Oh, no! The cause-train has begun! You've got a picture-ad to free a guy in the right hand column! It's only a matter of time before we see just a few more cause ads... and eventually the slippery slope will turn into an avalanche of free-x, free-y, free-everybody!

The decline has begun.

Maybe. But China in particular pisses me off.

Yeah, I wasn't really serious.

Do you think it's time for a Cuba style embargo?

I still support a United Nations for democracies and non-human-rights-violators only. But then again, I'm not sure the US could be a member.

I think you're asking the wrong question, and instead should ask what the compelling argument is to NOT recognize polygamy. I don't think there is one. Yeah, it's associated with rape, domestic violence, etc., but that's not inherent to the institution. Plus, like teen sex and illegal immigration, it exists whether we like it or not. So we might as well suck it up and regulate it so that we have a better chance to stop rape, domestic violence etc. within polygamous marriages.

I don't think that you're splitting hairs there. Extending a two party contract to cover three or more parties is a non-trivial exercise. Until the government comes around (which I think it will, eventually) to the view of marriage as contract, it doesn't even have the proper context to re-evaluate that contract in terms of having N parties. Until it has that context, any changes to the laws which attempt to extend their coverage to include polygamy will almost certainly be a thing of horror for everyone involved. Perhaps the issue can be revisited at some indistinct point in the futre, once the relevant law has a more rational basis.

After skimming the original article, while I don't think that the argument is specious, it discounts women's still changing and increasing roles in American society. Call it the economic fallacy the idea that multiple women would want or feel forced to marry a single man, thus depriving number of young men of the chance to marry, emotionally devastating them and driving them to crime or something equally silly. I think that the primary failure of vision here is that most of these studies are historical, and likely don't do a while lot to address the changing atmosphere in and around marriage in contemporary western society, which is primarily signaled by the massive rise in divorce. In a contemporary context, if some neglected third wife meets some man she wants to tryst with, if it becomes serious, she just divorces the group and marrys the new man. Problem solved. I don't think that the core of his argument hold up under modern conditions, and especially not when you have a strict marriage as contract law.

All of that aside, I think that polygamy is ultimately a "don't care" side effect of having marriage at all. Even here in SF, where the polyamory community is likely vastly larger than anywhere else in the country, it's still vanishingly small. Although I think that changing the laws right now is a good idea because the government would make a hash of the analysis needed to make the law sane and fair, even if they just started allowing it, the percentage of people who indulge in the practice is going to be small enough that there are unlikely to be any national tax repercussions or a vast decrease in the number of marriagable women, leading to increased crime and angsty poetry.

I should have read the article before responding, not because it changes my opinion but because it's really interesting.

1. I think he overstates the likely effect of men not getting to marry. You know what would happen? Wives would cheat on their husbands is much greater numbers than they do already, and the husbands would probably turn a blind eye to it because having three wives is probably a ton of work.

2. The porn industry would love it.

3. If polygamy were legalized, I suspect that there wouldn't be a great uptick in de facto poly-marriages simply because people who care that much about it already do it without the piece of paper.

Polyamorous with myself.

As someone who is about to get married, I have thought about what marriage means to me several times recently. I don't really have a traditional religion, but I do believe in God and have therefore considered the religious implications of marriage only as a side to the more practical societal implications.

I saw an article recently that said atheists are the most mis-trusted and disliked group in the U.S when it comes to marriage. In other words, people who are atheist are the most likely to encounter problems in gaining acceptance from their partner's family. Atheists are less likely to be accepted than are people who believe in any religion-including islam, judiasm, buddhism, etc...
Make sense? I can't remember where I saw
the article.

Getting to polygamy...I think that it would be really bad for kids... I can't imagine
why the US government should even consider
legalizing it. I think you hit it on the head, crazymonk. Marriage from a legal standpoint is nothing more than a contract.
Essentially, religious groups are victorious in this regard because they succeed in defining national policy to a large extent for this issue. Gay marriage should be legal on an egalitarian basis, and theoretically the church is separated from the state in the U.S. government. Obviously reality dictates that this can't really happen-- especially with touchy issues like gay marriage (and polygamy).

I always laugh when people are against gay marriage because they say people will take
advantage of the legal implications and
not really want to get married for the "actual" reasons.

I know I am rambling, but I really think
it is important to me that other people know that my fiancee and I are wife and husband. The commitment of marriage is important in my eyes, as well as the notion that a new family is being created with bonds. I'm not going to go as far to say that polgamy or polygny are evil, because I certainly don't think they are that bad... but I doubt they are very healthy for society at large either.

Isn't the issue really about sex? Most animals are polygynous (they don't have monogomous partners-- and when they do they often cheat). But I guess that's the main difference between us and animals in ideal... Physiologically our young need more care because there is a greater investment of
energy and effort to make them than say a fish-- so a highly polgynous existence does not make sense biologically.

Alright, I'm getting off track. I'll stop
writing now.

"I think you’re asking the wrong question, and instead should ask what the compelling argument is to NOT recognize polygamy."

That's a strange tact to take. There are lots of thing that the government doesn't recognize, such as friendship, mentorship, godparenthood, etc. Why the government chooses to recognize marriage I suspect is because of the offspring that usually result from such an arrangement, although that could be regulated with the concept of guardianship, with marriage not necessary. I guess what you're maybe saying is that the parties in a polygamous relationship should be able to enter in a contract that would have similar properties as a marriage, even if the government doesn't recognize it as such.

But again, I completely understand the limiting principle of marriage. Take citizenship. Right now, you as a citizen of the United States have the power to add one more adult citizen through the act of marriage. But if polygamy was allowed (and same-sex marriage) what would limit the granting of citizenship to foreign spouses of Americans? Or would that process be nullified?

I will share a little insider knowledge with you about Americans marrying people from other countries: I have heard that it does not necessarily guarantee citizenship anymore.

I need to do more investigating, but my fiancee and I have heard from others in our situation that it is a misconception that citizenship for a non-US citizen still comes directly with marriage-- of course, it is still logical to assume that one's chances of getting it are much greater.

Interesting. Let me know when you learn more about that.

i think all that getting married does is remove the new spouse from any numerical immigration quotas (which, considering the occasional 15-yr waits, is no insignificant benefit). but you still have to go through the whole process: you schedule a first interview to make sure it's not a scam, and then you get a 2-year green card, and a follow-up interview at the 2-yr point to make sure the marriage is intact. after that, i think you go about the normal process of applying for citizenship, minus any quota wait times.

Well, but nobody's asking for a formal, legal recognition of friendship, etc. My thought was that for any thing X that people want to do, if there's no good reason to stop it, why not let them? Of course, as you point out, that's silly when taken to the logical extreme -- we don't need to cofidy every single human relationship. But I don't think that extreme is very likely. (And if it does come to pass that everyone wants the government to recognize their friendships, godparenthood, relationship with their pet hamster, etc., maybe they'll rethink the idea that this is any of the government's business in the first place.)

I also think it's worth pointing out that we have legal marriage in the first place for cultural and religious reasons, not because we're consciously using it for social engineering. So it seems unfair to hold polygamy to the social engineering standard. Particularly since polygamy as a concept is a lot older than same-sex marriage and has some tradition behind it, even in this country. I really think it might be legal if it didn't happen to gross the majority out.

During the wave of anti-immigration sentiment that accompanied prop 187 back in high school, my friend's German mom finally got around to asking for citizenship. So they don't just automatically give it to you.

You're splitting hairs, I think. Or rather, splitting the wrong ones. As long as marriage remained transitive (i.e. if I'm married to someone, I'm married to any other spouses they have) it seems like the extensions of marriage's current contractual aspects would be pretty simple.

But then, not many people are asking for that. Are they? I've never been clear on whether the women in a typical Christian-offshoot polygamous marriage feel committed to each other in any way, or just to their shared husband.

My other disagreement with your post is when you say "putting aside the debate as to whether marriage should be politically recognized at all". Sure, if you put that aside, which takes all the *motivations* for marriage out of the picture, then modern legal marriage has nothing to it except its formal features, and then, I don't know, maybe three-person contracts are so different from two-person ones that that settles the question of polygamy right there.

But that's too easy. It seems wrong, to me, to settle the question of legally recognized poly relationships based on anything other than the core reasons that we have governmental marriage in the first place.

Since I don't find THOSE reasons compelling, I have no a priori case for legal polygamy. I just think that equality demands the possibility of poly marriage if the government recognizes any marriages at all. Why should some people be able to marry whoever they fall in love with while other people can't?

Slater said:

Getting to polygamy…I think that it would be really bad for kids...

Got any data?

Isn’t the issue really about sex? Most animals are polygynous (they don’t have monogomous partners– and when they do they often cheat). But I guess that’s the main difference between us and animals in ideal…

"Monogamous" humans often cheat, too. If a woman is sleeping with two men, why is it more about sex for all three of them to have a household together than for her to live with one of them and see the other one secretly?

Physiologically our young need more care because there is a greater investment of energy and effort to make them

Dude, the children of poly parents I know get just as much care as the children of monogamous parents. Maybe that's an issue in Mormon plural marriages; I don't know.

W/r/t your first point, it is not clear to me that marriage would be transitive if multiple marriages are recognized; that would have to be determined by lawmakers -- more evidence that multiple marriages are different in kind than two-party marriage.

As for your second point, I completely agree with you, but the debate on marriage is clearly not there yet. I was more interested in my post to think about multiple marriages in the context of the status quo, where I think same-sex marriage is far more justified. The more radical step of re- or undefining marriage, while appealing, won't happen in the near future.

#1: Right, which is why I'm saying that from a "what kind of contract is this?" viewpoint, it makes a lot more sense to distinguish between transitive and non-transitive marriages than between two-person and more-than-two-person. Multiple relationships, taken in aggregate, differ in kind from two-person marriage, but so does the world of two-person relationships (in similar ways).

#2: Okay, rereading your post, I was ignoring some important adjectives before. Sorry about that. I agree; I don't see a compelling legal argument, or a politically-compelling argument of any kind, in favor of non-exclusive marriage rights. Rauch's article ranges further than that, though-- it seems to me like he's making an ethical case against it, which I think is outweighed by the larger ethical case for it, despite there being no body of judges or politicians for me, practically speaking, to make that case TO.

If you're a polygamist then you're barred from geteting the GC in the first place, as you'll have commited a crime of 'gross moral torpitude' (like stealing, being a drug dealer, etc). And you'll likely be deported. If one becomes a polygamist before one becomes a citizen and are convicted of a felony then one would loose the geen card and get deported.

to Flea: Obtaining a green card through someone who is a US citizen and an immediate relative (i.e. a spouse) removes you from the numerical limits and also avoids some of the limitations on conversion from a non-immigrant visa. If you get the green-card interview within 2 years of marriage then it's only valid for 2 years, and you have to apply for removal of conditions 3 months before it expires. If you get a GC through marriage you can apply for citizenship 3 years after getting your GC instead of 5 years if you get it some other way (parent, employer, investment immigrant, etc).