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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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