You know, oddly enough, the "slippery slope argument" DOES hold water. . .

[xiphias]

One of the arguments which people used to argue against interracial marriage was that it was a slippery slope. If you let blacks and whites marry, why, then, eventually, GAYS might be able to marry, too!

And they DID. Just two generations later!

Now people are arguing that gay marriage is going to be a slippery slope leading to allowing polygamy.

Well.

What of it? If people decide to do that, I feel confident that they will do so because they will believe that it is morally and ethically correct to do so.

Comments

[holyhippie]

I'm perfectly fine with polygamous marriages. As long as all the adults involved consent, what's the issue?

I think that if the government ever did consider moving this type of marriages to a legal status on par with marriages involving two people, they would quickly find the territory full of landmines in respect to benefits, legal rights, insurance, and so on. Plus, there would be reduced barriers to preventing marriages where the sole intent of the marriage is to fraduently gain benefits from the government.

Companies may stop giving health insurance benefits to employees. Right now, they have to cover maybe two adults, plus some number of kids (which are cheaper to cover). What if they had to cover four adults, plus kids?

These problems may be surmountable ... but the issues are certainly going to be different, going from a marriage composed of merely two people, to a marriage composed of many.

[madcaptenor.livejournal.com]

Companies may stop giving health insurance benefits to employees.

Of course, we could have nationalized health care. Then that wouldn't be a problem.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

Socialised medicine? What's next, public schooling?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

As long as all the adults involved consent, what's the issue?

That *is* the issue. When you start adding more people you get into serious problems of undue influence, and consent vs "well okay". (Ask me how I know!)

Not that I'm against it, just saying that it's fraught with difficulty. Of course monogamy is, too, especially from my perspective. ;)

You also bring up the insurance issue...my visualization for this is a giant marriage-katamari, where every employee of the company is forced into some sort of bizarre line-marriage so that they can all be covered under one policy! Or, y'know, insurers could stop privileging married couples as if women were still supposed to be unemployed, barefoot, etc., and just charge per person covered (with some sort of discount like there is for multiple cars).

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

>they would quickly find the territory full of landmines in respect to benefits, legal rights, insurance, and so on.

One friend admitted that while he opposed gay marriage on the grounds that that's simply not what he thinks about when he thinks of the word marriage, he also thinks we shouldn't legalize gay marriage because he didn't think our current setup could afford to extend all the various benefits to same-sex partners too.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

To which my answer is "change the setup rather than denying people basic civil rights", but well, y'know, I'm one of them filthy communists.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

:::screams:::!!!

But tjen we don't have quite the giant, top-heavy running-dog infrastructure in our countries.

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

oh I agree. He would agree too if he thought this were a perfect world but he thinks of himself as a hardened realist who sees what's actually possible in this world.

hardened realism

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i'm a hardened realist too, but the test is whether i'm only one when i've already got mine, or whether i can handle it when i end up with the short end of the stick.

Re: hardened realism

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

:)
He's gotten the short end of the stick in other areas so I imagine he figures every group gets its share of the short shrift. I'm not agreeing with the guy...just...he's not an "I've got mine" kind of guy.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

I'm just waiting until it's legal for wife and I to marry a consenting dodecahedron.

Slippery slope

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I've never understood how people get from polygamy to sheep molestation, though, and that does seem to be on the "slope" of some of these rhetoricians. Maybe they're all repressed beastialitists, as well as repressed homosexuals and polyamorists?

Re: Slippery slope

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

...And now I'm thinking of Orson Scott Card.

Re: Slippery slope

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Yes, that.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

I'm all for letting the polygamists and polyandrists marry. I agree that doing so could pose a challenge as far as insurance goes, but I think it's definitely a surmountable challenge. I also don't think many people would want to have multiple spouses. It's really a lot of work.

You know, I should set you up with some books about Utah history and the anti-polygamy movement in the 1870s-90s. A lot of fascinating and not-so-well-known stuff, a lot of parallels with Mormon polygamy to gay marriage today.

Also, we had a senator in Utah who was not allowed to take his seat in Congress because he was a polygamist back in 1890 or so.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Sorry, this is a really pedantic thing, but polygamy is multiple marriage. Polygyny is multiple women/wives. :)

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

You're right :) I've just been working non-stop for the past 16 hours, and confused my suffixes.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Let me put it this way - if polygamy is legalised in a hundred years, it will be because the argument over the legal wording starts tomorrow.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Now people are arguing that gay marriage is going to be a slippery slope leading to allowing polygamy.

Bestiality first. IANAlawyer, but I'll bet you it's legally much simpler. Then, with goats on our side, there's nothing we can't do!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The other day I got to explain polygamy and polyamory in the US (and the distinction between how the words are generally used) to my Taiwaese colleagues. That was fun.

Their views on the matter mostly were "well, as long as they're all consenting adults" but then again, these are people used to a nationalized healthcare system.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

Right... first our idea of what marriage (or voting rights or whatever) ought to be changes, and then we change the law to reflect it. Exanding a legal definition to include more situations often means it will continue to be expanded. Nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

That being said - in the case of marriage, a change in number is a much bigger change than a change in gender. It's not just the economics... I mean yes, we need to figure out how health insurance would work and convince the actuaries to go along with it; but, based on my recent experience buying health insurance for my company, we are a lot closer to solving that then most people think... so the economics is something we can figure out.

The problem that I see is more structural. If you look at polyamory / polygamy / polyandry / polygyny, you're actually talking about a lot of different family structures. It's not clear which ones ought to be granted the right to be called a marriage... well, in some cases it is clear, but not in all of them, and you can't write a law until it's clear for a relatively large number of cases.

For example, suppose you have a family with three adults (as I do). What does it mean when one adult choses to leave and join another family, as is currently happening to me? Does the entire marriage disolve? What if, instead, we had chosen to add a new member to the family? Or if one person left to join another family, but both families chose to live together as a "tribe" or "community."

By changing the number of people in a marriage, you aren't just changing who can be in a family, but how families evolve and relate to each other. Figuring out how to do that - what works and what doesn't - is going to take a lot more thought than just changing the gender content of a marriage.

So, I think polygamy is harder - not impossible, just harder. And not inevitable either.

And you know, no one has really asked the fundamental question - what makes a marriage different than any other contract? What makes it a marriage?

Kiralee

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*nod*.

realizing i was poly actually in part caused me to reject state-sponsored marriage altogether. because thinking about its complexities led to realizing how many things within heterosexual, monogamous marriage are also very complex, much more so than the law acknowledges.


i don't like my personal relationships to be subjected to "one size fits all" laws. i don't like it that the state can change the conditions of my marriage without consulting me. i much rather sign a personalized contract.

health insurance doesn't have to get complicated, if society insures each and every individual. which is IMO what it should do anyway, regardless of their marital status and employment. but short of that, it would be better for people if there were a voucher system in place instead of spelling out which specific relationship one has to have in order to qualify for certain benefits. give an employee N vouchers for health care benefits which they can use as they see fit.

things like inheritance look to me like a more legitimate thorny issue.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

When I first took a serious look at marriage - when I was about 15 or so - I had sort of the same opinion. It's a really private relationship, why does the government, or the law, have to be involved? It's none of their business.

When I grew up... well, there are a lot of things the government does, like provide money for student loans, or some forms of unemployment insurance, for which they need to know how people are related to each other. To be fair, the government is mostly interested in fiscal rather than sexual relationships... however, most humans insist on basing fiscal support on "love" and see "love" as a subset of dating (rather than, say, friendship), so ultimately it boils down to the same thing.

Basically, I decided that the government's / law's interference in marriage was a necessary evil.

Kiralee

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

did you mean to imply i am a wet-behind-the-ears youngster who'll see the light once i grow up just like you and learn what all the government does for us good people? i am the other side of 50, and at 15 i was already responsible for an entire household. :)

IF the government were only interested in fiscal matters and not in sexual ones, we wouldn't be talking about gay marriage at all because it would be standard. no, most governments have other interests than fiscal matters; they're involved in a great deal of social engineering. and that's what i'd prefer to see done a little more justly.

i think the government's involvement in marriage should lie in resolving conflict, not in its promotion of a very limited form of partnership at the expense of others. fiscal responsibility in relationships motivated primarily by love can be handled like so many other fiscal agreements: via contracts. contracts that cannot be changed willy-nilly by a third party with all the power and none of the responsibility. contracts that don't care what sex the parties are, only that they are of sound mind and of age. i actually think it would be beneficial for people if marriage wasn't quite as automatic; many don't even realize exactly how many different contracts they're signing with that, and what exactly they spell out. corporate laws already handle all sorts of unions and partnerships and their dissolutions. children should be offered the same governmental protection whether or not their biological parents are married.

student loans should be available to students in need, regardless of whether their parents are well off -- the parents might not be supportive, or might even be toxic/abusive. i am glad i grew up in a country where education basically was free, and student loans only covered secondary expenses, or i would have not been able to go to university because my parents would have never supported it, and on my own i couldn't have afforded it.

that's the way i envision a fair society: supporting individuals with continuity of care, with equitable opportunities for all. the precise webs between individuals are much too complex for the law to fathom and codify.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

Oh, jeez, I'm sorry... I didn't mean to offend you, or imply anything. I was just trying to share my experience, which happened to start (for me) when I was 15.

I didn't mean to say that the federal government never cares about social matters. It's just that in the context I was talking about - say if one is applying for an educational grant - the information they need is about ones fiscal, not sexual, relationships. Unfortunately, some relationships (e.g. marriage) affect both.

I don't think there's a way for marriage to exist without the government having rules about it. So everyone has a contract, and all the contracts are different, reflecting different aspects of different relationships. Contracts are still a part of the law. They will still have clauses that the government will have to make rules about - and the government will still ask questions about what kinds of contracts you have. And people will still create a boilerplate contract (which some of them they will then fail to read) called marriage, because otherwise, instead of spending all that money on a big party they will be spending it on the lawyers they need to draft the contract.

There are ways to provide more flexibility than the current system has... and I think that would be a good thing. I just don't think it's possible to do it without rules and definitions - in other words, laws. And, if there have to be laws, then we should spend some effort making sure they are good ones.

I'd like to see a system that would allow for families with multiple adults. I'm currently in a three-adult family, and I could seriously use the legal protection being "married" would provide. However, I don't think we have enough information about how multiple-adult families work to write good laws about it. At least I don't think we have enough information yet...

To refer to one of your comments above (which I think is brilliant, BTW)... I'm being a hardened realist, even though I don't already have mine.

That doesn't mean I think things should never change, or can't change... I just don't think the correct practical step to take at this time is to create a lobbying committee to repeal the amendment to the constitution that outlaws polygamy.

I think we need to have a better idea of what we are doing first. So that when that amendment (hoepfully) gets repealed, what it gets replaced with will actually work better than the current system.

Kiralee