What Stonebow said. Polygamous marriages in the US are not “immoral” in an of themselves as a contract between adult men and women, but in practice you tend to get stuff like child brides, along with coercive, cult like environments and family structures. Thee’s also the potential for violent conflicts between patriarchs of polygamous famlies, or between patriarchs and the family of daughters the group is trying to recruit. It’s just not a practicularly good deal all around.
Child brides are not a problem if age of consent for marriage is enforced.
Cultlike, abusive marriages exist with monogamy, and nobody uses that as an argument against them.
Most of the “patriarchs” out to “recruit” get soundly laughed out of most communities for people practicing multiple relationships.
And as many women are interested in multiple relationships as men.
In brief, religiously-influenced patriarchal polygyny is a poor model for the general case of polygamy, and almost certainly not the majority among people who prctice some form of multiple-adult relationship in the West.
Those effects do come along with the particular brand of polygamy practiced by the splinter groups; but I think it’s more a result of the secretiveness, control, and general ickiness of a tightly controlled separatist atmosphere than the polygamy itself. I think polygamy is fraught with potential complications, and that it must be very difficult to practice in most cases–but I don’t agree that it automatically results in abused child brides and violence.
You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie there. The Book of Samuel described King David as having 4 simultaneous wives, and the Book of Kings (or was it Chronicles?) described King Solomon as having 700 wives and 300 concubines. The Pauline Letters in the NT state that deacons and ministers in the Church should limit themselves to one wife apiece, but place no such restriction on the general congregation.
However, Biblical polygamy was a one-way street. A man could have more than one wife, but a woman could not have more than one husband. Adultery was defined as sex between Man 1 and a woman who was married to Man 2; the marital status of Man 1 didn’t enter into the equation.
I think it’s a great idea. Here’s basically the same OP, started by me awhile ago.
I once read an anectdote about Abraham Lincoln. At a social gathering, he got into an argument with a Mormon over polygamy. Finally the Mormon said, “But can you point to any Scripture which expressly forbids polygamy?” “Certainly,” Lincoln replied. “‘No man can serve two masters.’”
Not Abraham Lincoln, but Mark Twain.
It does sound more like Twain than Lincoln . . . I’ll look it up next time I’m at the library.
I don’t see anything “immoral” if it’s among consenting adults. Certainly, it’s illegal, and as mentioned above, the complications that arise as more people get introduced into the marriage contract, the more difficult it becomes to litigate that contract.
Simple solution: Do away with the marriage contract as a legal entity, and let people commit whatever consensual acts in their bedrooms they damn well please, short of breaking other laws (like those against homicide, or bestiality, for instance). Children are the legal responsibility of the two parents. Who owns the property? Well, who’s name is on the mortgage? And so on. It shouldn’t have to be complicated.
The anecdote can be found online, and it is indeed supposed to be Mark Twain. On the webpage, it was attributed to A treasury of laughter by Louis Untermeyer, which I assume to be a garbled version of the Treasury of Great Humor; Including Wit, Whimsy and Satire from the Remote Past to the Present. You can find it in the library under 808.87.
Abraham Lincoln didn’t have much contact with the Mormons, though he did practice law in a courthouse where Joseph Smith once went for a case. By the time Lincoln became president, the Mormons were established in Utah.