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.