Well why not? If people want to couple differently what business is it of the state how they choose to arrange their coupling lifestyle? So long as property rights are clearly delineated and children’s welfare is not adversely impacted who is harmed?
What is the *real * reason why western nations are so against it? Is it just the “eew” factor"? Is it threat to women, a threat to men? How does real world polygamy play out in US polygamist communities? What happens to the young men who want to marry but the older men with greater resources are sucking up all the potential wives? What happens to young women who seek to marry, is there undue pressure to choose an existing patriarch? Do marriageable kids become chattel like resources?
If an employer provides (or is required to provide) benefits to the spouses and families of his employees, can an employee marry a couple of dozen women with a couple of dozen children to gain the benefits for all of them? Why not?
No employer as far as I am aware is required to provide any benefits to employees. If they want to extend benefits to polygamous families then they will, if they don’t then they won’t.
Yes, but facts is facts. Many contracts already exist which require benefits to spouses. Let us not forget certain governmental programs that help spouses. (I understand you are taking a Libertarian stance, but we live in the world we live in.)
Could we imagine a system where this would work? Sure. We can imagine a lot. Will it really happen? Nope.
Not quite, and this raises an issue for SSM or polygamous marriage. If an employer provides spousal benefits, they are often (always?) required by law to do so for all legally recognized marriages-- they can’t just pick and choose. So, it’s all or nothing.
I personally have no problem with legalizing poygamous marriages, but for practical reasons we’d have to ditch the laws a refer to above, as they could easily bankrupt a company.
Legal entaglements.
Man marries wife number one.
Five years later he runs away and marries wife number two.
Twenty-years later, he runs away and marries wife number three.
After a week, he dies without a will. Who inherits his property?
Under current law, probably wife number one.
Under a polygamous law :smack: :wally
But I think that’s dodging the question. Many employers extend benefits to their workers and the worker’s families. And most would balk at extending them to a dozen spouses rather than one. Therefore they’d have to stop giving benefits ot discriminate against polygamous people. That’s just one of the problems that would arise.
My point being, it is just a contract but that’s the problem. It’s a specific contract with specific, varied and complicated implications. The (one of many) reasons I support gay marriage is that it’s not, as has been claimed, a reworking of the whole institution. It’s exactly the same except for the identities of the participants. Polygamy on the other had *would * be a major reworking. Particularly as it wouldn’t be (I would hope) a simple idea of a man getting as many women as he wants. What if he marries another woman. And his wife maries another man. What then is the legal realationship between the two men or the two women? And then there’s child custody…I don’t know where to start.
It would be an entierly different animal. I don’t think we could call it the same contract. Not that I’m not in favour of people working these things out with contracts of their own.
In a previous thread on this, some people felt the government would be quite concerned about exactly how much each of these people is paying in income tax… if you had, say, twenty guys all marry one woman so they could file jointly…
I don’t think this is a useful objection. Clearly, we have to change the system to allow for polygamous marriages, so the fact that the system would need to be changed isn’t persuasive. Now, you can make an argument that the system would have to change too much in ways that aren’t worth the gain, but I don’t think any of those arguments are particularly good either.
I realize I’m probably branding myself as a heretic here, but I’m a little uncertain on this part… I realize that in the early days of the Gay Rights movement, people probably felt it was unnecessary to change the laws because they felt not many gay couples would want to get married. How many people out there want to get married into polygamous marriages? Ones where all the spouses know about it, that is…
Oh, there’s another point… how would changes to the laws affect situations where somebody tried to add on a spouse without informing all the spices?
The problem already exists to a lesser extent with “family plan” insurance – somebody with eight kids is effectively freeloading off the rest of the pool.
I love how this always comes up in the polygamy and SSM threads. The arguments made refuse to reflect on the status quo. Paul, you’ve selected what you think might be one extreme–a guy could marry a dozen women each having a dozen children, and his employer would have to provide benefits to them all. OR He might only have two wives and no children and then the company would be better off!
But so what?
Under the CURRENT system, a man can marry one woman and have a dozen children, divorce her and marry again, having another dozen children, rinse repeat. For that matter, under the current system, the man could have dozens of girlfriends and produce dozens of children. If they’re his kids his employer will have to cover it. If your argument against polygamy is that, “it will produce families that are too large.” So what? You’re not willing to limit family size under the old system, why do you care in the new system?
Marriage is just a contract, and when there are more than two parties the contract gets more complicated. Under the current system, how do we assign custody? How do we divvy up property? ITS A MESS!
Of course the laws will have to be adapted and a few lines of code will have to be added. But if it was treated like a proper business contract that’s really not that hard. From what I can tell the concerns really boil down to:
For medical reasons, the spouse is supposed has power of attorney, but in polygamy who has control? Imagine the Shrivo case if she had two husbands! Wait a second, the Shrivo case was a traditional marriage, what went wrong?
Assigning custody would be a mess. But as I said above, it already is a mess. I think 90% of it would come down to who are the actually parents. I don’t see polygamy creating any more problems that our current divorce-remarry problems. We currently see all sorts of situations where people remarry after having children–where does custody go? There are millions of men/women raising children that aren’t theirs, just like what might happen in polygamy.
Dividing up property would be tricky, but doesn’t need to be if a will was left. Again, if a person has money this is ALWAYS the case. Look at the mess with Anna Nichole Smith, again, there’s a “normal marriage.”
Adding people to the party is going to complicate things. But if you’re worried about complications then we need to scrap marriage all together. The fact is, polygamy is icky, and weird, and we’re all scared of change.
Yes, putz indeed. Under the CURRENT system, what happens? Or am I not supposed to ask that. What’s more, what would happen if you were co-owner of a business, and you went off and added 5 more partners? Then what? Or could we simply say that it wouldn’t be allowed, that just like under current laws, adding a partner would require consent of all parties. How does a company function when it has more than two partners/owners? Does the whole thing break down? Are there no companies functioning right now with a polygamy management structure?
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I immediately thought of this article.
It does seem to point to inherent problems. It might be a different if we have a system where people opt-in, but in a religious community where polygamy is ‘mandated’ it doesn’t work unless you recruit more women or kick out men.
:smack: :wally