Arkady
President
Now that gay marriage is well on its way to being legal in every advanced nation, let's look down the road at an at least superficially similar issue: should polygamous marriage be legalized?
Since polygamous marriage is well within the confines of "traditional marriage," it's possible it will get less opposition from social conservatives. Plenty of Bible figures were righteous polygamists. There are polygamist traditions in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, at least, and many far-eastern religions. Among the elite classes, it was standard in places like ancient Japan, China, Thailand, etc.
However, traditions aside, I think there are practical arguments against polygamy that didn't really apply to gay marriage:
(1) Anti-polygamy laws are not discriminatory against the individual in the way anti-gay-marriage laws are. Telling a gay person he can't legally marry someone of his own gender is telling him that he can't legally marry anyone he's romantically and sexually attracted to, even though non-gays can. By comparison, telling a would-be polygamist he can't legally marry multiple people isn't denying him a right others have. We ALL are forced to choose just one legal spouse among the many we may be sexually and romantically attracted to. Forcing us into that choice may be good or bad policy, but it's not discriminatory. We're all getting equal protection under the marriage laws.
(2) Accommodating polygamous marriage, socially and legally, is VASTLY more complicated than accommodating gay marriage. With gay marriage, you can basically do it with a single one-line law making all the other marriage laws equally applicable regardless of the sexes of those involved. There's nothing about most laws dealing with marriage where the sexes of the partners are terribly important, especially in this modern era when most of the gendered laws had already been revised to reflect the changing position of women in the world. By comparison, most marriage laws expressly or implicitly require there to be just two participants for them to function properly. For example, divorce laws aren't build to accommodate a polygamous situation. What happens if a man with two wives wants to divorce one and not the other, but one of those two wives wants to stay married to both after the divorce. Can you have a situation where a man is married to a woman who is married to both that man and another woman? How long can such a chain get? Polygamy would require major changes to thousands of laws, would make existing legal precedents worthless in many cases, and would even cause serious problems with private contractual arrangements. For example, if your company's pension has survivor benefits for a spouse, that has very different statistical repercussions if you have five spouses than if you have just one.
(3) Polygamous marriage has an ability to disrupt non-polygamous marriage and society in general in a way gay marriage can't reasonably be expected to do. If you appreciably change the male-female mix among singles, you can have serious social problems. This isn't like gay marriage, where we're talking about a peripheral social phenomenon that is never likely to impact more than a tiny percentage of people. We're all potential polygamists, and if laws make polygamous marriage more attractive, the impact on the society could be much larger. Polygamy traditionally existed in societies with high male mortality due to dangerous occupations (e.g., subsistence hunting) and constant tribal warfare. With the natural male-female ratio being skewed by that, having multiple females per male in a marriage worked pretty well. But in a society with a natural 1:1 ratio, if either gender were disproportionately involves in plural marriages, the results could be huge..... for example, if we had a lot of low-status males with no marriage prospects, because lots of women were tied up in plural marriages with high-status males, it's a recipe for violence.
I have no moral problem with polygamy. It actually sounds quite nice. My wife and I are both professionals, and the idea of having a more traditionally feminine "homemaker" wife to help us out sounds great. And I suspect there are women out there who'd be happy to be in that role, if society didn't stigmatize it. I also see hints that both genders might be happier in polygynous arrangements -- women would get more emotional support than a traditional husband provides, and guys would get more sexual variety. It would also be a great boon to bisexuals, who wouldn't be stuck only being able to legally marry one of the two genders they're attracted to.
But, none of that erases the practical problems with polygamy. So, since it's an issue that only impacts a minority of people, and doesn't do so in a way that implicates Constitutional issues, I see no pressing need to do anything about it.
Since polygamous marriage is well within the confines of "traditional marriage," it's possible it will get less opposition from social conservatives. Plenty of Bible figures were righteous polygamists. There are polygamist traditions in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, at least, and many far-eastern religions. Among the elite classes, it was standard in places like ancient Japan, China, Thailand, etc.
However, traditions aside, I think there are practical arguments against polygamy that didn't really apply to gay marriage:
(1) Anti-polygamy laws are not discriminatory against the individual in the way anti-gay-marriage laws are. Telling a gay person he can't legally marry someone of his own gender is telling him that he can't legally marry anyone he's romantically and sexually attracted to, even though non-gays can. By comparison, telling a would-be polygamist he can't legally marry multiple people isn't denying him a right others have. We ALL are forced to choose just one legal spouse among the many we may be sexually and romantically attracted to. Forcing us into that choice may be good or bad policy, but it's not discriminatory. We're all getting equal protection under the marriage laws.
(2) Accommodating polygamous marriage, socially and legally, is VASTLY more complicated than accommodating gay marriage. With gay marriage, you can basically do it with a single one-line law making all the other marriage laws equally applicable regardless of the sexes of those involved. There's nothing about most laws dealing with marriage where the sexes of the partners are terribly important, especially in this modern era when most of the gendered laws had already been revised to reflect the changing position of women in the world. By comparison, most marriage laws expressly or implicitly require there to be just two participants for them to function properly. For example, divorce laws aren't build to accommodate a polygamous situation. What happens if a man with two wives wants to divorce one and not the other, but one of those two wives wants to stay married to both after the divorce. Can you have a situation where a man is married to a woman who is married to both that man and another woman? How long can such a chain get? Polygamy would require major changes to thousands of laws, would make existing legal precedents worthless in many cases, and would even cause serious problems with private contractual arrangements. For example, if your company's pension has survivor benefits for a spouse, that has very different statistical repercussions if you have five spouses than if you have just one.
(3) Polygamous marriage has an ability to disrupt non-polygamous marriage and society in general in a way gay marriage can't reasonably be expected to do. If you appreciably change the male-female mix among singles, you can have serious social problems. This isn't like gay marriage, where we're talking about a peripheral social phenomenon that is never likely to impact more than a tiny percentage of people. We're all potential polygamists, and if laws make polygamous marriage more attractive, the impact on the society could be much larger. Polygamy traditionally existed in societies with high male mortality due to dangerous occupations (e.g., subsistence hunting) and constant tribal warfare. With the natural male-female ratio being skewed by that, having multiple females per male in a marriage worked pretty well. But in a society with a natural 1:1 ratio, if either gender were disproportionately involves in plural marriages, the results could be huge..... for example, if we had a lot of low-status males with no marriage prospects, because lots of women were tied up in plural marriages with high-status males, it's a recipe for violence.
I have no moral problem with polygamy. It actually sounds quite nice. My wife and I are both professionals, and the idea of having a more traditionally feminine "homemaker" wife to help us out sounds great. And I suspect there are women out there who'd be happy to be in that role, if society didn't stigmatize it. I also see hints that both genders might be happier in polygynous arrangements -- women would get more emotional support than a traditional husband provides, and guys would get more sexual variety. It would also be a great boon to bisexuals, who wouldn't be stuck only being able to legally marry one of the two genders they're attracted to.
But, none of that erases the practical problems with polygamy. So, since it's an issue that only impacts a minority of people, and doesn't do so in a way that implicates Constitutional issues, I see no pressing need to do anything about it.
