So why, exactly, is polygamy illegal?

Great Debates
81

Just found this page that lists some of the benefits government confers on married couples. I want to post a couple of them to see how they might pan out in a group marriage contract.

joint parenting

A married couple has the right to parent their children. In a group marriage, who has the right to parent the children of two of the members. If I am in a flexible marriage and neither i nor my child’s mother is available to meet with a teacher to help make some important decisions about my child’s education, can I send my other wife? Should the school have to abide by her decisions? If I want decisions to be made by just me or the child’s mother, does wife number two have the right to demand that her decisions be respected instead? How about the decisions of her other husband in the contract?

82

joint adoption

Might solve the previous problem. Parents who want a say officially adopt the child in question. Do non-adopting parents in the contract have to provide for the child? How do they keep their assets separate?

If a married group wants to adopt a child from an adoption agency, should a privately owned adoption agency that doesn’t think a group home is the best environment for their charges be forced by law to consider the application?

83

What happens when there are only two parents who meet with the teacher (separately or together) and disagree? How about two divorced parents and their new spouses? How does the school decide who to listen to?

What happens when a man wants to adopt a child and his wife doesn’t? What if he adopts alone* and they later divorce?

*I mean, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? What man in his right mind would adopt a child into an unwilling family? Why would you assume that a polygamous man would do such a thing either?

Now THIS is a good question. My first instinct is to say that, as long as no increased level of harm can be attributed to group parenting (the same way no increased harm can be attributed to gay parenting or monogamous parenting) then yes, adoption should be open to married groups as it should be to gay couples and monogamous couples. After all, most of the people I know have more than two parents - it’s just that they’re married sequentially instead of all together and living in two (or more) homes instead of one. But I’m retaining my right to change my mind in the morning after I’ve had some sleep or hear a cogent argument against it.

84

I never said things were simple as they are. What’s the benefit to society of introducing potential further complications?

I was referring to a situation where the two biological parents of a child in a flexible marriage contract are joined in there efforts to care for the child by more parties. Those who wish to have parenting rights could officially adopt the child as an additional parent.

Of course, would plural adoption of someone else’s child be restricted to those within the marriage contract?

As far as this part of your post is concerned, I believe we can accept there is the rare occasion when a woman carries a pregnancy to term that her partner would just as soon have terminated, so the situation of differing parental preference as to the child’s presence is not without precedent. Would a pair within a flexible marriage contract then be required to gain consent of all other contract participants before having a child together then? Or just all the ones sharing a household with them?

What are the existing laws in the various states regarding sharing a household with someone else’s children? I know sometimes a stepdad will officially adopt his wife’s existing children, but before doing so, but after marriage, is he required under law to provide for them simply by virtue of being married to her mother? I’ve never had occasion to find this out.

More:

joint foster care, custody, and visitation (including non-biological parents);

Talk about making an already complicated situation more convoluted!

Suppose five adults in a flexible marriage contract are all biological or adoptive parents of a child, and then the contract is sundered. What if the courts grant all five custodial or visitation rights. Is it good for the kid to ahve to be shuttled between up to five households? If it isn’t, by what criteria do the courts decide whom among the five get custody or visitation? Granted, this decision is not pretty between two people most of the time, but again, what’s the societal advantage of condoning a situation that could turn more nightmarish by an order of magnitude?

85

status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions where one partner is too ill to be competent;

What, again, is the advantage of turning an already impossibly difficult time for one person into grounds for officially-sanction desperate debate?

Will there be one standard type of flexible marriage contract (everyone in it is married to everyone else for the duration of the term of the contract, or some such), or will a hospital lawyer have to pore over a particular group’s contract to decide which among them to listen to before pulling or not pulling the plug on life-support?

86

I’m pretty sure this is first how Polygamy came about. Nomadic tribal life is dangerous and young men especially die all the time leaving widows with no livelihood, (Though as an aside, I believe this could be solved by allowing women to own stuff, but whatever). In the rougher parts of Central Asia brothers still organize to support one wife as resources are scarce. A supply and demand issue dictates that richer men will get more women, but the remaining will be more highly sought and treated with greater respect…not too bad for a gender often marginalized huh?

87

I disagree. Being highly sought is not at all the same as respect; women have always been regarded as a scarce/valuable commodity, which tends to lead to them as being treated as just that. A commodity. It’s much more likely that you’ll have women afraid to walk the streets for fear of being dragged off somewhere for gang rape by gangs of men who have no access to women. Especially in places that already don’t treat women well.

88

The issue I have with “legal polygamy” is that the costs and benefits are not yet well articulated.

Is seems to me that the benefit is the legitimacy and respectability accorded to the “role” or title of being married: being able to call someone else a husband or wife, as you choose.

The cost of polygamy is that it will I believe make a mess of existing legal arrangements. This isn’t a trivial cost; it has very real and practical drawbacks. Such drawbacks will not fall on “the law” as an abstraction, but on people attempting to make sense of their affairs.

Since the reality is that there is no law preventing people from forming whatever sorts of relationships they want (it isn’t illegal to be “polyamorous”), why not seperate out the title of “marriage”, “husband” and “wife” from the legal status of “spouse”? Leave the laws in place for “spouses” - namely, that one may only have a single legal “spouse” for tax and benefits purposes - and open the field to the title of “marriage” - so that people can, under whatever cultural or religious rules they operate under, have as many “wives” and “husbands” in whatever configuration they want to.

Seems to me this would satisfy the real liberty and legitimacy concerns, while not creating a hugely expensive legal mess.

89

And this is what it really comes down to, I think. The answer to “why don’t they…” is almost always “money.”

90

Well, in this case there is of course a big heaping side dish of “cultural factors” as well. Many people in our culture plain don’t like polyamorousness and don’t see any particular reason to accomodate it or legitimize it in any manner.

However, assuming a perfect world devoid of cultural constraints, “money” (or rather, cost-benefit) would still be a dominant factor in therms of the legal situation.

91

I’m talking about actual, legally recognized polygamous marriages in cultures such as the one mentioned in the OP. Polygamy is not legally recognized in the situation of American damaged goods trying to avoid an actual intimate relationship by having a perpetual threesome–that’s a totally different situation from what polygamy is all about in the Arab and African cultures that practice it. As bizarre and dishonest about their motives as the American three-way relationship people are, their behavior certainly shouldn’t be illegal–it’s not the government’s place to force everyone to be a model of emotional health, and there’s certainly plenty of dysfunctional monogamous relationships that no one is clamoring to ban anyhow.

The people who actually understand themselves to be “married” to more than one other person–the Kuwaitis, Nigerians, breakaway Mormons, etc–are also cultures where brides are sold as goods, incest taboos are negotiable, and the concept of “consenting adults” as a precondition to sex presents not just one but two puzzling words for the males. The correlation between culturally embraced polygamy and all that other bad stuff is hardly a coincidence.

92

Worldwide, the acceptance of polygamy is the norm, not the exception. Murdock’s “Ethnograpic Atlas Codebook” surveyed pretty much all the cultures we had decent information on and correlated factors across cultures to see where differences and commonalities were. There’s a PDF that I found online here that shows the breakdown. Of the 1231 cultures for which data existed, only 186 were preferentially monogamous. Most practiced some form of polygamy, and 4 practiced some kind of polyandry.

That means that there’s no particular reason it can’t work. In fact, it does work in the vast majority of human societies. And like a couple of people in this thread recently said, marriage arrangements often come down to money. In the case of polygamy one reason that people get together in group marriages is because it makes economic sense. There are benefits for sharing work burdens, having a larger pool of support, safeguarding against disaster, among other reasons.

This paper discusses the economics of polygyny. It’s fairly technical (frankly, some of the math is over my head), though broad and not considered by the author to be an extensive treatment on the subject. The view that the only reason men marry multiple wives is to get hot second-wife sex is too simplistic. There are a lot of reasons social, economic, and practical, that polygamous marriage takes place.

The legal problems that people have pointed out are largely due to some assumptions about the benefits that are folded into marriage contracts. If those things were spelled out instead of being assumed, I think that it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to write marriage contracts that work for multiple marriages. After all, we’ve got examples from over 1000 cultures, including past examples even in European cultures, as to what works and what doesn’t.

Multiple divorces can often bring more legal entanglements than I think a good multiple-marriage contract would. It could be argued that what we’ve got now, serial monogamy, is an inferior form of polygamy. While a man in our society can’t be married to more than one woman at a time, he often has to support more than one household. His wives don’t get the benefit of of labor-sharing and de-facto daycare/babysitting from the co-spouse, and all of them don’t get the economic benefit of having a shared household with lower costs than multiple households.

The laws and customs of inheritance, alimony, child support, custody, and property division can get quite complex, and even worse have to be ironed out after the fact because there’s no provision in the marriage contract itself to handle any of that. The laws we have regarding the disposition of those things after marriage are tacked onto a system where the default used to be a lifelong contract, but many, perhaps most, marriages do not last for a lifetime.

It’s not like modern industrial society hasn’t dealt with group living either. An extreme example, kibbutzim could be considered a form of large-scale group marriage, as marriage itself is sometimes discouraged as being undesirable for the community.

If we’re ever going to have same-sex marriages, these kinds of difficulties will have to be wrestled with to some extent anyway. Might as well do it right and consider everything at once rather than have a bunch of ad hoc kludges hacked onto the system to handle cases as they come up.

Something to note is that even in cultures where it’s considered highly desirable to have more than one spouse, it’s not particularly common, for any number of reasons both personal and economic. So even if we came up with a completely workable solution and approved it tomorrow, there wouldn’t be a huge rush of people getting into group marriages. It would probably be like the majority of polygamous societies around the world; mostly monogamous, a few with two spouses, and a very few (usually around 2% or less) with more than two spouses. I seriously doubt there would be any great societal upheaval caused by allowing people to get married to more than one person, especially when by all indications a small minority would be the only ones doing it.

93

You’re begging the question of “existing” being the same as “working.” Of course a system in which men trade their underage female relatives among each other like canned goods “works” for the polygamous males who define what that culture is. So what? Not all cultural practices are good.

94

And you’re making the mistake of generalizing about cultures you know nothing about from an extremely biased stereotype. Child brides are the exception, not the rule, in almost every culture on earth, regardless of whether they practice polygamy or not.

Family isolation lends itself to horrific child abuse that the community may not find out about for years, if ever, and such isolation is the norm in most of the western world, particularly in the US. Our method of divorce divides families and separates children from their parents, in some cases irreparably damaging the relationship. Child support laws in many states lend themselves to predatory practices where women deliberately get pregnant in order to get support from a man, without marrying him. The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world, and young and single parenthood contributes greatly to poverty, infant mortality, and worse mother outcomes, and there is a strong correlation between poverty and abuse rates. So, how are our cultural practices so incredibly better than what you’re so dismissive of?

95

Wait…why do I have to believe or prove that the U.S. is good/perfect before I can question a practice in another culture? Especially since one of the cultures I criticized, the Mormon offshoots, does in fact exist in America alone?

96

Huh - am I being whooshed here? A child “belongs” to the mother regardless of the best interests of the child?

97

No, you don’t have to prove that the US is perfect before you criticize, but it might help to get some perspective. There are serious problems in the US stemming from how most people live. Some of those problems would probably not exist in a group marriage. Think about it, 85% of the cultures surveyed in the source I cited were polygamous. Eighty-five percent of the world population is a big damn chunk of people. If polygamy didn’t work, it absolutely wouldn’t be found in as many cultures as it is. Do you honestly think they’re all a bunch of child-raping, boy-killing, old men? People aren’t stupid, you know. We all want pretty much the same things out of life, no matter what our language or customs are.

Your criticism about the one group in the US is directed at an extremely minor population belonging to a branch sect of a church. Actually, more like a branch of a branch, since not even all polygamist groups get big spectacular headlines for doing abusive things. The ones that have stable lives and loving families are not the ones you’re going to hear about most of the time.

I doubt you’re particularly well informed about any of the groups you’ve mentioned because you seem to be generalizing the behaviors of minorities across whole cultures. Not all “Arab and African” cultures are the same. You’re talking about a huge group of people that are ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse, and saying that they all have the same customs. This is absurd.

My opinion is that you’re speaking out of uninformed prejudice because you have an emotional reaction about the issue. You’re picking out examples that confirm your views while ignoring those that don’t. The fact of the matter is that the problems you mention are not universal, they are often condemned by the community in which such abuses do take place, and just because things like males being marginalized might happen with one group of people doesn’t mean that it has to happen with all groups who live that way.

You could have picked a different way to criticize the issue. Just because I think it’s possible to have polygamy in the US doesn’t mean I think it’s going to happen. There are valid arguments you could have used. Pointing to spectacular stories of things that happen in cultures you’re not particularly familiar with is not one of them.

98

You keep saying this, but it’s a non sequitur. Rape is found in every culture. Murder is found in every culture. More germanely, domestic violence is found and tolerated in almost every culture. Nearly every culture outside of India eats meat, but that doesn’t mean vegetarians are automatically wrong. Every culture allows people to drive cars, it doesn’t mean global warming can’t exist. Culture is a fact about how the world is, and says nothing about how the world ought to be.

YOU are generalizing from cherry-picked examples of polygamy being possible in the abstract that are presented by dogmatic cultural-relativists in anthropology classes. Just because most cultures allow for polygamy doesn’t mean most marriages in those cultures are in fact polygamous, and just because there’s some Muslim woman somewhere who is happy to go on television and talk about how great it is to be purchased as 1/4 of a wife at age 13 because her husband will set her on fire if she says otherwise doesn’t mean that this arrangement is actually good for the women involved, objectively speaking.

99

Murder and rape are condemned in every culture, not accepted. Domestic violence is not acceptable in every culture, or even most cultures. At the very least wife beaters will face social disapproval, in most places there will be legal repercussions. Your examples are not good ones for supporting your argument.

I’m not cherry picking. You are the one who keeps coming up with spectacular claims of where it goes wrong. Sure, you can find tons of shocking stories if you look for them, but like I said, that’s because those stories are the ones that find an audience. You don’t find front page news screaming, “Fatima Likes Having Second Wife Around!” Stuff that makes international news is bound to be horrible and spectacular.

Take a look at the local newspaper in any city in America and you can see examples of where our system goes wrong. That doesn’t mean that our way of living is crap, it means that people suck. The same is true everywhere in the world. No matter how good the system is, things don’t always work perfectly. I’m also not denying that abuses do happen in polygamous societies, but they are not anywhere near as widespread as you’re claiming, even in places where marriage customs lend themselves to abuse.

And I said in my first post that even in places where having multiple spouses is desired rather than just allowed, most people do not have more than one. Most people are monogamous even if their culture supports polygamy. There are a lot of reasons that’s true.

Have you ever read ethnologies featuring polygamous societies? The reason I think it can be a good system is because of reading about it, much of it not from the “ivory tower” of an academic outlook, but in the form of first-hand accounts from people living that way. I was frankly surprised to read that wives are sometimes the ones who ask their husbands to take a second wife so that they can have help around the household, an extra caregiver for the children, and the windfall of wealth a dowry can bring. There are practical reasons for having multiple spouses. It makes life easier and more stable in many circumstances.

You seem really angry about this, so do me a favor: instead of basing your outrage on newspaper stories, try reading some books about the people from a more intimate point of view. Read some sources that have interviews with people from these places, things written by anthropologists who have lived with them for months or years at a time. Try actually learning about a couple of the cultures you’re smearing with your broad brush view of “polygamy = child-rape, torture, burning women alive”. I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find things a lot more nuanced than you thought.

100

So what’s to stop me from marrying 2 or 3 or for that matter 40 women just so they can get a green card? Say I charge them $5000 per marriage, then we charge for the “new husbands” and I can make a hefty sum just to get people in the country past the immagration laws.

And for tha matter, do you legislate a finite number of spuses in one marriage? If not, and if there is any tax/legal advantage to being in a poly-marriage, what stops an entire town from claiming that they are are all one big, happy family?