Reply to Legalized Polygamy (or "I told you so")

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here.  I think polygamy should be illegal because of the legal morass it can create.  Who has property rights, who has the right to "pull the plug", how do you weed through custody issues in a multi parent family.... I think it would unduly burden our courts to have to sort this all out if there are multiple parties to a legal marriage.

Agree that animals cannot consent and thus cannot marry.

As for blood relatives, it is already illegal to marry or divorce for financial or tax considerations.  My parents are also fixated on the idea of inter-family marriages as a way to protect inheritance.  I said I'd be delighted to marry whichever of them does not pass away first ;)[/quote]

The fact is that there is no good reason to ban polygamy in the United States. The property issues aren't really more complicated than they are when people marry, then divorce, then remarry, then divorce, and so on. They could be handled by contract to the extent people want to specify what happens with their stuff, and there could be default distributions otherwise, the same as there is with two-parent families.

As for family members marrying - look, this is where I start to feel grossed out. But I really don't think that people's most important life choices should be constrained by what grosses me out. People should be free to do what they want, up to the point it starts hurting other people (or animals) - and in this case, it's hard to see how other people are hurt if people are allowed to marry their siblings. (Yes, potential for kids to have genetic problems - but we as a society allow other people who are likely to pass on genetic problems to marry and have kids, so that can't be dispositive.)

Would any of this convince your parents that they weren't right? No, my thinking here - which I think is in line with what a lot of people who supported gay marriage all along think - would probably bolster their belief that we are all a bunch of heathens who want to destroy everything they hold sacred. The point is that their examples of what might come next are not actually all that scary. It's great that they are living the life they want. They should butt out and let others do the same.[/quote]

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