Right, so last year we had this thread that's been continued. In it and elsewhere, I see lots of people supporting gay marriage but unabashedly assuming that marriage is still between two people. Why?

Frankly, I think the most sense is made by marrying a bunch of men and women -- for all the reasons that marrying one person makes sense, but more so.

I really have no idea why people assume it. I'm with you.

For me at least it is because I only have enough energy for the one woman I got, and even that is pushing it.

Keith

I don't have any principled objection to multiple marriage, so long as the people involved want it and are enjoying it. I do think that it's harder in some ways to make multiple-person serious romantic relationships work out, for a variety of reasons, and my friends who have been in such relationships agree.

The main argument against it appears to be that historically polygamy was connected to treating women as second-class human beings. This is true, but it also seems to me that women's empowerment is ultimately a separate issue. Also, there's no analogous argument against multiple mixed marriage or polyandry.

I do think though that if we allow multiple marriage we'll have to give up entirely on providing special tax rates and other social and economic benefits to people on the basis of married status. That might be for the best in any case. We can still provide special benefits groups of people who take care of children together, if that's something that seems like it would be beneficial to society to do.

But if a self-aware group of people thinks that it will make them happy to pursue a multiple committed romantic relationship, I don't see what principled ground I have to object to that on.

I think the primary reason against polygymy is emotional. I know polygomy is common historically, but how many stories are there about jealousy and favoritism arising between multiple spouses? In modern thought, a marriage is about "love." Jealousy and favoritism are major issues in romantic relationships.

Also, aren't societies were polygomy common, isn't one sex considered the "head" of household? My point is that I wonder if a marriage of 3 or 4 (or more) equals -- which is the common assumption -- is really a practical possibility.

[edit] Cross-post with Sean. [/edit]

I think from the government perspective, all domestic partnerships (marriages) should be treated as mini-corporations. People share income, but also agree to pay for each other should they separate. Or not, depending on your prenup, or whatever. Then you can have two people corporations, three people, four, whatever, with any kind of mix.

Maybe tax benefits should be completely shifted over to be based on children within that corporation. Mainly because they cost a shitload of money, but are somehow connected to the future of society. Or so I'm told.

Know what I can't read with a straight face? Mitt Romney (Mormon governor of MA) saying how he opposes MA's same-sex marriages because they might open the door to polygamy.

I'm like, christ. Get a sense of history, guy. Get some solidarity. Some of my great-great-grandparents went to prison for their marriages. Yours too, Mitt.

Bastard.

-Vincent

Because nobody has really tried it in larger denominations, except for Lazarus Long and he doesn't count.

The point is that on paper, a two-person marriage is "easy". In practice it's one of the hardest things in the world to do right.

On paper, there's no reason why line marriages etc. ought not to work just fine. But there's also no practical evidence either way, not in an enlightened society.

It's not just quantitatively different from two-person marriage, either. Many of the benefits of marriage (legal and similar) accrue by providing a clear, unequivocal answer to possible disputes. The answer is of the form "one person - the other spouse." Substituting "several people" into that blank immediately increases the complexity and room for failure of all of those agreements. It's a qualitative difference, along the lines of the distinction between binary and trinary logic. No reason on paper... but where's your trinary computer?

I'm not arguing that this means it won't work; I am arguing that it will remain experimental until many generations have not only tried it, but succeeded. (Marriage as true equals isn't even to that point yet.) I expect it'll happen, eventually. I expect it'll have its share of really, truly, spectacular failures. So - why do we assume dual-only? The answer is that even if we don't, it's still appropriate to behave in much the same way as though we did. I do not choose to be a guinea pig in the first wave of that experiment, but I'll support anyone who does.

- Eric

Beats me why marriage is assumed to be between two people. A muslim classmate was talking the other day about how his father has two wives. I can't recall whether he said that upon coming to America, his wives were not recognized, or if he actually had to remarry, but only to one of them.

lumpley wrote: I'm like, christ. Get a sense of history, guy. Get some solidarity. Some of my great-great-grandparents went to prison for their marriages. Yours too, Mitt.

Bastard.

Bob Goat wrote: For me at least it is because I only have enough energy for the one woman I got, and even that is pushing it.

Keith

Personally, I don't see the point of institutionalize "marriage" to begin with.

Any arguement about it representing a higher level of committment is belied by the frequency not only of divorce but repeated divorce.

The only thing it represents is a higher level of hassle...right from planning the ceremony and guest list to having to combine assets and credit ratings and file taxes jointly.

If people are committed to a life long relationship with each other based on love, affection, respect, comradship, and support (emotional and/or financial) then great...go do that. What's the point of institutionalizing that with a marriage. Why does some other party...priest or judge...have to give his ok to make such a relationship legit. The institutionalization of marriage is a fundamentally pointless hold over from the days of relative lawlessness when women had to be protected by men from from other men...first fathers, then husbands. It got adapted to a more civilized time when the protection was less a factor than financial support. But now...women don't need a man's protection or a man's money...so there is no need for laws enforcing such a situation. Its a ridiculous piece of completely irrelevant non functional baggage.

If you want to proclaim your love and devotion for your partner...do it. Do it publically if you like. Do it with a ceremony if that makes it feel more substantial...but marriage...feh. Stupid and pointless. If you want to proclaim your committment before God...go ahead. He's listening. God knows you're married in your heart without needing the state to issue a certificate. God doesn't care about the state's certificate. You can "be married" in the eyes of God without needing the approval of government.

Which is why I find the whole "Gays should have the right to marry" thing to be even more pointless. Fighting tooth and nail for something that has no intrinsic value. Personally I find the "domestic partnership" that most gay couples reside in, to be vastly more sensible than "marriage" any way (which is why I'm in one).

The only shitter about not being married under U.S. law is the ridiculous restrictions on things like Health Care privacy (try getting information from a doctor about your S.O.'s condition if your not "family"), and inheritance, and estate tax. Fortuneately there are some things you can do with trusts and powers of attorney to mitigate most of those restrictions. And the restrictions themselves serve no purpose...they were just written in an era when marriage was the assumed state of normalcy and it made for a convenient way to write the law.


Love between two people = good.
Sharing a life together = good.
Marriage = stupid silly nonsense.

Ralph, I agree with all that. But dude, the point was really...

Valamir wrote:
Love between two people = good.

Ralph - I have to disagree there. Skip concerns of implementation; let's assume it was somehow being handled reasonably, with no silly concerns over "who do we allow to do this?" and all that.

Look at it as changing the default settings.

Default setting when you die is that the state becomes the guardian of your children. We modify that default if you have surviving kin. Marriage overrides that modification and puts in place its own default. It is possible for you to explicitly place an entry in that blank - assign a guardian in your will - but it requires work, just like modifying the default in any piece of software.

And as in software, defaults are damn useful when stuff starts changing. If foobling becomes commonplace, it becomes very important to know who your designated foobler is. One could require everyone to manually register a preference here. But in the absence of an institution like marriage, there would be no assumed default. Defaults can be extended by extrapolation legitimately, as they can be overridden; specific settings (the designated guardian of your children) cannot be extended by extrapolation (designated foobler) the same way, particularly if the specific settings aren't all set to the same value.

It is useful to have a program set new integers to zero unless otherwise specified. It is useful to have social institutions set new queries to "spouse" unless otherwise specified. Call "spouse" what you will, this is a dimension which "lifelong committed (but not recognized by the state) relationship" simply does not capture.

- Eric

There is a reason for the state to support some kind of arrangement, namely that often, one person does the income-work and the other person does the house-and-kids-work. The latter person is seriously screwed if there's no safety net for them once the first person decides that it's all over.

Now, that doesn't need to be marriage per se. It could be a contract of sorts. But a lot of people might not be smart enough or even want to accept that possibility at the time they start such an arrangement. This way, with marriage bringing government benefits, it secures child support and alimony for most people who end up in such an unfortunate position.

So we could drop state support and watch people crash and burn until contracts become the standard... or we could continue and expand the concept of government-sponsored domestic parnerships.

I once saw a law firm online offering "Relationship LLCs", as a sort of legal hack for non-traditional relationships. Sounded like a cool idea.

But to play the devil's (or maybe Jehovah's?) advocate here:

If marriages are permitted of infinite quantity, what's to stop abuse via marriages of convenience? I mean, what if your boss decides everyone in the company is getting married? -- it'll give some killer tax breaks or something... What if the Teamsters all get married?

Yeah, Larry. What if?

If that's a problem under law, then maybe there's screwy stuff in our law that ought to change.

Eric, Christian, Larry: you're all doing technocratic arguments. What you're essentially saying is that polygamy is no good because it's hard to implement due to existing bureaucratic procedure, which, you imply, is too difficult to change. That's a rather light argument compared to the question of whether polygamy is "right" or "wrong". I'd say that a state has a problem if it's bureaucracy is so massive that it can't be changed to improve it. Actually, the historical answer is to cry for revolution when the state refuses to bother with adapting.

What you state are genuine challenges - but they're challenges of application, not principle. To accept them in deliberation of the principle is to claim that the bureaucracy we live in is stronger and more important than ideology (read: the passion you live for). I don't think any of you would claim that the US government is already perfect.

What I'm trying to say: I don't doubt for a second that all those practical tax law issues and potential loopholes can be solved with expert legislation. Polygamy is a question of whether we should, not whether we can.

I told my wife about this conversation, and she said, "You are far too soft hearted to just fuck your way around a harem, anyway. You'd get all emotionally involved and end up shortchanging us all and exhausting yourself. It's better this way."

And she's right, which is why I should be polygamous. I can't think of any reasons why people in general shouldn't be polygamous, though.

My argument wasn't really aimed at not allowing polygamy, but rather, at why the state should support some kind of domestic partnership to begin with (to protect some of those entering into such partnerships).

I have no issue with that protection expanding to include more than two people.

Eero, I would contend that "because we don't know how to handle an alternative system yet" is still a reason why we don't try to use (stronger yet, assume) the multiple form in all conversation. The U.S. government (or my own Canadian one) is of course not perfect. But this does not change the argument that a move from binary to trinary+ logic is a deep change, qualitiative in kind.

If you want to ask "why do we not think of polyamory, instead of duoamory?" then that's a different question altogether. No damn reason at all; I don't, except that I happen to find that I love one individual more than all the rest put together.

But why do we think of marriage as between just two, instead of more? My answer is that marriage is an institution with a function, and that function is altered in nontrivial, qualitative ways by increasing N. We have essentially zero experimental data on these changes; all we have is theory.

I might paraphrase Ralph in a different context: "Enough theory! Go out and get multiply-married, already!" ... or similar. I don't think that further theoretical discussion re: marriage, as a multiperson institution, is fruitful (amongst, say, convinced Heinlein readers). As far as I'm concerned, somebody's gotta try it, first (maybe by use of some explicit powers-of-attorney nonsense and so forth, to achieve the equivalent-of-marriage in the current world), before we can say anything more at all about why it should or shouldn't actually work. All we can say clearly is that we know we don't know.

Which gets off-topic for Chris Week's original point. Basically, Chris, I'm on your side ... but I'm a serious Devil's Advocate for it until I see some Actual Play threads.

- Eric

joshua neff's wife wrote: You are far too soft hearted to just fuck your way around a harem, anyway. You'd get all emotionally involved and end up shortchanging us all and exhausting yourself.

Ack, Christopher...I did fail to bring my point back on topic.

Allow me to rectify.

If we accept that there is no benefit to marriage that people can get that REQUIRES government involvement to accomplish in the insitution of marriage than individual people can choose to marry or not marry independent of legal considerations. If for your faith marriage requires 2 people of opposite sex wed in a church by a priest...great...continue with the practice however you like...leave the government out of it.

We then recognize that there are currently all sorts of legal / financial laws/policys that involve the married status. However, it doesn't take much to realize that married status is simply a bureucratic convenience. Its an easy way to, in a single word, identify a recognized formal relationship between two parties. All of the religious "living in sin" consideration is supposed to be a non issue for our secular government. Those for whom it is an issue can continue to have religious ceremonies to validate their relationship according to their own faith as now.

So...if we realize that "marriage" as perceived from a government bureaucratic perspective is simply a formally recognized contractual relationship between people (where the contract is provided by statutory law rather than an actual negotiated contract)...we can then hit on the obvious fact that the law already provides for formally recognized contractual relationships between people...there called partnerships.

You create a partnership agreement that identifies the assets of the partnership, the bylaws for how the partnership will be organized and run, blah blah blah...and lo and behold you have a legally recognized entity that is distinct from but not seperate from the individual partners...in a fashion VERY close to that of a married couple with "joint" property vs "sole" property.

So, no great stretch to come up with a standard "Domestic Partnership" agreement that lays down all of the legal terms and clauses that the law ALREADY provides to married couples. Instead of it being statutorially imposed its agreed to in a contract. A contract that can be modified and amended by the parties to fit their own needs...for instance is "alimony" and "child support" REALLY applicable in a marriage where both parties are independently wealthy?

Ok...now to get to the point of the thread. Once you seperate out the legal / financial / bureaucratic issues that should be the realm of the government from the religous issues that should be the realm of an individuals choice of Faith you can start to apply those legal issues legally...without being trapped in circular arguements about "what a marriage is" because its no longer a marriage...its a legal partnership.

Once its a legal partnership it becomes very obvious that most legal partnerships actually involve SEVERAL partners....with rules for how new partners can join, old partners can resign, and how the relationships can be severed. It just becomes a new way of owning property jointly with anyone you choose according to established terms of your partnership agreement. In essence everybody become a member of their own little mini business practice where the business of the practice is living. 2 People, 3 People, 30 people. Legally there's no problem with structuring it how you want.

Now...how to deal with all of those pesky existing practices...like Company provided health insurance that allows you to carry your spouse on your policy. No problem at all really. Simply amend "spouse" with "any single designated Domestic Partner". What the hell does the insurance company care who that individual is. The perk from the job covers you +1. They mind have to recrunch the actuarial tables in order to account for new combinations of genders and ages in order to set appropriate premium levels...but that's really not that hard to do.


Now as for concerns that the reason you have what amounts to a statutorially enforced relationship called marriage is to protect the naive / weaker party from entering into an unfair arrangement. Certainly something that should be accounted for, but far from insurmountable. In fact, the domestic partnership model actually makes it easier to arrive at a fair balance because they don't have to be "one size fits all" arrangements. Courts and mediators have ample experience at dealing with contract disputes.

Christopher Weeks wrote:
But with those five partners, you can get and provide satisfaction of various needs from different people. We all do this with friends and associates anyway, but all living together in a loving relationship would be more flexible in lots of ways.

Valamir wrote: Love between two people = good.
Sharing a life together = good.
Marriage = stupid silly nonsense.

Andrew Morris wrote: I'd post my Actual Play posts, but I don't really think that'd be appropriate.

Hah! Joshua Neff, your wife's input made me laugh out loud.

The whole 'women as property' thing should maybe at least get an historical nod. After that, it's all emotionally wiggly (ok, and probably physically wiggly, too.)

Meguey wrote: Hah! Joshua Neff, your wife's input made me laugh out loud.

joshua neff wrote: I told my wife about this conversation, and she said, "You are far too soft hearted to just fuck your way around a harem, anyway. You'd get all emotionally involved and end up shortchanging us all""

Just a thought, not really a nod in either direction, but the logistics of it scare me.
Bob, Sue and Joan are married under Agreement A. Sue falls in love with Tom and decides to marry him as well. Tom is married to Suzy, Greg and George under Agreement B.

Part of the arrangement of a standard marriage includes sharing homes, even in existing & functioning poligamy situations though it may be property instead of a single building, incomes etc.. Such an arrangement above would be *quite* interesting. The mess of paperwork would frighten me greatly, not to mention it is quite alien in concept to myself.

I'm in the crowd that says one is enough for me. Its bad enough when you throw in in-laws (or even your own parents, as is my case). Personally, I'd have to think you insane to even attempt such a thing.