Gay marriage, yes. Legalized polyamory, no.

[elfs]

Oh, good. Jonathan Rauch has finally written a response to Stanley Kurtz's argument that if we extend marriage rights to homosexuals, we have no social-policy grounds under which to deny them to polyamorists. Rauch's argument is compelling and echoes my own: indeed, he uses the same material I did last year, adding to it more recent examples from the current Chinese experience.

The argument is a simple one: if you grant legal recognition to polyamorous households, then the ones to take the most advantange of the system will not be liberal SF-con-going women with two husbands but rabidly Christian and Mormon harem-collectors. Households with a surfeit of wives will easily outnumber households with multiple husbands. We don't live in a perfect world, and there's not much we can do to change human nature such as it is. In our world, the one where policy writers have to live, if you grant legal recognition and the transfer of marriage rights to polyamorous households, you will soon arrive at a state where you have a large underclass of men who have no chance to marry.

History records no state that was not monagamous that succeeded as a liberal democracy. Rauch misses making an important point: polygamy is a powerful tool for conservative *women*; with more than one woman in the household, they can exert more influence over the man (provided, of course, that the women all have a common agenda), and women will have the power to "marry up" into high-status households. I think that's a point worth holding onto: in a society where polyamory in the norm, you'll have a group of women who are monogamous precisely because they can't marry up. Polygamy leads to a stratification based upon criteria liberal democracies don't want to face.

But the point inevitably comes back to the real world argument that legalized polyamory would benefit households with many wives, and those with many husbands would be rare. In such a world, there would be a class of subalterns, subordinate men with no hope of ever enjoying the stabilizing effects of marriage. Rauch concludes:

Polygamy is, structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it.

Comments

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

AFAIK history records no non-monogamous state that *attempted* to be a liberal democracy. I would think this would have an effect on the number of sucessful attempts.

Women's lib has already caused a somewhat related problem -- a man with a higher powered, higher paid job is more likely to marry a woman with similar, and a woman with such is more likely to marry a man with similar, particularly if they are going to be a two-income family. This has helped increase the gap between the haves and have nots. However, I would consider this a lousy argument against women's lib.

Outside of extremely conservative spaces, however, I don't think the polymarriage==polygamy thing would hold. First, because monogamy is so very rooted in our culture that even if it became legally approved tomorrow, the number of people who would go from monogamous to poly is so small as to be ignorable and because women who have grown up in a more egalitarian (not necessarily egalitarian, just more so than Mormon culture, which is not hard to do) wouldn't put up with the idea that they should marry into a higher status family rather than making their own family a higher status family. The 'women can control the man' argument only really holds water in a society where women do not hold any power, cannot vote, etc. Things aren't equal here, in the U.S., now, but they are considerably better than that.

You might be interested in the second half of this (http://rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com/19585.html) as an alternative to the marriage question altogether.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

This is a very important point of fact. There has never been a society where women were afforded so much legal, social, and political power. Many if not all previous societies that allowed polymarriage had no rights for women, so of course the examples we have to draw upon are entirely male-centered.

With this in mind, and women and men free to do whatever they please with regards to marriage, I don't think anyone could actually predict what might come of that. Divorce law would most certainly become infinitely more complicated however.