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Comment by sgnelson | Hacker News Reader

One problem I have with Polygamy is that I have never seen a 1-woman, multi-husband community. Sure, I've seen a few relationships in which this was the case, but when you look at the historic aspects in the US, it seems a very rare thing. That makes me wonder if there is a severe power imbalance in the relationships and what is truly occurring.

It's well known that in some modern US polygamy situations, there is a great deal of abuse of power, both in terms of controlling the wives, as well as controlling and abusing the young men who will not be allowed to have a wife. This further increases the societal costs and leads to more abuse of power, which is not what we need.

edit: I should add: It's a numbers game. Given that on average, there tends to be just slightly more women born than men, what happens with all the extra unmarried men (or women, though this is rarer)?

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That same concern already equally applies to traditional marriage, in which some % are abusive. If you have a problem with polygamy on that basis, then you've got a drastically larger problem with the already existing system of marriage, in which millions of instances of abuse occur annually.

The best solution is to bring polygamy out into the open, legalize it fully nationally.

The government has no business dictating who can get married, or what the structure of marriage looks like, so long as the people in question are of sound mind and adults.

If I want to form a ten person marriage, with five men and five women, whose business is it to control us and stop us? There are only bigoted 'answers' as to why that shouldn't be allowed.

Not that I necessarily disagree with legalizing polygamy, but I think there is one non-bigoted answer: logistics. Our financial system in general, and our tax system in particular, has N=1 or N=2 hard-coded into it. There are other practical considerations as well. Suppose, for example, you have an N=5 marriage and three of them want to break away and take the kids. Resolving situations like that would be much more complicated than what we have now, and what we have now is already plenty complicated.

You could recreate marriage as a form of incorporation which wouldn't be a bad idea if you think about the cost of growing old and having children. More adult partners equals more income to ensure the survival of its members and their children.

And yes, I read Moon is a Harsh Mistress too many times (I'm a sucker for that novel). :P

Nothing is stopping you from doing that today. In fact, if you're really serious about advancing polygamy, this would be the way to start: show -- don't tell -- us how it would work. Because right now the poster children for polygamy are (AFAICT) all white male religious nut cases who just want to use it as an excuse to keep a harem.

I never said I want to be in a group marriage, so I don't know why you seem to be suggesting that I should "show, don't tell" anything. I just said I could see it working out for some people. The fact that there exists an entire subculture of queer and pansexual individuals who are in such group relationships seems to me the proof in the pudding that it should be ratified as part of our civil law. And not some horny old man looking to recreate a Turkish harem painting.

I think it would be wise to consider the possibility that maybe the legal institutions involved in marriage aren't up to scratch in terms of what humans can possibly do in terms of romantic and intimate relationships. It's better, in my opinion, to incorporate a method by which we can address these issues by more effective methods (as in don't ban something just because you don't like it. You ban it because it's destructive to the social order.).

That comment wasn't necessarily direct at you specifically, but at anyone who wants to see polygamy legalized. It was just a suggestion.

You realize that there are legal scholars already positing their legality right now, right? It's not too hard to search Google to see some of the more interesting papers being written on the subject from the legal point of view.

The social and psychological aspects are still scarce since we live in a society built around western European Protestantism (heteronormative). So, whatever research that does exist is relatively new or limited in scope.

> You realize that there are legal scholars already positing their legality right now, right?

Of course. On my list of social causes worth spending time and energy on, polygamy ranks pretty low. If it's near and dear to your heart I wish you the best of luck.

It's not so dear as you wish to be. I merely recognize the nature of law is not unlike any other logical enterprise. When you allow one form of inference the other forms that depend upon it must be analyzed to see the limits of it. Just like how legal scholars debate the limits of speech even today. It's both academic and practical.

To play devil's advocate here:

If the white male religious nut case can provide and care for the woman and any resulting offspring and the woman are willing and knowing participants in the harem.

What's the problem? That you don't like it? That seems rather bigoted.

The problem is the religious nut case part, which often leads to the reality being very different from your rosy hypothetical. In real life, polygamous relationships often involve older men with young, often underage, women who have been coerced into the relationship and are often sexually abused. I have nothing against polygamous relationships among fully fledged consenting adults. But that doesn't seem to be what most polygamous relationships are.

I could be wrong. I haven't done extensive research into this. If you want to convince me, show me the data.

You realize the data is scarce because the phenomena hasn't been studied, right? You seem to be hung up on the Sister-Wives nonsense and see it as the only viable data point in a truly unanalyzed section of human behavior. The fact of the matter is that I personally know people who are polyarmous and none of them are the creepy Mormon/Branch-Davidian type. Most that I know who are poly are queer (like myself) and far from religious.

If anything, it should be you that should go and create a research program analyzing the nature of poly relationships in humans and the underlying causes, not me. I merely pointed out the reality that our law should consider accommodation for those individuals as it does for others. All you seem to be bringing to the table is scare mongering that depends more on the tiniest of slivers of human society for the proposition that poly relationships should be illegal. Such a proposition is not tenable on it's face nor in its contents thus far. Or in simpler terms: please do your own research because I'm not here to convince you either way (but you seem damn sure to convince me that my poly friends are some evil bad fundies wanting to rape children).

Edit: sorry for the rudeness. I take things personally sometimes.

Given it's illegal most everywhere, data is hard or little to come by.

There are two large groups: one with a pretty 'dirty' record regarding abuse/child marriages and another with a clean record. So this could come down more to an environment/community issue than a polygamy issue where, in one community/environment, abuse and child marriages are largely the norm and the other it isn't.

Warren Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints && Apostolic United Brethren. The former having the bad record and the latter having the clean record. (&& being the separator to avoid confusion) The former is larger than the latter but the latter is the second-largest church that practices polygamy.

The burden of proof is also on you to prove that polygamy leads to abuse/child abuse as you are the one making the claim. Given there's little/no data to support either side, you'll have to wait for more research. Which would likely involve legalizing the practice and conducting studies.

I definitely agree on the complexity of our tax / govt financial and legal codes, and the problem that poses. The solution there is obvious too, and has been needed for decades anyway: simplification. Of course that's held up by political gridlock.

The easiest way to resolve the child situation would be to keep custody to two parents as it is today. Any children that exist in the N=5 marriage, would be biologically between two people. So the only thing that would be changing is marriage itself, not child custody laws (which today are not primarily built on marriage anyway, we can obviously marry other people that have pre-existing children without adopting those children as our own; and we can obviously have children outside of marriage).

While true, it's not a valid reason for preventing progress on the deconstruction of marriage.

'Our system is messy and complicated, so if we add more variables, it will be an even bigger mess!' - so make the system less messy and enable more variables.

Can you imagine if someone came and said add this function/feature to the program and in response you said "the program is complicated and the code is long, no need to confound it any further with features."

I don't claim this argument is valid, only that it is non-bigoted (and defensible).

On what basis would you argue it's defensible, when child custody isn't premised on marriage (or the lack thereof) to begin with?

I don't see what would change such that it would introduce any new complexity on that side of things.

The exact same complexity already exists today: step-parents. It's mostly a non-issue and is well defined. Step parents acquire no custody rights over the child inherently. If my wife remarries, and we had a child together, the parental rights are retained in myself and her. The same would be the case in a three-way break away on that ten person marriage; there would be (in this scenario) a two person custody of the child, eg the biological parents.

If I'm married and my spouse has a child then I am presumptively that child's parent too. That is, of course, not the only way I can become a child's parent, but it's one way. Polygamy complicates that. If one member of a N-way relationship has a child, do all of the other members become the child's parents

Again, I'm not saying this argument is valid or should carry the day, only that it is defensible and non-bigoted.

It doesn't complicate it, because the answer is: no.

Nothing changes about the legal custody system of children due to N-way marriages.

If two people in the N-way marriage have a child, it's not the N-way marriage that acquires custody, it's the two biological parents.

Marriages do not define custody, period. That is not how it works in the US.

Keep in mind that presumptively is not definitively. If there is a paternity test that later says otherwise, eg if your wife or husband cheated on you, then that other person can typically acquire parental custody, because they are the biological parent. All things being equal (not involving abuse or danger to the child), biology is the first line of legal custody.

What about adoption? The most sane thing to do near-term, would be to keep it the same - adoptions are max two people legal scenarios. If the system is cleaned up, simplified, or otherwise adjusted for N-way marriages, then perhaps later there could be N-way adoptions as well (and scientifically, we may eventually see N-way biological custody too).

In regards to your software development comparison, that happens all the time. Someone decides, this system is already so complicated it would be a mistake to try to bake in all this additional complexity. A more sensical solution would be to design a different system for handling these or deal with them in one-off cases if they are infrequent enough.

Vague metaphors aside, this happens occasionally in the industry I'm in (finance) when we trade small lots of non-traditional products. These products don't follow many of the rules that all of our other traded products do. Instead of re-writing our systems to deal with these(totally impractical), we manually shimmy these in to the database until they expire or are traded away, at which point we can forget about them.

As to abuse in a typical 2 person marriage, yes, you're right, but this is also something that I believe society tries to deal with. There are always going to be abusive relationships, regardless of how many people are in them, but I do think that my question (opinion, whatever you want to call it), about how power and relationships change depending on the number of people involved is something to consider.

I totally agree with the fact that marriage is none of the government's business. But at the same time, we would probably want to change some tax laws and social benefits if polygamy became legal.

(I really couldn't care less if polygamy is legal or not. Yes, if there is a relationship of 5 women and 5 men, then there is no difference than traditional marriage system. But I really do wonder about what happens when you have 1 male with 10 wives, and 9 other young males with zero wives. In the past, this has traditionally lead to some form of revolutions. I haven't seen anyone actually answer this question yet, just people calling me a troll and a bigot.)

> I really do wonder about what happens when you have 1 male with 10 wives, and 9 other young males with zero wives. In the past, this has traditionally lead to some form of revolutions. I haven't seen anyone actually answer this question yet, just people calling me a troll and a bigot.

Most societies studied (83.5% of the 853 societies according to George Murdock, for example) preferred polygyny. In other words, what you describe as "1 male with 10 wives" has always been the norm in human history.

The real question is - why enforce monogamy, especially as extramarital affairs and unequal couplings continue anyway? Fairness and justice are human inventions; they do not exist in nature.

what a bogus argument. You're saying because 'some modern polygamy situations' are unhealthy, we should hope to keep it illegal?

You're going to freak out when you learn about the divorce rate.

Polygamy is simply very different than same-sex marriage. It’s associated with patriarchy and sexual abuse, rather than liberation and equality. It flourishes in self-segregated communities, Mormon-fundamentalist and Muslim-immigrant, rather than being widely distributed across society. Its practitioners (so far as we know) are considerably fewer in number than the roughly 3.5 percent of Americans who identify as gay or bisexual.

While some polygamists may feel they were “born this way,” their basic sexual orientation is accommodated under existing marriage law even if the breadth of their affections isn’t, which makes them less sympathetic than same-sex couples even if their legal arguments sound similar.

Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality. That's a modern attitude. Marriage is associated with the treatment of a person as property and arrangements for political and financial reasons, even to this day. And yet here you are, saying one type of marriage is okay and the other kind that you're not particularly close to is associated with Mormons and Muslims and antiprogressivism, while lauding a modern view on one marriage and taking the dated view on another.

The reason plurals doesn't flourish, to you, is because the people who practice it don't tell you, lest you tell them what you just told us, and the inevitable "are you Mormon?"

Marriage of course depends entirely upon the married, their culture and their interpretation. Especially in America where we have fused 100 cultures and traditions, there's little you can call universal truths about marriage.

Every single child has a mother and a father. If that's not a prime universal truth, I don't know what is.

Men and women have been found by psychologists in every culture and tradition to differ in aggression and general activity level, types of cognitive strength, and sensory sensitivity. The differences between man and woman are obvious to all but the most ideologically blinded deconstructionists.

Don't be silly. Sometimes its a sperm donor; often the father is not biological. Children are orphans; they are adopted; they are born to a surrogate. That's got to be about the silliest thing anybody has said on HN for a long time.

> Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality. That's a modern attitude.

"Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality, except in these modern times"?

The term of art for 1-woman, multi-husband arrangements is "polyandry". The Wikipedia entry [1] has a citation to a survey that finds about 50 out of about 1230 known societies in a 1980 ethnographic atlas practicing polyandry, so it is a distinct minority community-scale arrangement.

The next public, conventional taboo to broach is group and line marriages. As economic conditions worsen for some nations' middle class in the upcoming decades, line marriage can potentially offer a coping mechanism, trading off resource collectivization and time in exchange for recapturing increased security of various forms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry

The only plurals I know are multi-husband communities and everyone involved are happier than clams. Your concern trolling to equate happy relationships with domestic abuse, simply because you don't understand them and think that everyone in a plural relationship is FLDS and lives in Utah, is pretty striking and antiprogressive (which is odd, considering you're attempting the progressive argument against their happiness).

And no, what you're saying is not "well known." You are arguing against certain fundamentalist groups, not plurals. They are not equivalent, despite this thread's clear goal to say otherwise.

So basically, "I don't know about it, so it doesn't happen."

News flash, 1 woman multi man, and (prepare to have your mind blown), multi women multi man communities can and do exist.

You've only seen polygamist relationships like that because that's what you've been fed by society to make you believe that it's wrong and can't work.

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