The Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints are in the habit of taking the excess boys from their societies and dumping them in the nearest big city. I don’t know whether to be more outraged about their treatment of the boys or their treatment of the girls. When I told my husband about this, it took him a good two hours to calm down enough to talk about it.
“BIGAMY, n. A mistake in taste for which the wisdom of the future will adjudge a punishment called trigamy.”
– Ambrose Bierce
Various queens come to mind.
Not Queen Maria of Romania, Cleopatra, Messalina, Catherine the Great, Josephine, Anne Boleyn, Isabella of France, or Princess Diana, though (okay, the last never quite made it to Queen). 'Cause those queens seem to have had little trouble having more than one partner at a time.
Would they have married their lovers if they could have done so while keeping their husbands and their heads? I don’t know. Maybe. I’d maintain that we’ve not in recorded history of Westernized societies had a culture which afforded women the social, political and financial power they need to be truly egalitarian polygamists. Until maybe now, maybe here.
I’m not certain the experience of the current band of Mormons who practice polygamy would support your contention. It seems that young men in those groups are often kicked out of their community in order to give the older men access to the girls.
(In my earlier post in this thread I equated that with rape.)
The lost (Mormon) boys:
I think we have to realize that marriage is primarily a legal arrangement concerned mainly with distribution of property. As noted there was no prohibition of bigamy in biblical times, old testament anyway. And my understanding is that during the middle ages–in England at least–formal marriage was essentially something that only the propertied classes engaged in. The rest were common law spouses and that is the origin of that term.
There is no law (no law that anybody enforces, anyhow) that would prevent a person from having a spouse plus as many consorts as are willing, from cohabiting. If formal polygamy became legal, a whole new legal framework would be needed. Perhaps the solution would be nuptial agreements agreed on by all the parties, without which no new marriage could be legalized. While gay marriage fits neatly into the general framework of marriage.
I don’t think such a small, closed and authoritarian society has much to say about how the practice would be a large, open and democratic society such as the US, but you do have a point in that the poster you were responding to did not qualify his statement well enough.
Why do you assume it needs to stay that way? I mean, you could rewrite marriage laws so that if A marries B and then C that B must agree and in effect marries C as well.
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WhyNot? - I love you.
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It’s intriguing to wonder how, in law, marriage was originally coded as a partnership of two people. Why was that the default?
That’s a cult not a country or a society(unless you really, really want to stretch the definition).
There are plenty of countries that practice polygamy and none of them have a problem with men being unable to find mates.
Frankly, if you’re one of those straight men who has a tough enough time getting dates in a western country, you’d be in much worse shape going to China or India than either Iran or Saudi Arabia.
There are reasons to object to Polygamy but if the US legalized it it would lead to men being “discarded like garbage” is insecure male bullshit.
I assume in the early (even late) 19th century a not uncommon method of “divorce” was to head west without the wife and kids, and just acquire/make more along the way, and laws against bigamy were meant to curb that.
Of course. Corporate law deals with this sort of stuff all the time. People come in, people sometimes leave, assets change hands, rights and responsibilities ensue, inheritance happens…none of this is insurmountable, or even all that different than law that exists now if you just use your imagination a little.
It’s conceivable that we will see new forms of bigamy allegations working their way through the courts before long. Suppose Fred marries Barney in Maryland, then skips out and moves to Mississippi, which doesn’t recognize his same-sex marriage. In Mississippi, Fred marries Wilma. Litigation ensues.
Yeah, this could shake the very Bedrock of our laws!
It is one thing to say that as philosophical matter but it is very different in practical terms when you have 50 states with literally thousands of different laws pertaining to the idea that marriage is something that involves only two people. Sure, it is possible to come up with another system, even some that haven’t been mentioned. How about fractional shares of a person than be be infinitely divided? You could start with 100% of your own shares and then divide them among as many people as you see fit. You could have one main spouse worth 50% and another two with much smaller factional shares that can allocate based on their annual performance reviews. The range of possibilities are endless.
You can do all of this already but most people don’t understand that. Establish a corporation, buy property and make your concubines shareholders. Establish trusts to divide everything as you see fit. Give at least one of them power of attorney.
I don’t know where there this new found fascination with marriage comes from. Marriage is a largely failed and antiquated idea whose time has come and gone but now, suddenly, some people want to expand it when we should be phasing it out altogether. It is marketing scheme perversely tied to legal contracts as well as some nebulous spiritual values that don’t traditionally apply to polygamy.
You can do all those pieces separately if you want to and there is nothing stopping anyone from doing it now. My position is that people can sleep with whoever they want but there is no reason for the state to provide a deceptively easy boilerplate contract to cover all possibilities. You can do that on your own through legal channels that already exist if you and your potential spouse(s) feel strongly enough about it.
For most things, yes. For a few very important things, I can’t. I can’t have my hypothetical two husbands and my wife visit me in the ICU, even two at a time. Two of those people can be excluded by hospital staff or my other family members because they aren’t legally my spouse. I can’t put them on a family health insurance policy through work, not even if I’m willing to foot the total difference in the bill for extra people. I can’t die knowing they’ll all receive my social security spousal benefit, even though three women each married in turn to a serial monogamist can get their spousal benefits. http://www.creators.com/lifestylefeatures/business-and-finance/your-social-security/benefits-to-an-ex-spouse-don-t-impact-current-spouse.html There may be other rights I can’t work around with contracts and wills and power of attorney, but those are the ones I know about.
Fair enough and it is valid point. However, there is no need to try to retrofit acquainted marriage ideals just to fix those problems. You could just fix those lingering issues and let people deal with whatever other arrangements they want to through existing legal frameworks. There are a bunch of reasons that marriage exists historically but many of them are not valid today. It is a boilerplate legal contract that few people truly understand fully when they agree to it. I think it would be in everyone’s favor if it was an actual legal pursuit in which all parties involved got to review the legal contracts (today just implied) and could make modifications to them. It wouldn’t be romantic at all (but then again, neither is long-term marriage) but it would be much more straightforward.
Under this ideal, you could get married in a church or even around a campfire and that would have no legal standing. The property division, rights and responsibilities would be completely separate and handled by the contacts that each of you negotiate.
I absolutely 100% agree with you. If I was Queen of the World (or at least the country) there would be no default marriage rights at all, and *every *marriage would be preceded by the couple, triad or what have you sitting down and actually hashing all this stuff out for them and their situation.
Of course, we’d have a lot more rich lawyers. 
Ha. I said that to my wife once. A few minutes later, she suddenly said, “Just remember, I am your master. Jesus said so!”
I’m still confused what a polygamist marriage would actually mean in a Western liberal society. It doesn’t sound like any sort of analogue to normal marriages, so the (implied) comparisons to that aren’t making any sense.
Anyway, the key question is, say I marry some guy who is married to some chick who is married to George Clooney - how much of George’s stuff do I get if the guy and chick get divorced?
Or maybe we are just thinking about exclusive polygamist marriages? Isn’t that a bit bigoted of us?