving crackpot.
My favorite raving crackpot notion is his argument that breasts evolved so that human women would have something that looked like buttocks on the front side, because related primate species tend to mate facing the backside. (Never mind that buttocks are a result of bipedalism, and thus not something that pre-hominids would have the sort of instinctual attraction to that he argued for.)
But really, the looniness of it is encapsulated in the notion that breasts in the wild look like ass. Perhaps early hominids stalked the wild corset in its natural environment.
Well, for the record, the OP did contain references to gay marriage, so that particular tangent was not really that far off. The way it has recent oozed into the realm of ball size is truly astonishing.
