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

[mothball-07.livejournal.com]

I'm arguing against polygamy on the grounds that conservative groups not interested in the well-being women would be the most populous to take advantage of it, and in doing so we condemn a large group of men to ..

You yourself state that many of those young men *already* leave Mormon circles. If this is the case then they are *not* doomed to bleak futures. They are likely to marry women from other backgrounds. Yes, perhaps this removes from the overall pool of women, but as stated previously, I believe other forces will balance there.

Re. serial monogamy, I see this as an argument *for* poly marriage. The vast majority of divorces contain an element of wanting a new mate, but no accepted social mechanism for taking one on. I believe that were polyamory socially accepted (which is a clear effect of legalization) we'd see divorce drop *dramatically.*

Further, we'd see populations such as older women (the group traditionally most alone due to the unbalanced death rate and marriage-age shift) banding together to share available men and resources.

I suspect we'd also see younger couples forming aliances for raising children. The truth is, there are many advantages for families with young children to have more than two available parents.

Personally, I think any move from strict family-structure rules to a more flexible set of options will benefit everyone, and most of all those with the least power as they pool resources.

Very wealthy men already can, and do, lock up multiple women's interests. Social acceptance would put these options within reach of *more* people, and especially those with less power : women, and younger less established men.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

You yourself state that many of those young men *already* leave Mormon circles.

I did not say that: I said those men have been expelled from the Fundamentalist Mormon compounds (in at least two cases, whole farming towns), dumped on the streets of more mainstream Mormon communities. These young men want desperately to get back to the life they know, the only life they have ever known. Imagine being told by the rebbe: "Leave and never again darken our door." I imagine you could take it, you're a tough person, but not everyone can. The rehabilitation of these young men is long, intensive, and expensive.

In any event, I don't see a single example of the kind of social experiment you're proposing actually working, and those societies where polygamy has been legal are all less liberal and less democratic than ours

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Tibet, traditionally, has been very sexually liberal, with a cultural meme of 'Free Love', and a strong tendancy towards polygamy. I'm not sure about the gov't, type, but as they've been pretty much owned by China for a long time, I doubt it's democratic, but I don't honestly see that it matters. Democracy doesn't automatically equal sexual freedom. Or personal freedom of any kind. That's rather obvious these days.

And you're missing one very important point. The conservative christians that you see benefitting from legal polygamy are _already_ doing it. They are, in fact, doing it quite frequently with underage female 'partners', often closely related, who it would still be illegal for them to 'marry'. Their lifestyle wouldn't change a bit. Their 'marriages' are often non-consensual affairs and, as such, shouldn't be legal anyway. If they are fully consensual then there's no reason not to recognize them. They're _already_ living that way. Making it legal would change nothing at all. People who are _not_ religious fanatics and who might benefit from it are as likely to have MFM triads as MFF. Or MMM. Or FFF. The thing is, _NONE_ of that affects how many available women are out there. People are already living as they choose. It's just not _legally_ recognized. The lack of that legal recognition, when it _is_ granted to MF monogamous couples, is discrimination, and as such is potentially harmful to our society.

What really bothers me, though, is that the argument of "Men won't get wives and will be left out!" could as easily be used against lesbianism. After all, that takes two women out of the pool for those poor young men, so it's just as bad, right?

Arguing against greater freedom because the 'wrong' people will use it is simply messed up, sorry. And saying it can't work because it's never worked is not only defeatist, it's illogical. A society like ours has never existed before. So, of course, a society like ours has never tried free and open marriage laws before. The experiences of societies _unlike_ ours are completely irrelevant.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Arguing against greater freedom because the 'wrong' people will use it is simply messed up, sorry.

Ah, but that's not what I'm arguing. I never referred to them as the "wrong" kind of people: I simply said that if you removed the social and legal barriers to polygamy, you would see polygyny exercised far more frequently that polyandry, and the consequences of our doing so would be vast and devastating. There have been thousands of polygynous societies throughout history and, what, 3 polyandrous ones? I think that says a lot right there about human behavior.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

How can the consequences be vast and devestating if nothing changes? All that it would likely do is recognize relationships already in place, or that would already take place. Our society is not going to change overnight into one where just any woman is going to accept being one of a herd. The people who would practice polygyny in a potentially harmful way _are already doing so_, for the most part, and the harmful aspects of it would be no more legal with the potential legalization of consensual, adult polygamy than they are now. Mormons aside, the rest of the population forms their relationships as they want, and the _only_ proposed change is legal recognition of those relationships. Whether, a hundred years from now, polygynous, polyandrous, or huge conglomerate marriages will increase in popularity _cannot_ be predicted. Certainly more _currently existing_ polygynous than other poly relationships would file for recognition, but there's no reason to assume they would become any more popular than they are now. It could very well go the other way. Women could see having two husbands as the solution to needing two incomse _AND_ a full-time stay-at-home parent to raise kids. Men could decide they enjoy the comraderie of having a 'brother' in the house to do those manly macho things while the wife's out shopping... and the more chauvinist males may be won over by having someone to share their wife's shopping bills. Who knows? It is _not_ predictable, because this society is _not_ gender-biased. (caveat: yes, I realize that practically, it still is, slightly. However, legally, it's not, and society is pushing towards equality slowly but surely. The hardcore chauvinist is rapidly becoming a thing of the past... something to point to in amused horror, rather than a feature of the landscape)Or the tendancy of young couples to do things in MF-MF foursomes might evolve into solid quads. Who knows? There's no way to tell because it would be a unique society.

As I said, history cannot predict what a free and democratic society, in which women hold equal status to men, including the equal rights in shaping the laws of the society, will make of polygamy. It hasn't ever been tried in a society like that. Using societies in which women were subjugated and treated as property to say "Polygamy is bad" is as non-sensical as people claiming video games are evil because way back before video games were invented we didn't have drug wars. It's mistaking correlation for causation. The past should teach us... it shouldn't _limit_ us.