It’s not “liberal” to pretend that inanimate objects or creatures that are thoroughly incapable of understanding the concept of marriage could join in any union that in any way resembled marriage. It’s just bizarre.
And marriage isn’t just a certificate, as I’m sure you know. What about when the person married to a building wants to start making medical decisions for the building and claiming it as a dependent on taxes?
I can’t believe we’re even talking about this.
I voted for all the consenting human adult ones, including group marriage, and I also voted for the robot/computer one, with the assumption that we’re talking about a future sentient AI there, not some guy marrying his Roomba.
Liberal and conservative in relation to this poll is a false dichotomy. I support marriage between any sentient individuals who voluntarily enter into it.
As long as free choice is involved, I don’t care about ages. Having the age of majority for sex and marriage at 18, the way it is in many states, is just bizarre. Most of our parents and grandparents married a decade earlier than we did. My mother met my father when she was 16, married him at 19, and had me at 21. I have some hope of statutory rape laws being revised or abolished since they have led to some high-profile miscarriages of justice, but I don’t know how realistic that hope is considering how irrational some people are about anything to do with sex.
Right now, sentience excludes animals and computers. You can bring up animals again when we start Uplifting bonobos and dolphins. Computers still, at this point, don’t have the sophistication of a cockroach, so marriage to a virtual personality would have about as much meaning as marrying a steak knife. Self marriage is a solipsistic absurdity.
I am very liberal so I voted for all of the choices.
While it’s not for me, I can’t find a good reason to oppose plural marriages, so I voted for all of the first six choices.
The first six, and the last(providing it is sentient).
Marriage is a standardized contract.
I have no moral problem with polygamy, but once you start including more than two people in the equation, the “standardized” part goes out the window, which makes the whole thing pointless.
man and woman
man and man
woman and woman
man and girl (slightly below adulthood)
woman and boy (slightly below adulthood)
girl and boy (slightly below adulthood)
With caveats.
When one partner is under the age of adulthood, there must be parental/guardian consent. Such marriages used to be common. I see a danger of abuse, though. Perhaps parents/guardians might sell a child into marriage. That would be a Bad Thing. (Doesn’t have to be, but if a guy has to buy a bride – and yes, I’m stereotyping men as sexual predators – then he probably doesn’t have the under-age person’s best interests at heart.) I would not support such marriages as a matter of statute – i.e., people could just do it; but I think that it would work in certain situations, and would support it on a case-by-case basis. Even so, it would be skeevy.
I did not vote for polygamy and multiple marriages. I don’t see anything wrong with plural marriage or polygamy in concept; but I think it would cause too big a mess in case of divorce or death.
I believe marriage should be between any two consenting legal persons. At this point, that ought to include man/woman, man/man, and woman/woman. I suppose it could include some underage persons in some circumstances, but that would depend on different laws in different places, so I didn’t vote for those. Similarly, I didn’t vote for non-human persons simply because I don’t believe such laws exist anywhere, though I could see it possibly eventually covering artificial lifeforms.
I don’t have any objections toward polygamy, but from a legal perspective, it introduces some difficult to resolve problems that don’t exist in one-to-one marriages. For instance, if a man marries two women, are all 3 of them considered pairwise married? What happens if the man dies, which woman gets legal right for his property. If that man gets a job that provides medical coverage for spouses, do they have to cover both? What if one of those women gets a job like that, it probably covers the husband but what about the other wife, particularly if they’re not pairwise married.
So, really, my only objection to it is that it creates a lot of legal ambiguity that would need to be specialized for every such instance and it sort of defeats the idea as it exists now. It’s not really at all analagous to the SSM issue now where you just scratch out the gender references and it’s essentailly the same.
That said, I wouldn’t even necessarily be opposed to it, but it’s not a simple solution like the SSM one. For instance, we could let one pair in a polygamous group be legally married and the rest just be socially married, or perhaps find a way of defining some sort of hub-spoke relationship and how to resolve that if something happens to the hub, or some kind of all-equal definition, but however it works out, if we’re not very careful, it could quickly get as legally complicated to unravel as any other type of social network situation. So, before I could really support it, I’d want to see a good solution to avoid some super-complex marriage type relationships and then burdening our system with dealing with those complications.
I support religious institutions having any of those types of marriage, as long as they don’t think I should care.
I’m against government institutions caring about any of those types of marriage. If two or more people want to enter into some kind of mutually binding legal contract (like a power of attorney or whatever), go right ahead (although that means that parties who are unable to consent to a contract will be left out).
man and woman
man and many woman
man and girl (slightly below adulthood)
woman and boy (slightly below adulthood)
girl and boy (slightly below adulthood)
I think “woman and many men” would be a lot trickier than the inverse, since it has much less precedent and paternity would be so ambiguous, but I might have to include it to be fair.
I’m assuming that “slightly below adulthood” would be at least 16, and that parental consent would be required.