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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I read something interesting about this the other day (I wish I could link, but I can't remember where I read it) talking about the societal problems that legalized polygamy would cause, which are not parallel to same sex marriage. If there are 100 men and 100 women, and the richest 5 men each take 10 wives, that would leave 95 men and 50 women. We've already seen problems around the world when there are more men looking for wives than there are women who are available to marry.[/quote]

Yes, this. It isn't necessarily about morality,  it is about the possible societal problems.  In the end, it's the "unwanted" males who may suffer and cause problems. Not great for the women either, obviously. [/quote]

There are several problems with polygamous marriages that don't apply to two-person marriages.

First, the state's recognition of a marriage confers certain benefits, like lower taxes (if one spouse earns substantially less than the other), community property, non-probate transfer of assets upon death, etc. The reason we give those benefits is because we want to encourage marriages so as to create stable families to raise stable children. It's pretty clear that two-parent households are more stable than one-parent households, but not that three (or more)-parent households would give society any greater benefit. Of course, you don't have to have kids to get the benefits, but kids (and societal stability generally) are why the benefits are there in the first place. (This reasoning doesn't go against gay marriage, because the evidence is that gay couples do have children, and those who don't are no different from hetero couples who don't have children).

S[b]econd, unlike SSM, there's a big initial cost to figuring out how plural marriage would work. For example, what kind of relationships would be allowed, and exactly who is married to whom? Say you have one husband and two wives. Are the wives married to eachother too? Can one member independently marry a fourth person, who does not marry the other two? Can that person have a separate marriage too? How much of a daisy-chain (if any) would be allowed? This matters because of all those things that go along with marriage. Even in a simple husband-wife-wife situation, if one person dies, who is their "spouse" for purposes of getting their retirement? Who gets their assets? How do you allocate the assets of a second wife in a two-wife marriage, where there is a surviving husband, first wife, and children from both wives? Do the living wife's children inherit from the dead wife, at the expense of the dead wife's children? And speaking of children, how do you handle custody in the two-wife situation with children from multiple wives. You might suggest going with the biological parents, but what if children are adopted into the plural marriage?  [/b]

It's not that it would be impossible to figure these things out, but there would be a big cost to it. We have spent thousands of years developing family law and property law with the idea of a two-person marriage. In the last 100 years or so, the trend (a good trend) has been to make spouses equal. And if spouses are equal, there's no reason to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. We don't have any experience with how plural marriage would work, and even setting aside the way that it has been practiced (encouraging child abuse, exiling young males), it poses big problems.[/quote]

The easy way to start is to just allow the basic one spouse of opposite gender being able to marry others of the opposite gender. One many many wives, or one woman many husbands. Then you make a mandatory will and trust. [u]Mandatory initial fees [/u]to cover the high court costs that come with screwed up wills. Split SS benefits equally among surviving spouses. Children from each wife get their mothers assets. Courts protect children's assets. Not that complicated. [/quote]

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