I have trouble believing that close relatives can adequately consent to a marriage relationship, particular parent-child or grandparent-grandchild. If siblings (say, two that weren’t raised together) wanted to get married, I would have no objection. These days, they are fully capable of getting genetic counselling if they want children.
So once we have established that it is, in fact, a relationship of consenting adults without abuse, no problem. I think that’s a pretty high bar, though, and I have no idea how one would establish it, or on whom the burden of proof would fall.
Polygamy:
As others have said, it’s fundamentally a practical problem in that having 3+ people in a marriage relationship complicates the legalities enormously. There is also concern for abuse, particularly abuse of women, given the historical precedent, but that I think is a more solvable problem.
There’s a bit of irony in that not long ago, someone would have said that it was inherently impossible for two men to have a healthy relationship. So I’m willing to listen with an open mind to people making the arguments that incestuous or polygamous relationships aren’t harmful, and hear how they would solve the logistical difficulties in expanding marriage to multiple adults. If they can do that, fine, let them marry.
I was going to post but then I saw this and didn’t have to, because it says pretty much what I was going to. I am not opposed to polygamy per se; it just can’t be done within our existing legal framework.
I am not entirely sure what to make of incestuous marriages. In another thread I discovered that the birth defect issue isn’t nearly as large as I previously thought, so I’m still coming around to my new position (assuming I take one).
I encourage you to read up so we don’t need to repeat previous discussions.
Brief answers:
INCEST: the overwhelming majority of incest cases begin as statutory rape between non-equal parties. The number of adults neither of whom raped the other as a child who want to become married is, I believe, vanishingly small. I believe that if we made civil unions a thing, that number would increase (for example, an adult son may wish to combine legal status with an elderly mother, even if he doesn’t want to sleep with her, in order to simplify the legal status of providing her with care), and that’s the main reason at this point that I still think civil unions should be a thing–but again, it’s a very small number of people.
Polygamy suffers from two issues. First, there’s the power differential: as practiced in the US, many, many polygamous relationships are patriarchal to a fault and can result in some ugly abuse of the wives. That is not, in my opinion, a sufficient reason to oppose polygamy, since there are also non-abusive polygamous relationships.
The better reason is that polygamous marriages are fundamentally different both from one another and from binary marriages: the people in them have so many different structures to their relationships that it’s very difficult to figure out a one-size-fits-all model for them. Furthermore, hundreds of years of case law addressing couple marriages doesn’t apply to many poly situations (for example, if Mary marries Bob, as does Steve, and Steve has kids, and Bob dies, does any part of his inheritance go to Steve’s kids?) We should eventually allow poly relationships, lacking a moral reason not to, but doing so will require a helluva lot more logistical and legislative work than the toddler-with-a-red-crayon approach that suffices to change the laws to allow SSM.
Again, I recommend you read on previous answers to this question.
I actually don’t have any moral or ethical objections to either incestuous or polygamous marriage. I suspect, though, that ensuring informed consent among adults, and ensuring that coercion is not a factor, become significantly more difficult in these cases.
Possibly, but if it’s consenting adults, then the wives entered into it voluntarily, just like there are spouses who enter into traditional marriages voluntarily.
I’d like to point out a fundamental inconsistency in your OP: you start by asking about arguments in favor of gay marriage, but then you only go on to talk about arguments against incestuous or polygamous marriage. If the quoted sentence is really what you want to ask about, how about giving us what you think are the arguments in favor of gay marriage?
While we don’t have any experience with polygamous marriages, there are plenty of countries which do, so this isn’t a good argument. The power imbalance argument is much better - until we have a society where women are truly equal with respect to results it sounds like a bad idea.
But it is even worse in terms of income inequality. It is bad enough that the 1% have most of the money - should we let them get most of the spouses also? And they would. And advertise their harems in the Style section.
No thanks.
If you include relationships between various sorts of cousins, incestuous marriage is actually extremely common in some parts of the world (notably in South Asia and I think some parts of Africa and the Middle East). Among South Asian immigrant communities in Britain and Africa, it’s actually led to significant health problems.
In my ethnic group, for example (Tamils) a study was done a few decades ago that suggested that full siblings in rural areas shared on average 52% of their genes, rather than the canonical 50%, which suggests a fair amount of inbreeding.
In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is a difference.
If you can ensure that multiple spouse marriages do not routinely result in marginalized women dependent on a central male figure, I would drop that objection to the idea. I reject the theoretical idea that all participants are equal, because this is reality, not theory.
I’d like to hear from these women who are angling to have multiple husbands. Let’s hear their stories about how they were denied access to their beloved partner’s deathbed because their relationship was not recognized by the state.
I guess the question is, is incest rare because it is taboo, or is it rare because people inherently don’t want to do it? Remove all the incest taboos, make it legal and accepted, are we going to see society altering increases in incest?
The basic social problem with polygamy is that in a society with even gender ratios, if some men have many wives that means other men won’t be able to find sexual / romantic partners. In a society like Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance (where something like 50% of women and 90% of men had been killed, leaving five women alive for every man), polygamy could work excellently. Not here and now, though.
Of course, you could get around that by having a heavily licenced system of polygamy, where you had to apply for a license to have multiple spouses, and the government doled out equal numbers of polygynist and polyandrist licenses so as to keep the gender ratio even. Alternaively if you achieved a heavily biased sex ratio (through artificially assisted reproduction- we know now how to distort sex ratios, without even needing to use selective abortion- or through wars, plagues etc. that differentially killed men).
I don’t think that’s a good argument. Consanguinity compounds with repeated cycles of inbreeding, so you can’t just look at the first generation of offspring and say ‘no problem’.
Also, incest corrodes pre-existing family relationships (or has the potential to) by inappropriately sexualizing them.
Nice if you had bothered to read the rest of my post. “We don’t know how to do this” is not a good argument against if lots of other countries have done it. There are lots of better arguments against.
Take the same argument and apply it to the “traditionalist” view.
You’re saying gay couples shouldn’t be allowed to get married.
So aren’t you also saying that straight couples shouldn’t be allowed to get married?
Arguing that gay couples shouldn’t be allowed to get married because of incest makes as much sense as saying gay couples shouldn’t be allowed to get married because of global warming. You’re throwing in something that has no relevance to the issue.
Velocity, today there are same sex marriages in 33 states. If the campaigns in each of those states had been for “Gay/Incest/Poly” marriages you know damn well not one state would have changed it’s laws, so let’s not pretend otherwise.
Regarding the ‘legal complexity’ thing, you could simply borrow from the legal countries of other countries (including former British colonies, which presumably share some of our legal tradition) that allow polygamy.
I am morally fine with poly marriages (assuming no abuse, but then that applies to two person marriages also). Legally, I think it should be treated as a business partnership, with whatever rules there are for distributing the assets when a business with more than 2 people dissolves (similar to divorce). My only real concern is making sure the kids are treated fairly, but I believe family court gives wide latitude to judges in this matter anyway to allow for a case-by-base treatment.
I think the big reason poly relationships don’t get the media traction is that the number of people wanting to enter a poly relationship is quite low and there’s not the groundswell of support to get the politicians to rewrite the laws for them.
As far as incestuous marriages, the genetic thing with the offspring is the thing that worries me. I haven’t heard a good argument against that.
