It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy | Hacker News Reader

It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy

politico.com

23 pointsdudul28 comments

Three friends of mine are married; each one has an emotional, sexual, and financial bond with the other two. They have jobs and a house and two kids; they're basically a model family if you ignore the novelty of the bit where the kids have three parents.

The law only recognizes part of this relationship as a marriage, even though it is clear to everyone who knows them that all three are equal partners; it's not a couple-plus-another, it's three people who have chosen to bind themselves together as a family.

I see nothing to be lost by allowing their triad to gain the same legal status currently afforded to pairs, and much to be lost by continuing to prevent it.

A friend of mine grew up in a commune-like household. Several couples and sets of children in a large house pooling resources, sharing responsibilities, collectively caring for each other like a single family. The impression I got was this was a collective emotional and financial bond with a more traditional sexual coupling, but I see that as besides the point.

The question is, what regulatory framework would you impose here? How would you want this to work in terms of taxes, inheritance, divorce, etc. I think when you dig into it, the reality is it's hard enough to build a workable framework around two people forming and breaking these bonds, to make an 'n-way' coupling that actually functioned properly (from a legal and fair-taxes perspective) would probably be impossible.

To the extent that you want to tie in a 3rd (or more) people to a union with children that could be biologically descendant from any two of the set... these would have to be one-off contracts in the form of LLCs / partnerships holding the assets, and estate / inheritance plans with appointed god-parents, etc. I just don't see how the state could make a one-size-fits all framework for n-way couplings, but also I don't really see what's stopping a motivated group from making it work on their own.

It is a hard problem and I don't have an answer to propose.

I know my friends have set up a number of legal arrangements with powers of attorney and such in order to work around their lack of marriage, just as gay and lesbian couples had to do for many years.

The problem for them is the same problem homosexual pairs faced up until yesterday: checking the "marriage" box grants you a long list of goodies, from the mundane to the critical, and many of them simply can't be acquired any other way.

It may be that the solution is not to continue fixing the legal institution of marriage at all, but to abandon it. If people could sign up for the rights and responsibilities of marriage a la carte, in whatever combinations suit their relationships, we could solve not just the gay-marriage problem but all the other forms of inequity currently baked into our traditional framework, many of which we may not even be aware of yet.

People should be allowed to make any sort of private contract they want (as long as they don't hurt anyone else). Why are marriage contracts any of the government's business?

I think we should recognize that power imbalances exist and that some private contracts are very exploitative, and are thus not entirely voluntary.

Many of those power imbalances were created (directly or indirectly) by the government.

There should always be an option to declare bankruptcy and start over (unless you were guilty of a crime, which is a debt you shouldn't be able to dodge).

For example, if someone decided to enter a slavery contract, they could always later declare bankruptcy and default and start over. However, an employment contract of 1-10 years probably would be treated differently.

> Many of those power imbalances were created (directly or indirectly) by the government.

Therefore using government to correct them is somehow immoral? Not sure how that follows (or if not that, what you are attempting to say here).

When government creates a power imbalance, and then government tries to correct that power imbalance, it usually winds up making things even worse.

Government didn't create it; people did, using government as a tool. As a tool, it seems rather neutral, depending entirely on which constituency is pulling the strings on a particular policy.

At very least to determine what happens to your property when you die (and, perhaps more importantly to the state, how it is taxed). And also what happens to children if you die before they are of age.

Hospital visitation is a tricky one. I suppose you could have people register who gets to visit, but it would be unfair unless you required everyone to do this. I would be pissed if I a family member got in an accident and died alone while I pleaded with the hospital staff while people in traditional relationships are allowed in without the same registration.

Couldn't we, in theory, set it up so that those issues (excluding taxation) are dealt with in a standard polygamy contract.

Of course there is still the issue of determining what the correct resolution of those issues is, so we will likely have a situation of multiple 'standard' contracts, and people picking one without actually researching the differences.

I'm sure most things probably could (though still unfair if some have to explicitly acquire these rights by contract while others get it by default). The government's obligation at death is the sticking point.

This case was about getting a spouse's name on a death certificate. The DOMA case was about taxation at death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor ).

Because marriage in the states of the United States have been defined as a contract where the government is one of the parties who also has interests.

All contracts are the government's business -- an agreement that doesn't rest in some way on the power of government (and thus, is not government's business) is not a contract.

OTOH, civil marriage in the US (the religious institutions sharing the name are separate concerns, even when they happen to coincide with a civil marriage) is in many respects not like a contract in the usual sense, since many of the legal effects are not to create legally enforceable obligations of one party against the other, but for the partners to agree to jointly share some treatment from, and as offered to couples by, the government. (There are some features of marriage that are either contract like, or which could be mimicked by normal contracts, as well.)

Forming a marriage under the laws of a state is more like forming a corporation under the laws of a state than it is like entering into a bilateral private contract.

While possibly polygamy should be as legal as same sex marriage (I don't see why not) it is unlikely to become legal any time soon. It just doesn't have the same number of adherents to push it forward. And most people don't know someone or have someone in their family that is a polygamist. It's also hard to make an argument for innate tendency.

OTOH, it's in the Bible. That may help a little bit.

I was recently in a hotel room and as there was nothing else to do I looked up who Gideon was in the Gideon bible. It turns out he was a major polygamist (Judges 8.29)

Now I see their organization under a completely different light... Promoting polygamy by distribution of bibles...

http://www.gideons.org

Banning polygamy is in part about equality in marriage opportunity; the risk in some societies is a surplus male population that engages in insurrection and other "crime" or violent behavior. This sexual frustration and social inequality can end up going in many different directions.

Isn't this the 'slippery slope' argument that gay marriage advocates said would never happen?

Well, it happened.

If you actually read the article, you'll notice that it's on your side of 'what won't those hippies do next.'

I don't get that vibe. As far as I can tell, the tone is more, "Regrettably we had to demonize polygamy to avoid guilt by association, but it's time to pay the technical debt and extend marriage equality to all."

That's definitely the tone, but it's pretty funny since it's talking about the erosion of traditional marriage. Polygamy is almost certainly the most traditional marriage there is. Groups of people dedicated to each other who shared the responsibility of raising children definitely came before people decided to partner-up. For an example, I'm not saying you have to believe the Bible literally, but most of the men in the early parts of it had multiple wives. Now, maybe it's a radical idea for the majority of the population to consider Biblical marriage traditional, but even if you don't believe in that particular religious text, it's at least evidence that plural marriages were pretty common thousands of years ago. I'm not saying they're better or worse, but they're definitely traditional.

If most men had many wives, there must have been a lot less men than women, and/or a lot of men with no wife at all. Or perhaps wife sharing would account for it.

Or, like a lot of books, most of the stories were about rich men who had things others didn't. That part isn't glossed over at all. But that's just about the Bible stories. If you're talking about my comments on early humans, I think it's likely that sharing partners was more common.

No, they usually went straight to "marrying pets" and "marrying children".

That said, the gulf between monogamy and polygamy is enormously larger and more complicated than the comparatively minor jump to same-sex monogamy. From a procedural and logical perspective, gay marriage is a SMALL change, opposed mainly due to cultural mores.

However, any programmer can tell you that refactoring from a one-to-one relationship to a many-to-many relationship adds complexity, and polygamy involves a similar architectural change that touches many issues. Just for starters, start thinking about issues like inheritance, custody, power of attorney, and tax-law.

"No, they usually went straight to "marrying pets" and "marrying children"."

I disagree. This is the first argument I heard about gay marriage and everybody said it was ridiculous. But I have now heard that this should be the next issue from many people on Facebook.

I guess they weren't so crazy after all..

"Just for starters, start thinking about issues like inheritance, custody, power of attorney, and tax-law."

..Or how easy it would be to bring citizens over from any country and fake citizenship.

Haven't heard anyone calling it ridiculous before, but that might be our individual Facebook bubbles in action. The reaction to the slippery slope argument I've seen has always been more of a "Sure, why not? But let's fix the same sex marriage first."

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