And what does it change wrt medical decisions?
Established precedent.
Agreement here. Polygamy would need to be modelled on a corporate template - individuals can join and leave while the corporation continues on. Single-partner marriage would then be a sub-set of marriages, like a corporation with two stockholders each holding 50% of the assets.
I think this would be fine to me, with the emphasis on the “sub-set” part. So long as two-partner-marriage runs under the same rules as a three- or four-partner marriage, I would have no particular difficulty with it.
Incest, yes, I find icky. But plenty of people find gay marriage icky. If I am asking people to overlook their ickiness and do what’s fair, then I’m obliged to do the same myself or have people correctly point out my hypocriticism. In that and the case of polygamy, I’d want a shitload of protections to try and avoid potential abuse, and we’d need to look after changing things to make sure that’s something we can actually stamp out enough to make it reasonable, but I don’t have a theoretical issue with allowing polygamy or incest-included marriages.
My main objection to incestual marriages is that I have not been shown why they woudl be needed.
A marriage (as I understand the concept) is a contract that officially recognizes another person as being “next of kin” with the rights and responsibility of family. In a consanguineous marriage, the persons are already legally recognized as being related.
If you know of any rights and responsibilities legally awarded a spouse which cannot also be easily given to a sibling, please let me know.
Often, who makes a decision is whoever the hospital can get on the phone, in the case of multiple siblings. I ended up making some minor decisions about my father’s end-of-life comfort during the times I was sitting with him, and my mother was getting some time to herself. I was in New York with my parents, and my brother was in Chicago-- and this was before cell phones were ubiquitous. My brother made no decisions by virtue of the fact that he wasn’t there.
My mother made all the major decisions that needed to be in writing, and my father signed a DNR when he was still competent to do so, although it appears that personnel can ignore them with no repercussions.
Now, if a man has five wives, the likelihood is that they will all be RIGHT THERE. And there is no practical hierarchy of whom to call first, like the hospital knowing to call my mother first, the child living locally second, and if a decision had to be made ASAP, the child out-of-town third. Had my brother object to being third, he could have come to NY, but it wasn’t necessary, and he needed to work.
I suppose part of polygamous marriage could be that the first spouse makes life-&-death decisions, unless the spouse appoints another with a power of attorney.
Something else that needs to be clear is the relationship among the spouses. Are they legally kin? This has all kinds of implications from rental car agreements, to whether two women married to the same man are next-of-kin. Suppose two wives of the same man go on a day trip, and get onto a car accident, and one is severely injured. Is the other allowed to make decisions for the one who is badly injured and unconscious, or does someone need to get hold of the husband, or one of her blood relatives?
Also, most people imagine polygamous marriages to be several members of one gender, married to one person of the other gender, but suppose two couples want to marry and be a foursome? Suppose, for example, a lesbian and a gay couple want to marry for the purpose of having children and parenting them together? I have a lesbian cousin who raised two children with her partner, and a gay male couple who are the children’s fathers, and the children turned out great. I would have no problem giving their situation formal recognition. My cousin is the bio-mother of both kids, because her girlfriend is diabetic, but all four of them have shared equally in caring for both the kids. Of course, when they first got together, SSM was illegal, and as it happens, they are legally two heterosexual couples. One couple is legally the parents of one child, and the other is the legal, adoptive parents of the other. It’s weird, but is has worked for them for 20 years.
I think the country in general isn’t ready for two-tier marriage, which is to say couple-couple marriage, and I don’t know that will ever happen.
If polygamy isn’t just men with lots of wives, but wives with more than one husband, and couple unions, then the “problem” of unequal distribution goes away. I’m not looking for this to happen any time soon, though.
Besides the good objection that clairobscur raised… why would you think that? None of the other great ape species is monogamous. Most societies have historically been polygamous (that is, they have allowed polygamy even if not everyone was able to practice it). The evidence leans heavily towards us being “naturally” polygamous.
I assume that anyone who disagrees with this is a bisexual or homosexual who has “chosen” to be straight – just like the preachers who rail against the sinful and decadent lifestyle of homosexuals are likely extremely attracted to that lifestyle.
Yes, the “is the society really ready for this” point is IMO much farther away for these modes than it was for SSM even a whole generation ago; they require more and larger changes *both *cultural and legal.
SSM had the advantage that in practice it only took replacing gender-specific language, but otherwise the nuts-and-bolts of what the civil contract involves remain intact in both letter and effect (especially since the view evolved of the married couple as a partnership freely entered between individuals who are full equals before the law, rather than an alliance between families with a “head of household” to whom the other was subordinate in everything). All you change is what the parties look like.
The incestuous/plural variants, OTOH, create a whole other set of problems since they would require altering of the civil contract as well as of the social standard. There’s more to those than “We’ve always done it this way”, in fact our culture has generally viewed moving *away *from polygamy and close-kin marriage as “progress”. The embrace of SSM provides little support beyond showing that sociocultural inertia eventually may be overcome, and nobody was arguing that SSM was “backward”.
The last few posts have addressed many of the issues that would have to be dealt with in establishing a legal order for plural marriages. In the case of incestuous marriages you would have to deal with, for instance, whether you divide or allot inheritances or properties as per the marital or the familial relationship, or how if the marriage ends up being dissolved the parties may still *remain *legally next-of-kin to one another with all that entails (first cousin marriages are not really a good counterexample, as generally it is unusual for someone to have no other surviving relatives on a closer line).
Among US states, at least one that I know for sure, and I sort of recall there were a couple others but can’t remember which right now, already do not have a statute specifically outlawing consenting-adult incest, so it’s not like the very notion itself causes a major collapse in public order.
In the end, to be honest about it, were it plausible to take care of all the various issues involved and mentioned upthread, I do not see how I’d be able to insist on polygamous or incestuous union being malum per se.
I support SSM. As long as everyone involved is a consenting adult I’m fine with polygamous or polyamorous marriage.
Define incestuous. In many states it is perfectly legal for first cousins to marry. If you are talking about parent/child or sibling relationships, then loosing that taboo might well lead directly to an increase of abuse against children.
Sure, an argument. Let’s set out the initial assumptions that make pair marriages good, whatever the sex of the pair involved, only when the pair is not already part of an existing immediate family (incest exception). But any larger combination not good (3 or more).
Assumptions:
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The nuclear family. We assume that two parents and their children form the core of family. The children grow up in this family and then go out into the world and create their own nuclear families to in turn raise their own children in. We assume that this is the best way for children to grow up, and we also assume that even in the absence of children, these pair-of-adults families form a base stability for society.
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Innate sexual and romantic orientation. We assume that many people have an innate orientation whereby they can only be happy paired with others who match what they are oriented to. We further assume that most people have an innate orientation toward the category of people with whom they can naturally reproduce, but that a substatial minority of people have an innate orientation to bond with a person from some other category, with whom they cannot naturally reproduce, but because all the other drives are there, they will still form a family with that person. And we assume that this is a built in human need for many people that they cannot be happy without.
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We assume that the laws we now have are good laws and need only minor changes.
Given those assumptions matching reality, the best thing to do is to allow any pair of consenting adults to marry and form the adult part of a new nuclear family. It is counter-productive to allow additional adults to adhere to this because they cannot be part of that nuclear family. It is counter-productive to allow members of the same nuclear family to marry because it risks damaging the nuclear family they both come from in order to cannibalize it for a new one. It is also needlessly cruel to restrict formation of nuclear families to individuals who can naturally reproduce.
The arguments that other societies have information about polygamy from practicing it is flawed in that there are (that I know of) no countries that have legal egalitarian polygamy without regard to sex. Are there even any countries that let women marry multiple husbands? If not, then we still have no examples to follow in that regard.
If incestuous marriage became legal, I think one of the first special laws regarding it would be a different age of consent-- like 21. Right now, a girl can get married in Indiana with parental consent when she is 16, or without it if she is pregnant. I don’t like the idea of a father giving consent for his 16-year-old daughter to marry him. Actually, I’d like to see the age of consent be more like 25, but I doubt that would fly, and I’d settle for 21. Also, I don’t think 16-year-old girl pregnant by her father should be emancipated to marry him. That is still child abuse, and probably statutory rape (I’m not sure what Indiana’s laws are regarding the age gap, or the age of consent with a non-relative vs. statutory rape by a relative). A father should not be rewarded for abusing his daughter by getting to marry her.
If a child wants to marry a parent, in addition to a 21-year-old age of consent, the son or daughter should probably have to sign a statement that there was no sexual contact between them before the child was 18.
That probably sounds burdensome, and maybe even not fair, because it isn’t required of other couples, but there needs to be some measure taken to prevent coercion, and to make sure the marriage license isn’t license to continue abuse that began a long time ago. A woman who is 21 should in theory be just as able to consent as any other woman, but if she was continually raped by her father growing up, and then he demands that she marry him, she may not be able to say “No” to him, even if she desperately wants to.
Parent child marriage is never becoming legal, so you don’t have to worry about that. I’d be more worried about other forms of incest (cousin marriage, for example), since they’re actually common in many parts of the world, and if immigration form those regions continued, there might be a strong demand to legalize them.
First cousin marriages are completely legal in 19 states, sometimes legal in six states, and legal if they were performed legally elsewhere in 50 states. Ship’s sailed.
And it didn’t take immigrants to make it happen. :rolleyes:
They’re still skeevy as hell though, right ?
It’s the “sometimes legal” cases that, I figure, finish any arguments against SSM that hinge on a lack of ability to procreate. In those six states, cousin marriage is contingent on not reproducing, so there’s obviously no reason a requirement to reproduce or an expectation of reproduction is legally necessary.
Rare result of a general rule vs. systemic, self-perpetuating (self-increasing in fact) risk. The latter would probably justify a ruling on the former for consistency’s sake but it hasn’t come up yet, so, whatever.
And yes, society does have a “right” to poke its nose in there, because society bears the increased weight of messed-up offspring of “defective” unions (be it in terms of “simple” health risks, mental problems, complete fuckuppery and everything in-between). Incestuous unions are necessarily endogamous, so that’s as good a place as any to start legiferatin’.
My uncle has been married six times, and I suspect most of his wives married him because he’s filthy rich from his slumlord earnings. If I’m thinking of skeevy as hell marriages, first cousin marriages aren’t where my mind goes to first.
Well, they’re pretty rare now. If we get more immigration from India and the Middle East, they’ll certainly become more common, and there may be more public outrage directed towards them. As mentioned above, in England incestuous marriage among South Asian immigrants is a major social problem.