Except of course there are societies where polygamy is legal and that doesn’t happen.
The argument about it being unfair to the “excess men” is simply silly male paranoia that shows gross ignorance of the world.
In fact, where polygamy is practiced is practiced, such as my native country, it’s done by so few that it has no measurable impact on the ability of men to find wives.
Moreover, as already pointed out, despite so many idiot American males thinking they’re owed a hot wife, men aren’t.
It seems to me that it comes down to the same reason gay marriage is illegal. Apparently, the United States thinks it’s a Christian place. I have no idea why that would be, or why any religion would have to do with law, but it does look that way.
Part of the problem, in the U.S., is that the Mormon experiment went badly. Women were treated very badly under that system, and thus it served as a “bad example” when the country came to deciding whether or not to tolerate it.
If the Mormons had been able to provide a good example, where it worked well and didn’t have obvious drawbacks, the country might have shrugged and let it be.
There are examples of group households that do work just fine. The U.S. now has a better support structure of law, and such groups do not run the same risk of victimization that they did 150 years ago.
The legal aspects would be damned messy, but not so awful as to be completely beyond resolution. I think we will see group marriages legalized some time in the near future, with some very strong protections against exploitive practices.
I don’t think there’d be any real problem with shortage of women. I mean, what does it even mean to have upwards of, say, 15 wives? Could you even keep an active, spouse-like interest in their lives for a significant amount of time? I think even above 5 or so wives you’re really stretching the word “wife” pretty thin.
I mean, so George Clooney marries 500 women on a lark. My conservative estimate is that 450, easily, are going to divorce him or just plain disregard their marriage certificate after a couple months of being another face in the crowd.
I just don’t see the problem of 1% of the population realistically pulling a Genghis Khan and ruining it for the rest of the blokes unless you strip away womens rights at the same time you implement this.
Especially if you allow women to marry multiple men as well. I suspect you’ll see a lot of “nominal marriages”, where 400 lucky groupies get to say they married Brad Pitt, but 387 of them also have one or two “normal” spouses, and more or less never actually talk to Brad.
I mean, maybe a few more socially inept people are going to be left stranded. But, I doubt it’s going to make a significant dent in the average man’s chances to be in a romantic relationship, though we might see relationships become less intimate and more transient.
Very, well said! 
It hasn’t happened in Saudi Arabia so there’s utterly no reason to think it will happen here.
There are very good reasons to object to polygamy and it’s silly to compare it to gay marriage, but this paranoia about “excess men being discarded like garbage” is utterly ridiculous.
I’m actually reminded of the arguments put forth against divorce that it would be bad for women because it would lead to men constantly discarding they’re wives for much younger women.
No it’s not. The reasons why people should support equality for homosexuals have nothing to do with whether they’re born that way. At best it is a stupid counter-argument to an equally stupid argument, that homosexuality is some kind of unnatural abomination.
Why are you assuming that the system would be set up to favour one man with multiple wives? What is to stop any one of those wives from having multiple relationships as well? Sure, she is married to George Clooney along with 500 other women, but she is also married to regular Steve, Jim and Oswald. Sure, historically things have been stacked to favour the men but in a more egalitarian society there is no reason to assume that would be the case.
Lack of interest. Even in places that practice polyandry (multiple husbands) it’s typically out of economic necessity and by all accounts most of the people involved don’t actually like it much.
I’m not sure if I’m confused, or if you’re ignorant.
I wasn’t born monogamous. I was born with the drive, desire and ability to love more than one person at a time. I had lots of outside cultural programming try to beat that out of me, telling me that there was one perfect person out there for me, my prince would come, and people who have more than one lover are filthy disgusting selfish hedonistic perverts who can’t be trusted around children or married people. I hated myself and felt sure there was something wrong with me. I tried very hard when I was an adolescent to love just one person at a time, and I failed, and I was cast out of my circle of friends for my failure to fit in with the dominant sociosexual paradigm. I lost a job because my boss didn’t approve of my “lifestyle”. Today, I’m told that to include my kind of people in marriage rights would be so unbelievably complicated and unnatural that it would destroy the meaning of marriage.
Kinda feels *very much *like being gay, if you ask me. Which you didn’t.
Gay people don’t need to be married to spend their lifetime with their partner, either. Nor do straight people. But it’s not about need, it’s about rights and what’s right.
(This is just one reason why I hate the “born that way” argument for gay acceptance. It doesn’t matter if they were born that way or not, or if I was born that way or not. What matters is that everyone involved be involved consensually, and everyone not involved butt the fuck out.)
Emphasis added: And you know this, how? IMO, I think the preponderance of anthropological data, while not conclusive, would tilt in the direction of “born that way” rather than not. There certainly have been more polygamous societies than monogamous ones over time (that we know of), and monogamy seems to be a recent, cultural phenomenon rather than an element of basic human nature.
Further, the idea that someone can “easily” stop loving another person is nonsense.
Since this has become a debate, against my hopes, I’ll say that this underlies my OP - that the proscription against polygamy has no foundation in anything other than an interest on the part of lawmakers and others in some authority to legislate and influence the way other people live their lives. I don’t want or need protection from my own impulses. Regulations that protect the weak from the powerful are fine, but laws that protect people from themselves are abominations.
Excellent reply, but I think with some thought the issues you mentioned could be mitigated. For example, spousal health insurance. It would hardly be fair to working people married to just one other person to be subsidizing a person married to two or more. Adjustments to premiums would have to be made. (Of course if the USA did the sensible thing and had universal health care, it would be a total non-issue.)
Given that human evolution (except in modern China) has caused us to give births to 1.04 males for every 1.00 female, (or about that ratio), it would seem that there is a biological reason to have 1:1 matings. (BTW, I’ve read that by adulthood more boys have died than girls so the ration at mating age is very close to 1:1) Many people may be poly-amorous, but I strongly suspect the majority are mono-amorous, or at least serial.
So far we have also neglected other possible forms of marriage. What about a string marriage that, in theory, lasts forever? One man and one woman marry and then bring in a younger person and then another young person of the opposite sex as the first youngster. The head of the family would be an oldster with many years of experience. Estates would never go outside the family. As the oldsters died off, the next generation would take over.
Obviously, there would have to be some limitations starting with age of consent. Clearly, it’s rape, or damned close to it, for a 50 year old man to marry a 14 year old girl as his third or fourth wife. If I had it my way, no person could enter a legal marriage of more than two people until they were 25 which is the age at which the human brain becomes fully mature. In the real world, I would guess the age limit would be 21 or even 18.
BTW, I would put myself in the mono-amorous category. I’ve been married to one person for 40+ years and don’t plan on changing or adding. But that does not mean I favor laws restricting people from being happy as long as that does not impinge on my interests.
I think with marriage ti gets a bit sticky. It’s one thing for the government to forbid polygamous households, but must it recognize them? I think that the fundamental argument if favor of SSM is equally applicable to polygamous marriages, although the legal changes necessary for the latter are considerably more complex. And those arguing against legalized polygamy sound exactly like conservative Christians talking about SSM to me.
Further, I think Utah is the only state that outlaws a “polygamous lifestyle”, but I’m not sure that law is actually enforced. So it’s not really a case that cultural polygamists are breaking the law in the US. They just aren’t granted the same status as monogamists.
There are a couple problems with this argument.
First, it’s dangerous to base arguments supporting freedom for gays and gay marriage with a “scientific fact” like this, because that fact could turn out to be wrong, and if so, it would undermine your argument – but would it change your position? It wouldn’t change my position, even if we found conclusively that “gay is a choice”, or if we had a pill you could take to “fix” being gay.
Second, what if it turns out that there’s a gene that makes a person 90% likely to commit rape. Does that mean rape should be protected? Of course not. The difference is that rape is harmful (regardless of whether it has a genetic basis) and homosexuality is harmless (regardless of whether it has a genetic basis).
The issue of polygamy is often raised by opponents of same-sex marriage. If the right to gay marriage is recognized, they ask, then why not polygamy? This is usually reacted to by the pro-SSM side with indignant, flustered outrage; but I suspect in a few decades that will look as ironic or hypocritical as would someone in the 1960s insisting that it was absurd and offensive to compare interracial marriage to gay marriage. Point being that I think the analogy is fair, but for the opposite reason: I support the right to have same-sex marriage, and also the right to polygamy. (Or, alternately, to get the government out of the marriage business altogether, as some have advocated.)
There was an article before the election about how excited polygamy supporters were getting due to the fact that both presidential candidates were the grandsons of polygamists–in one case the son of a polygamist as well. They too saw the gay marriage argument as potentially applying to them. It was definitely a strange coincidence, considering how rare polygamy is in this country.
My understanding is that both bigamy and polygamy laws are based on protecting women, and based in an age where women had a much harder time protecting or even providing for themselves. Those arguments may no longer be valid.
However, there is still one very big difference between gay marriage and polygamy. There is a solid legal framework for a marriage between two individuals, and all of that framework applies quite well regardless of the sex of the participants. That is not true of polygamy.
So, while someone could make the theoretical argument that polygamy is no different (ethically, socially, etc) from gay marriage, there would be a very significan legal difference, and it would take a long time to work out the ramifications.
Gay marriage is an easy step. Polygamy is not.
Personally, I have no objection to polygamy, other than the observation that the Chinese character for prosperity is a woman and a pig under a roof, wheras their character for chaos is two women under a roof. But that’s the problem of the polygamists, and not the rest of us!
That’s true of the US, but there are any number of countries that do or did allow polygamy and have worked out the legal framework for it. Not saying we need to copy those countries, and I’m sure some of them have laws that would not be transferable to the US because of how they treat women, but it’s not like we need to re-invent the wheel here.
The slippery slope argument is nearly always right. One change generally is followed by another. OMG! OMG!
Therefore, we should never change anything.
Well, we would pretty much be re-inventing the wheel, or at least, the US version of the wheel.
My point is it would be a far more difficult process than SSM, from the point of legislation and jurisprudence. For this reason, if no other, it’ll take a lot longer for it to happen in the US. Of course, there’s that other reason, which is that to many people, “It just ain’t NORMAL!”
My guess is that, unless the fundamentalists completely take over the heartland, it’ll happen eventually. Practically speaking, it’ll affect far fewer people directly, and make much less of a difference to most of us tangentially.
On the other hand, it may never happen here just because it doesn’t have a big enough support base – not enough people care. But I might have thought that about gay marriage, 20 years ago.