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.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

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

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?

[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.

[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