Bullshit. Life is a series of inconsistencies, and so is the law. Humans make choices. It isn’t “eat nothing” vs “eat everything.” You choose a meal size of your liking. I can kill flies but I can’t kill people. Your position isn’t at all logical, and it can’t be *made *logical. Just admit that your invisible friend doesn’t like it (although the evidence is really scanty about said opinion) and move on.
That in no way answers my question.
Again, how so? Assuming you both made monogamous vows to each other, why would, if polygamy were made legal, you expect other people to just begin to enter your marriage? Do you or your husband not respect those vows?
I vote for eliminating marriage altogether.
Nope. There have always been all kinds of arrangements in society.
This Cracked article touches on some of them: 5 Modern Controversies That Have Been Around Forever | Cracked.com —
The nuclear family is not “traditional.”
People violate their marriage vows all the time. I assume that puzzlegal and her husband are both decent, honest people, but dishonest jerks get married too and legalizing polygamy could potentially make things even worse for their unlucky spouses.
Polygamy as it is practiced in other countries today generally does not require a wife to consent to her husband marrying another woman. (AFAIK no country currently allows a woman to have multiple husbands.) I think a lot of Americans would have a big problem with the idea that their spouse could unilaterally decide to legally add a third party to their marriage. Divorce would of course be an option in the US, but property division and custody arrangements in a divorce with three parties involved would presumably be even more complicated than a divorce between two people, so an after-the-fact divorce doesn’t seem like the best solution in cases where one spouse never wanted to be in a polygamous marriage in the first place.
If the US legalized polygamy then we wouldn’t have to do it the same way other countries have – at the very least we’d presumably allow multiple husbands as well as multiple wives – and I can imagine several ways that polygamy could be implemented that would protect people from having new co-spouses sprung on them without their prior agreement. But this is something advocates for polygamous marriage are going to need to address if they want the idea to gain mainstream acceptance.
If there’s going to be a problem via adultery, I don’t think it needs any help by legalizing polygamy. Adultery is alive and well. Looking for a lifestyle to blame because you or your spouse want’s some “strange”, isn’t the real problem, then. Your marriage is fundamentally broken.
Legalizing polygamy doesn’t somehow, magically, make your own monogamous marriage a polygamous/polyamorous one.
Exactly. There are a lot of i’s to dot and t’s to cross to get there.
No, it doesn’t automatically make my marriage polygamous. But it does automatically open the question.
As for the vows we took, hmm, I think they were something along the lines of “according to the laws of the people of Israel”, so maybe my husband didn’t vow monogamy… Well, not formally, anyway.
I’m certainly not claiming that every monogamous marriage would instantly become polygamous. I assume most wouldn’t. But it would change the legal nature of every marriage, even if it didn’t retroactively change the moral nature.
By the way, I once attended a marriage of two polyamorous folks. They explicitly avoided vowing monogamy. They vowed “to put you ahead of all others”, or something like that. The current laws don’t, by any means, prevent consensual polyamory. They do affect the legal status of such relationships.
I’m not sure what this has to do with my post, which was about the potential problem of a new co-spouse being added to a marriage and gaining rights regarding the existing property and children of that marriage without the consent of the first spouse. The whole point of legally recognizing polygamous marriage would be to grant the rights of marriage to multiple spouses at the same time. If it were just about having sex with different partners then that’s something people can already legally do.
Legal polygamy in the rest of the world already unmagically allows a man to bring home a new wife without the consent of his previous wife or wives. Polygamous marriage in the US could be different and more equitable, but if polygamous marriage advocates want to win over the general public then they’re going to have to explain exactly how this would work.
Except , of course that’s not what the order actually says. What it actually says is that gendered terms are to be construed as gender neutral until the language in the rules and forms are changed.* Forms will say something like spouse “Spouse 1” and “spouse 2” instead of “husband” and “wife” . It doesn’t mean that during an actual case the various parties cannot be referred to by their relationships.
*These things have happened before- there was a time when it was common for rape laws to be written in such a way that only men could be guilty.Court decisions generally changed that before the legislatures, so for a while even though the law said “man” it was to be construed as “person”
Yes.
The human race is a naturally polygamous species. It’s how we’ve evolved.
You should check out the research on testicle size as it relates to monogamy and polygamy and where homo sapiens fall in the spectrum. It’s in the polygamy area.
So, yes, they were born polygamous.
No, it’s not. The human species has evolved to be nominally (serially) monogamous with continued infidelity on both sides. In other words, coupling + cheating.
Treppenverter: “Non-traditional” is no more a type of marriage than “non-forty-six” is a number or “non-nostril” is a body part.
Oh, well if only on legal documents that’s different. Somehow.
Who gives a shit what words are used in an Ohio Supreme Court? Whose marriage will be substantively affected by the use of “parent” instead of “mother” in a custody dispute? What do you anticipate happening next, and how do you get to there from here? This looks to me to be long on innuendo and short on substance. A court made a reasonable logistical stopgap decision. Extrapolating from it the end of the nuclear family is hilarious nonsense.
It’s inconceivable that polygamy would be legalized in the US in a way that allows a person to enter into multiple marriages without the consent of previous spouse[s]. While I agree that the logistical details are more complicated than Richard Parker is making them out to be, the idea of your husband springing a second wife (or husband) on you is never going to be an issue in this country.
I don’t agree - here in Canada at least, the change was very easy from a legal, drafting POV. All it took was re-defining “spouse”. That was it.
Well, therein lies the problem. What makes a particular form of marriage a “fundamental right”?
In the case of SSM, the primary impetus (again, at least here in Canada) was the recognition that it was unfair to disallow a legal status that as fundamentally similar in pretty well every respect to gay persons - that changing the gender of the persons involved didn’t really make any findamental difference.
Opponents tried to argue against this fundamental similarity, but their arguments lacked merit. For example: marriage is for procreation, thus gays ought to be disentitled (the counter-argument being, we don’t prevent sterile straights from marrying).
In the case of various polyamourous combinations, this ‘argument from fundamental fairness because of similarity’ breaks down. A group is not the same thing as a couple and the ‘slippery slope’ potential is vast - there is no obvious limit as to how large a ‘group marriage’ could be. Why would it be a violation of any ‘fundamental right’ to say that a small town cannot claim that every member is “married” to every other in a way that has legal implications?
It isn’t that ‘if one has a fundamental right, the details - while vexing - aren’t important’. It is ‘if there is no obvious similarity between A and B, there is no obvious reason why depriving B of the legal status accorded to A volates any findamental right’.
There is a Tibetan group with a long history of polyandry (one woman multiple husbands) and as far as I know they are still legally able to engage in the practice. There is also a group of Arctic Native Americans that have a long standing tradition of polyandry (specifically, one woman two husbands). It’s rare, but not unknown.
Actually, the human species is mildly polygamous - in hunter-gatherer and small tribal societies most people have only one partner at a time. Occasionally someone will have more than one partner, but it’s almost always someone who is extremely good at securing resources (an exceptional hunter, for example), necessary for survival in marginal environments (the Native group I mentioned where the pattern was 1 woman 2 husbands), or marriage of twins or other siblings to one individual.
Cheating is not mandated, just an option than many never take. Likewise, polygamy is an option, one that many never take.
The link in the OP is regarding a former Mormon man now unaffiliated with any religion. In the Mormon or former Mormon community that practices polygamy, does the first wife have consent over bringing further wives home? I know that there have been some Mormon cults that practiced polygamy where the wives had practically no say, but I don’t know if that’s an outlier or not. I guess it might be hard to get data since many would try to fly under the radar.
But I agree, I’d like to hear from polygamous marriage advocates. If I hear from some explaining how their marriages are equitable and needed, I’m open to listen. If I hear that men should have the choice to bring home extra wives regardless of what the first wife thinks, and only men could have multiple marriages, I’m less open to hearing what they have to say. But like I’ve said in other threads, the vast majority of times that polygamous marriage is brought up, it’s not by people promoting polygamous marriage, it’s people against same-sex marriage grasping at straws. I’m less willing to hear their arguments, because those arguments are often flimsy.