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.

[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.)

[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.