Should polygamy share in the same-sex marriage debate?

I personally don’t believe governments should regulate relationships. Therefore, I have no problem with polygamy as long as people aren’t being coerced into the relationship. If a group of people knowingly and voluntarily choose to live together or even to formalise their relationship as a marriage, I have no problem with their choice.

Should it share in the same debate? In as much as the discussion is about should individuals have the right to manage their own relationships, then yes I can see the connection. I am also pro-same-sex marriage. I cannot see what two (or three or four or whatever number) people of any gender getting married has to do with anyone else.

I guess the only problem areas would be how to manage things like superannuation, welfare benefits, wills and disputes about finances.

For better or for worse (hehehe), marriage is tied to government. Government in the United States is supposedly representative of the people of the United States. So until the government decides that it doesn’t want records of your marital status, what gets called marriage is everybody’s business.

Interestingly, the Bible never actually gets around to prohibiting polygamy.

No, because they are two separate issues. If we want to debate the issue of polygamy it should be done all on its own. Thos opposed to same-sex marriage try to link it with polygamy, and bestiality—marrying your horse or some such—so they can change the topic from an issue they are now losing to one where they can win. Same sex marriage is no more linked with polygamous relationships than oppposite sex marriage is.

@Nullo, records, got it, financial breaks and tax records, I can see. But our constitution, written by and for descendants of religious outcasts from England, was based on the premise of religious freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Then somewhere along the way polygamy was outlawed, and of course all the laws about anal sex and falatio as a direct result of homophobia, and you have the exact same concept of religious suppression, only committed this time on the sexually subversive. The religiously subversive group from England outlawed what they considered to be sexually subversive, based on their paranoia resulting from their religious beliefs. Sooo, you could say that almost every sexual law, to include those banning prostitution, are founded on religious opinions.
I believe that those laws having to do with marriage fall squarely within the same realm as the arguments about injecting prayer into the classroom. It is a religious function, unconstitutionally adopted by the government as ‘It’s Business’.
@ETpro bestiality would I think be quite the different argument, because it relates to a union between a legally consenting ‘human’ and an individual that cannot give legal consent, such as the aforementioned horse. I think linking polygamy with same sex marriage would make the case stronger, if done the right way. And it would have the further effect of un-alienating all those polygamist groups and sects that practice their chosen way of life anyway, the same way homosexuals do regardless of societal laws.
(edit)Also it would address the fear that legalizing same-sex marriage would open the door for those others, by defining once and for all the line whereby state and government can and cannot be allowed to interfere with human unions and relationships. Basing it off of a legal recognition of a consenting adult, and leaving it at that, would simplify everything except the tax breaks. The real issue here is the continuation of sexually repressed viewpoints passed down from our founding fathers, being held onto for dear life by the religiously conservative. Linking alternative marriage with human/animal(cross-species) sex is a desperate attempt to inspire disgust in those who don’t share their aversions. Exposing pathetic efforts like that would go a long way towards restraining those kinds of manipulative, bad logic in issues like this.

@abaraxadac I will grant you that bestiality and polygamy are very different things, but I was not trying to compare them or even suggest they are the same. What I said is that both are suggested as being part and parcel of the same-sex marriage debate for the same reason; to link that debat which currently has widespread public support with issues that are not related to it and which has no popular support.

@ETpro I believe that including polygamy with same-sex marriage will focus the debate on the real issue, namely do state and government have the right to regulate consenting adult relationships. You’re trying to exclude polygamy from the conflict because it has no widespread public support, and feel it would drag the same-sex movement down through association. I feel not including it as a valid component of the same issue leaves same-sex marriage vulnerable to fears of opening the gate for polygamy, which if not handled at the same time will drag the issue as an unresolved but equally valid extension of the exact same question at hand.

@abaraxadac You have your right to that opinion. I am being pragmatic in pushing for what I feel we can do. If we overreach, we might come back empty handed.

Personally, I believe all consenting adult relationships should be legal. Polygamy was allowed throughout most of history, and only became an issue in America when Mormons advocated it. Outlawing it was religiously motivated and nothing else. It was clear religious discrimination. But that said, I think it is better left a separate fight for another, more enlightened day.

The debate s a waste of time.
I agree with @Mz_Lizzy .
My twist on her view is that ‘marriage’ as we know it was a concept of the church designed for control, recently hijacked by politics.

If you love someone or two, male or female (or both) tell me why do people find it necessary for that fact to be accepter by our rulers ? (especially as so many people have no deep respect for organised religion or their politicians)

‘Marriage’ as we know it should stay as it was intended.
An ancient religious ritual for those who love and fear the flaming finger of an omnipotent theoretical being and those who fully support such organisations & are able to justify all that has been done in its name.

Summary, If anyone wants to commit and make it public, they are free to do so (in most first world areas) Why do we need recognition from those we don’t respect anyway?

You know that people would say, “The next thing you know people will want to marry Rhinos and porcupines. Then computers. Where will it stop?”

The fear of change is probably the worst thing. Multiple spouses? Same sex spouses? What’s wrong with these people? Why isn’t a “normal” relationship good enough for them. It’s good enough for us.

What is a healthy relationship? Can a coercive relationship be healthy? Is it any of our business?

I guess I think it is our business to protect people from being taken advantage of or from being hurt. But I also think it can be hard to tell when that is happening.

@wundayatta

I don’t think most people against polygamy are against because they’re worried about people being taken advantage of, I think the majority of people are against it because polygamy is different and goes against religion. However, polygamy does have realistic negative implications: how would the legal benefits of marriage as they are today be applied to polygamous marriage? That might be difficult to implement. Also, what’s the limit? Can one man have 2 wives, 5 wives, what if 50 people want to marry each other? There has to be some kind of legal limit and that would create complications. Also, as you said, people can be coerced or taken advantage of in these situations.

Same-sex marriage on the other hand is simply a matter of changing the gender in the current marriage system. Nothing else changes. Whom is it hurting?

@DominicX Hell, if I can declare them all as dependents, I’ll marry the whole state of Massachusetts and go tax free form now on.

As a lesbian person who would love to have the freedom to legally marry – I feel like all issues of full freedom and protection under the law should be addressed together. I’ve heard many in the LGBT community say that we shouldn’t address the two together because they feel that one detracts from the other or that by combining the two one or the other would turn away folks who support only one of those scenarios rather than freedom in general. That was the same argument in some cases with regards to addressing race during the feminist movement or the suffragist movement to some extent & in turn particular groups had less support and therefore are/were slower with regard to receiving freedom &/or equal legal protections. Each group is intertwined within the next – there are people of all races among women & men hetero or homo, there are people who are poly-amorous within the homosexual community just like there are within the heterosexual community etc. and so forth. If you don’t give all of them freedom and equal protections under the law then it ends up affecting the whole eventually on some level anyway.

Why not simply address it all at once & just make a law that allows consenting adults of sound mind be permitted to marry & divorce & then just add some sort of clause that requires them to not be a burden on society in any way? For instance, if you have multiple wives you should be able to feed & house them in a safe way & if you divorce them you and they should all be capable of surviving without need for welfare programs or potentially being rendered homeless etc. I’m all for giving people freedom as long as they can handle it in a way that doesn’t burden society in some significant way financially. I’d love to be able to marry my one partner AND I’d love to be able to marry a couple more as well, but I would never marry more than I could afford to financially support in the case that they all lost their jobs at one time because I don’t believe on being a burden to society if I can help it.

@Jenniehowell the burden to society thing is a great point. Societies that do allow polygamist marriages have that as their main priority, and it makes sense. I must play the devils advocate here though and point out that many people marry just one spouse in our society today and they cannot support themselves, much less anyone else. I’m not really going anywhere with that, just saying.
And the fact that both issues are in fact intertwined is exactly why I asked the question in the first place. It seems to me that focusing on just one side of the same issue will actually slow down the process, rather than getting to the heart of the matter.
@DominicX Your concern for the tax angle is touching, considering you are speaking about people, their relationships with others, and their families here. The state and federal take on marriage came after people said they were going to become married, not before. The tax system as we know it today is a result of the religious and emotional decision to live with and potentially spend the rest of ones life with another. Why do they have to put a limit on anything concerning family structure at all? The entire point from my perspective is that the government should not be allowed to tell legal adults how to arrange their personal relationships. Tax laws can be changed to accommodate the way people choose to live, looking at it from the other way around puts the cart before the horse is even born, in my opinion.
And the legalities for homosexuals should be no different than any other partnership as far as I’m concerned. The government is saying that a homosexual partnership is less valid, or ‘holy’, than a hetero one, because of the fundamentalist beliefs of the lawmakers and their constituents. Using religious based beliefs to determine the financial obligations of taxpayers should seem wrong to more people out there than just me, I should think.
@wundayatta this goes back to that other topic. Legally consenting adults. Your ipod, pet rock, and parakeet do not really count.
@Odysseus Thanks for your input that we waste our time even bothering to talk about it. Your message that essentially the entire thing is a closed issue, with only one clear choice, and any other line of thinking is obviously cracked, is truly profound. I think I should close my Fluther account now, since that would seem to apply to every topic on the social board, at least. And probably to some of the general ones as well.

@abaraxadac ha – I definitely agree – we have too many people single and non who regardless of their sexual orientation or preference toward polyamory etc. are not independent in a way that I would call responsible in that one spouse could pay for the other(s) if something were to happen to them. To me that would be a part of what marriage vows would be about – not to say that any particular vows I’ve ever heard do state such things but that I believe they should. I’d love to know that my partner will not just stick with me in better or worse, sickness & health etc. but will support me in times of need in a way that sustains me and enables me to come back to their level when I fall rather than enabling me to stay down and be served by someone as if I am a burden to them.

Apparently, based on our country’s voting history, I am one of the odd folks out when it comes to my views. I have always supported a combination of freedom & equality for all people on a global scale with the only real stipulations being those which would relate to those regarding people becoming burdens to society or people taking action that harms others who may be non-consenting. The average American seems to support freedom without equality if you ask me which in the end simply just means freedom for some particular elite &/or privileged group (or a few groups) – I always have a difficult time with the phrases we all utter such as “the land of the free & home of the brave” How brave is it to only afford freedom to those who are just like you, or who you believe to fall within the confined boundaries of the twisted view you have of your own religion? And how can we utter this phrase without adding some other words like “the land of a few free & the home of the wanna be brave”?

@abaraxadac You did realize that I was expressing what I thought other people would say against the idea. To them, legally consenting doesn’t matter. They think it is the tip of the ice berg sort of thing. They are afraid of what will happen, and this is unreasoning, but it’s still there.

My thinking is that even amongst legally consenting adults, it appears that people make choices that are hurtful to themselves. Certainly manypeople think they do. So they want to outlaw these things. My question is whether there are any times when society can say they know better than the legally consenting adults? Further, what happens when children are involved?

@wundayatta my personal opinion on the question of whether society can say they know better, falls on my reasoning for legalization of marijuana and prostitution. If someone wishes to hurt themselves, no one else can say dick about it. When that hurting begins to extend to other people, the legal system is supposed to be there to prevent it. If a woman would be much happier outside of such an arrangement, but has locked herself into one because in her own mind she in afraid of any other world, not much can be done about it. children, on the other hand, would necessarily fall under the same auspices as children of gay couples. If the social services people want to visit once or twice to ensure there is no ‘weird’ stuff going on, like the gay male couple dressing their boys up in dresses because they think it is cute, or the polygamist parents arranging the sleeping and/or rooming conditions to reflect some bizarre cultish training regimen(like one 8 y/o boy with 3 girls in one room, something like that) then I think that is something the parents of children who wish to have unusual adult relationships might have to put up with, at least at first while our society is learning tolerance for them.
Ultimately, the fears about children getting brain-washed are founded on the bizarre conditions that our society forces people, who engage in such non-standard relationships, to live in. If a polygamist family could live next door to you, and your children went over to their house to play, and you had them over for a barbeque, you would likely be either more assured as to their normal lifestyle, or more deeply concerned, perhaps enough to call someone about it, say if you observed the father being possessive of girls obviously too young or something.
The key is to get them out of the cloistered, limited lifestyle, make them feel normal, and integrate them into our society so that nut jobs will find it more difficult to take advantage of them. In my opinion, once the polygamists are a part of our lifestyle, fears about abuse will dissipate, or be more easily confirmed and appropriate action taken.

@abaraxadac I agree with you.

Still, the thing I worry about is an overzealous child protective service agent. I don’t know, but it seems to me that too much is left up to the judgment of the agent, and there is no standardization of situations which are considered a problem. I don’t know enough about their procedures to be able to say this for sure.

The only example that comes to mind is this idea that any photos of nude children are child pornography. Perhaps there is a rule about this. If that’s the case, than I think the rule is ineffective and wrong. I think most of us can tell the intent of a photo in 90% of the cases. But that’s beside the point.

My larger point is that in gray areas, I think that agents use their understanding of religious prejudices as a standard by which they make this decision. Thus, photos by the professional photographer mother of her own nude children might be sort of ok, but pictures by the professional photographer gay father of his own children might be considered porn, simply because of the sexuality of the father and the prejudice of the agent against homosexual parents.

Do we really know things when we see them? Is polygamy always bad just because that’s the conventional morality? What about homosexuality. It seems to me that society makes these kinds of knee-jerk decisions based on assumed information instead of scientifically ascertained information.

That happens a lot in society, I think.

@wundayatta I couldn’t agree more. CPS is notorious for making bad decisions. I saw a story on the news last month where the child died after being locked in the bathroom for a day or two, then left in the trunk or something like that. A CPS agent had been to the house the week prior, and had not even asked to see the children the complaint was about.
On the other hand most parents in America have heard horror stories of kids being taken away from parents for the most ridiculous, trivial things. As if they have a quota to make each month or something.
The way laws are set up themselves is biased towards religious prejudicial thinking. If I had an answer for the short term, in that area at least, I would say get a peer to make the judgment. This may backfire in some cases, especially if the gay case worker gets in on the child porn pictures or something like that, but that kind of thing is a risk in every aspect of life.
A female or male homosexual case worker making the call on another, personally unknown homosexual couple and the way they treat their kids could be seen as relatively impartial. Kind of like the way they always have to have a policewoman on duty to frisk the females being booked, have a homosexual case worker in as many districts as possible, to handle those kind of cases. Unfortunately the polygamists are so closely spaced within their communes, that finding an impartial pro-polygamist case worker willing to move there from somewhere else would I think be the better option.
The real crux of your concern is, how do we regulate the regulators? That, my friend, has been an issue since the beginning of civilization, to one extent or another.

Fact from fiction, truth from diction. I believe the two should definitely be shoulder to shoulder, otherwise it is a bit disingenuous and a fraud. If you are going to tackle same sex marriages purely from a secular human rights side of the river there is nothing that precludes polygamous or even inbred marriages from being OK. For one to say I am for gay marriages because I am gay but I don’t want their struggle next to mine because them fighting to marry like me will hurt my chances, it hypocritical. That would be like me as a African American saying I want equality and equal treatment but screw the Hispanics, because of the backlash against illegals they would hurt my chances, so they best stay away until I get mine then let them go for theirs. If there is no reference to sin than any union composed of those legal to consent to it should be legal