Three real-life friends of mine–a lesbian couple and a straight man–are having a baby together. I happen to know that at least one of the two women is bisexual rather than exclusively lesbian, and I note that the guy has recently moved into the other half of the townhouse the ladies inhabit. I do not know how the baby was conceived – that is, whether it was the old fashioned method or via syringe – but it is nonetheless conceivable to me that they’ve begun a de facto three-way marriage but are simply not acknowledging that publicly.
Which brings me to the thread questions.
Can you imagine that yourself ever entering into such an arrangement?
If the answer to (1) is yes, and if plural lmarriage were legal in your jurisdiction, would you make it legal?
Regardess of the answer to the above two questions, do you think the seemingly-inevitable nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage will lead to a similar sea change in regards to plural marriage?
Can I ever! Ok, serious answer: Yeah, I could imagine that. I don’t think that it’s very likely, but I guess it might happen.
I think that plural marriages should be legal. There are a number of workable frameworks.
I don’t think that it’s inevitable. If the groundswell of public opinion that’s shifting on SSM were really due to a principled and reasoned believe that “however people want to live their lives, it’s fine with me”, then I would think so. But I think most people don’t really have a coherent philosophy of how the state should recognize and enforce personal relationships, so what you’re really seeing is a shift from “gay people are icky”, to “hey, my friend Joe is gay, and he’s ok”. Whether or not we’ll ever see the transition to “Hey, that triad Mike, Judy, and Lola are ok” is not obvious.
1 - No, I’m too jealous of a person to share a spouse with another, and I don’t have the kind of character that would allow for a “you’re both my wife, not each other’s wife” kind of deal. Seems too selfish.
2 - N/A
3 - I think a lot of polygamists wish it was, and I think a lot of anti SSM activists try to link the two via a slippery slope argument, but I think they are really orthogonal to each other.
Personally, I’m with yellowjacketcoder: it wouldn’t work for me.
Yes, I believe it should be legal. It’s going to require some VERY detailed legislation, however, to cover distribution of survivors’ benefits, power of attorney, and so on. You might easily end up with an immortal marriage: the original contractees are long dead, but with people marrying in, the contract itself still lives.
No, not inevitable, but I think likely. As with gay marriage, once it is seen to be pretty much harmless, the opposition will begin to look ridiculous. When they get to the point of, “We have to prevent this because it changes the meaning of the word ‘marriage’ in the dictionary,” we’ll know they’ve lost.
It depends. I can’t imagine I could be with my wife and another guy, but selfishly if there was another girl involved I’m sure I could. If I was in me/lesbian/lesbian(or bi) situation then I definitely could since it’d be practical for all involved…even while raising a kid.
I don’t think they should be legal because IM(uninformed)O there is too much red tape re: divorces and death that I think the fallout of a failed multi-marriage is too taxing for the benefits of one
I do not believe it will ever happen legally. It’s been hard enough trying to figure out gay marriage and that’s literally the exact same thing as regular marriage. Can you imagine trying to make society ok with multi-marriage?
Sure. We all manage multiple important relationships with people we’re deeply connected to. It’s more complicated when there’s not a “this one should always come first” structure but I can see it. I might actually be as or more likely than trying traditional marriage again.
It depends. What’s the nature of the legal structure? It’s like asking me to sign a contract without reading it first.
I doubt the ground swell will be the same. SSM was more about ignoring gender when entering into a parallel structure of a relationship that most of us get. This would be about creating a new social and legal structure.
I think the idea of a plural marriage opens up a can of worms legally. This was covered in some past thread. Suppose a three person marriage exists. What happens if one party wants a divorce? Must they divorce both other parties? Will the entire marriage be resolved? How will issues of parental custody and financial responsibilities be resolved? These issue are already problematic with simple two person marriages, they will multiply rapidly as the number of parties involved increases.
Full disclosure, I don’t believe the state should be in the marriage business at all. The only issue of concern is parental responsibility and that shouldn’t get any more complicated than it already is. Feel free to differ.
I agree. Also, gay people are a significant percentage of the population, I believe around 5%. There are a huge number of gay couples wanting to marry. And most straight people know a few gay people, and see that they’re normal and want to be happy, and so they support gay marriage too.
The number of normal people who vocally want plural marriage is non-zero, but it’s not huge. And the people who are most associated in people’s minds with plural marriage are the from the kinda weird sometimes abusive off-shoots of Mormonism.
I can see a possible future where a significant number of normal adults are rallying for plural marriage. But I don’t know how likely that is. I’d guess that there’s a much larger number of people who will pursue monogamish marriages instead, like Dan Savage always talks about.
Making it legal would be way too complicated. The real impetus behind SSM (and the reason banning violated the equal protection provision) was that there are many advantages to being married. In particular the right to make medical decisions, although the issue under litigation was inheritance taxes, which will not impinge on most of us. Now imagining how this would play out with triple or other multiple marriage arrangements boggles the imagination.
Here (and no doubt elsewhere) the bigamy laws are essentially unenforceable unless you try to formalize more than one marriage at a time. But you want a menage a trois (or quatre or dix), go right ahead.
Yeah, the reason why marriage works (from a legal and civic standpoint) is that it basically makes a set of assumptions that work for the vast majority of married couples. One of the arguments anti-SSM people occasionally trot out is that same-sex couples could achieve most of the benefits of marriage via various contractual means. That is somewhat (but not entirely) true, but it’s vastly cheaper and simpler to simply get married and have all the default assumptions apply (or tweak them slightly with a pre-nup.)
This wouldn’t work for plural marriages because in our society there are no default assumptions for them*. It defeats the purpose of (secular) marriage if every plural marriage is going to require the parties to hammer out exactly what their rights and responsibilities to each other are really going to be.
*The various religious polygamy schemes tend to be misogynistic to the point of being really unconscionable for the female parties, so the government probably doesn’t want to be encouraging them. Although most of those groups can’t even agree on the exact terms of their plural marriages either.
i don’t know what our society might do. there are some social changes that are going by leaps and others that i expected are molassesing along. this is nothing that couldn’t be handled with existing legal framework.
Yes, yes, and yes, eventually, but it will take some time.
Plural marriage is no more complicated than married-then-divorced-then-married-to-other-people families working together to raise a child. It may require specific Marriage Agreements, like we have specifically tailored Divorce and Parenting Agreements, covering issues of taxation, support, inheritance and dissolution, but it’s really not as insurmountable as adversaries have made it out to be.
One significant problem for plural marriage that is not an issue for SSM is the impossibility of adding plural marriage without either impacting two-person marriage or creating another type of marriage.
Unlikely, simply because it is highly unlikely I’ll be entering any kind of marriage or LTRs.
While my location doesn’t celebrate plural marriages, it does accept plural marriages entered in other countries with which we have treaties specifying such recognitions. If I was to enter a plural relationship, if it could be legally recognized, and if there were benefits to such a recognition, I’d get the papers done. Take into account that if I somehow find myself in an LTR I’ll also be weighing the legal benefits of getting papered vs not.