Too much choice (1)

[james_davis_nicoll]

It seems to me that if you let people marry who they like, this can only inevitably lead them to want to exercise choice in other fields of human endeavour and then where would we be? Today it's three people getting married but tomorrow it could be drinking water with a bit of lime in it instead of a more economically strategic soft drink or someone deciding they don't want to work 80 hours weeks.

I'm talking to you, Brazil

Comments

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

The issue of multiple partner marriage is always hamstrung by the most prominent examples of such marriages being bigamists who marry multiple women without bothering to tell them of their other wives, and members of groups like the Mormon fringe, where one man marries a bunch of women under circumstances of questionable consent. Then there's the swinger culture, where the interest in other partners is primarily about sex, and not developing a long term relationship.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

In any case, provided the participants are of legal age and as fully informed as can be, with no deceptions planned by any involved party...?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Tradition marriage seems to survive the PR hit that serial philanderers and wife-beaters engage in it.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

People can pretend that those are the exceptions to the rule because there are so many examples of supposed good single partner marriages they can point to. It ends up being a chicken and egg thing with plural relationships, with people who are part of examples that work keeping quiet about it because of how society perceives the idea. So all you end up hearing about are the problematic ones.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

"Most prominent" depends on where you're getting your information from. There are lots of people who think that just one special Book is all they ever need to read, and in that Book, it's clear that group marriages are a good thing... very traditional.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

And like so many other bits they utterly ignore it.

[snippy]

Swingers vary considerably in their goals; you might want to check your assumptions there.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

That\s certainly the common perception, and it\s that perception that gets presented in mainstream media and entertainment.

[snippy]

And like so many public opinions, it is over simplified and partly wrong.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

No, the issue is hamstrung because the only people who bring it up in mainstream discourse are right-wingers who want to derail the discussion of gay marriage, to which liberals respond by declaring that no one would ever propose legalized polygamy because it's obviously insane and -- hey, you over there saying that you'd support polygamy, shut your trap. Can't you see that the crazy conservatives are totally right on this issue and by agreeing with them we aren't joining in their bigotry against Muslims, Mormons and hippie swingers?

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Yes, the formerly-known-as-middle-of-the-roaders have taken to doing a lot of that.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

See also: Liberals responding to Birthers by tacitly agreeing that it would be bad if Obama were a Muslim.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

*shudder*

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My standard response to that is more like "while the associated legal consequences to work out would be more complex than with same-sex marriage, I'd be perfectly OK with legal polygamy, but that is a different discussion from the one you are currently trying to derail."

And I am pretty sure I have seen other liberals say this.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I'm with you: "There's nothing wrong with plural marriage that a COMPLETE REHAUL FROM SCRATCH of all the laws that presume a two-person exclusive marriage can't solve. In the meant time, two-person exclusive is embedded at every level, and needs to be fixed before plural marriage can function in our legal system."

Which is not to say that's a good thing, only that that's a current thing.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the thing about same-sex marriage is that, once marriage is assumed to be a union between two partners with comparable rights, enabling it is legally very simple; you just remove references to the sex of the participants. Increase the number, so that people don't have at most one spouse, and lots of things have to be fiddled with, many of them involving money and property: taxes, inheritance, automatic insurance beneficiaries, etc. In many cases the necessary legal hacks and limits on the practice will not please everyone.

But this isn't any kind of moral objection, it's just that an observation that there's much more work involved.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yup. Even as a straight white monogamous male I think plural marriage is a LEGAL headache (and one I wish would be addressed sooner rather than later) and not a moral one. My sole objection to plural marriage is paperwork and the affected assumptions.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Would the consequences of legalized polygamy really be that much greater than the introduction of no-fault divorce?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes, because no-fault divorce only changed how the marriage could end. Plural marriage changes a great many rules about inheritance and decisionmaking and financial liability, in ways that the existing rules can't properly address.

There's no reason they can't be changed to address it, but they need to be.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Divorce )+ subsequent marriage complicates estate management.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

No-fault divorce had huge social consequences. Mostly positive ones, but cultural conservatives would disagree.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

More, "allowing plural marriage for men but not women produces disaster in every case, including both recent 'corrected' Mormons and every single older time in human history."

There's nothing wrong with plural marriage in general, only with misogynist polygyny the way the Mormons do it and with misogynist polyandry the way NOBODY HAS EVER DONE IT BUT WE, UNLIKE MORMONS, CAN LEARN FROM HISTORY AND SCIENCE AND THUS OBJECT TO IN THEORY. Ahem.

But yes - societal exclusive polygyny and societal exclusive polyandy lead to abuse and disaster, full stop, because of the way birth rates work. The fact that polyandry has never been implemented does not give any indication that the expected failure modes should be different.


teal deer: Nothing wrong with plural marriage beyond that a societal expectation of gender-biased plural marrage leads inevitably to abuse. Avoid societal expectation of gender-biased plurality of the sort proscribed by scientific illiterates like Mormons, and you should be fine.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

The fact that polyandry has never been implemented does not give any indication that the expected failure modes should be different.

fraternal polyandry, while not especially common, is not unknown in south asia, even today. some observers predict that it's prevalence will increase in the near future, due to the severe (and increasing) imbalance in sex-ratios, particularly in northern India.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

I'll support multiple marriages with one man and multiple women as soon as we've finally finished wiping out sexism.

(One woman and multiple men is fine.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Marriages between one man and one woman can be completely abusive, but I don't want to wipe out man-woman marriages as a result, though I admit I've seen that argument made.

Traditional polygyny, in which the women have no say in further additions to the relationship and are effectively chattel, is obviously right out. But I'm not convinced that polygyny itself is where we have to draw the line.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

(One woman and multiple men is fine.)

ObSciFantasy: "Five-Twelfths of Heaven" (and two sequels)

Oddly, I just bought this today.

[rosefox]

We can start with wiping out the variety of sexism that assumes the women would only be interested in the man.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think part of any acceptable form of legal polygamy would be the idea that, first of all, you can only be in one marriage at a time, and second, legally, everyone in the relationship is married to everyone else (and informed consent is therefore necessary from all parties).

Who's actually having sex with each other is not really the state's concern.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I assume you have already seen Gay Marriage: the Database Engineering Perspective.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Part of me really wants to repost this over on the Bujold list. Part of me is afraid I can't back away far enough to keep from becoming collateral damage once I do.

I suspect the second part is going to win.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

The article doesn't separate religious and civil marriage, and they're very different things.

Limiting religious marriage is probably unconstitutional, because the government isn't supposed to be involved there, beyond the issues of protecting people from exploitation and cults.

But the government is fully entitled to limit civil marriage to one spouse... which is perfectly fine, because that's a type of partnership that the government offers for specific reasons. And I can't blame them if they don't want to deal with legal cases with 17 spouses fighting or the possibility that entire villages might get civilly married just to exploit things like the tax code. One civil spouse per person is nice and simple and more than enough for purposes that civil marriage exists (because the government doesn't have to offer any support for it at all)... people that want to do things like give power of attorney to a different religious spouse can do that separately with the regular legal code. People that truly want complex marriages should be willing to go through the legal hoops to define what they want... the government shouldn't have to offer a default plan for more than simple marriages.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that there would probably have to be a relatively low cap on the number of people who could be involved (maybe take a hint from the Qur'an and say five), just to keep the associated complexities from getting too hard to handle.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

That's why I say limit it to one mutual spouse per person.

It comes down to the 0/1/infinity rule for choosing limits (here, being the number of other people in the civil marriage).

With zero, you'd have a pure kinship system, where giving nonkin rights would require special legal paperwork. It's doable, but it would be so common that there's a benefit in going to a standardized form.

So the question comes down to if there's a benefit in allowing arbitrary numbers. And the thing is, like so many things, the complexity builds by induction here... once you have the ability to handle groups of five, it's very easy to extend that to six, or higher numbers. The number of relationships may shoot up, but the amount of truly new things to deal with drops off quickly (like with Rubik's cubes... if you can do a 3x3x3, a 4x4x4 requires only a little bit more to figure out in order to solve, if you can do the 4x4x4, the 5x5x5 requires only a slight adjustment, and if you can do a 5x5x5, you can do any higher order cube, the difference being the amount of work, not the complexity of the task). The biggest steps are the first few... so the question becomes should you jump from one to introducing any more complexity at all (which is why it's 0/1/infinity and not 0/1/N/infinity, the point of the rule being to avoid arbitrary limits unless there's an extremely good reason for a specific value). And I just don't see a reason why. The system is already set up to handle couples, and can also be used to handle larger groups... it just requires going through extra legal paper work to define it. Which is a perfectly fine solution to the complexity, because offering a standard package like limiting things to groups of five isn't going to please everybody, even those that don't want more than four spouses. Because when you get to larger groups like that, you start getting to the point where some members might not want a full partnership with all the other members (for example, like with business partnerships, there's increased liability with larger groups... which is why when large number of partners go into business together, they typically go for incorporation, which also detaches things so you don't have to worry about the issues that arise from when a partner dies or leaves). There is a lot of complexity added to the system right from groups of three: do they want something resembling a fully equal triple, three couples (and why shouldn't this be allowed over four people), two couples, or one couple plus one. Which is why I think it's better to just stick to having the government support the simplest case with a default package and letting anything more complicated having to spell itself out legally from the start. If there's a market for specific packages that emerges from that, with some paperwork becoming standard practice, then the government can consider if it wants to offer those as well.