My general view is there’s nothing inherently wrong with poly (although it’s not for everyone), and legal stuff shouldn’t be used to prevent poly relationships. However, poly marriage is more complex.
Legalizing gay marriage is, in a sense, trivial. The transformation of the law to allow it is fairly straightforward.
But having some form of legalized poly marriage is rather more complex, and it seems to me those complexities largely arise from the fact that, when legalizing it, you have to choose whether or not marriage will be transitive. Regardless of which option you choose there, there will be some odd consequences.
Basically, consider this simple example: A, B, and C are married to each other. A and B want to divorce each other. Both want to remain married to C. What should the law do?
More fun: How should parental rights work in large poly marriages?
Joint tax filing?
etc...
I’m not saying these are unsolvable questions, but it’s not a direct simple transformation of marriage the way legalizing gay marriage is. There’s actual nontrivial stuff to solve/figure out/decide.
Basically, going from 2 to N opens up a larger space of possibilities.
Oh, incidentally, the notion of poly relationships has been advocated on LW several times.
More fun: How should parental rights work in large poly marriages?
That part should be easier. Base it off genetic testing with biases towards whichever of the two parents is the one that had the child burst forth screaming from their genitals. Further modify implementation of rights by discretionary judgements made in favor of the child’s best interest. Basically, do exactly the same thing that the system should do now without the poly relationships being formal.
Hrm… not sure such a bias makes sense, especially in a group marriage where everyone was involved in raising the kids, for example. (Again though, I’m not saying these things are unsolvable. Just… there’s a bunch of little things like that that would, in fact, have to be specified.)
(I’ll avoid commenting here on the extent to which the system presently mucks things up, since that’s outside the scope of the discussion.)
Relax the condition that prevents person A from marrying person C if A is already married to B. This allows A, B, and C to marry one another, or allows A and B to both marry C but not one another, as they choose.
Most legal practices related to marriage won’t be altered by this.
Some will—the practices that assume that “A’s spouse” uniquely identifies a single individual—and those practices will have to change. For example, if the law says that in cases where A dies intestate then A’s spouse inherits, then the law will have to either be modified or a canonical interpretation arrived at to handle the case where “A’s spouse” is more than one person.
I agree that this adds some complexity to the law.
For example, one relatively braindead way to do this is to assert that for those laws, “A’s spouse” is understood to refer to their spouse with the longest tenure. (aka “senior spouse”)
The tenure/seniority rule does seem to be a shaky one. Anyways, I’m not claiming that these are unsolvable, merely that “legalize poly marriage” is insufficiently specified, and there’s several tunable parameters that need to be tuned.
You propose for marriage to be non transitive. That’s fine, but then that does lead to other things like how tax/insurance/etc should work. (One possibility would be that joint filing benefits be completely separated from marriage and instead work like this: Anyone is allowed to jointly file with ONE other person.)
There will be a number of other things that need to be addressed, though. I’m not at all opposed to poly stuff, merely that if one wants some form of legally recognized poly marriage, my question is basically this”what… precisely, is it you want the law to do? Taboo ‘legalized poly marriage’”
More generally, what I want laws governing marriage and parentage to do is formalize social support for family arrangements in a way that provides equal support for all families that share the properties that I value supporting. The most important of those properties is a commitment by an individual to provide logistical, economic, and psychological support to another individual in times of crisis.
Within the specific context of poly marriages, I want the law to do that for families that include more than two adults, but that’s just a special case of what I think marriage and parentage law (more broadly, family law) is for.
My general view is there’s nothing inherently wrong with poly (although it’s not for everyone), and legal stuff shouldn’t be used to prevent poly relationships. However, poly marriage is more complex.
Legalizing gay marriage is, in a sense, trivial. The transformation of the law to allow it is fairly straightforward.
But having some form of legalized poly marriage is rather more complex, and it seems to me those complexities largely arise from the fact that, when legalizing it, you have to choose whether or not marriage will be transitive. Regardless of which option you choose there, there will be some odd consequences.
Basically, consider this simple example: A, B, and C are married to each other. A and B want to divorce each other. Both want to remain married to C. What should the law do?
More fun: How should parental rights work in large poly marriages?
Joint tax filing?
etc...
I’m not saying these are unsolvable questions, but it’s not a direct simple transformation of marriage the way legalizing gay marriage is. There’s actual nontrivial stuff to solve/figure out/decide.
Basically, going from 2 to N opens up a larger space of possibilities.
Oh, incidentally, the notion of poly relationships has been advocated on LW several times.
That part should be easier. Base it off genetic testing with biases towards whichever of the two parents is the one that had the child burst forth screaming from their genitals. Further modify implementation of rights by discretionary judgements made in favor of the child’s best interest. Basically, do exactly the same thing that the system should do now without the poly relationships being formal.
Hrm… not sure such a bias makes sense, especially in a group marriage where everyone was involved in raising the kids, for example. (Again though, I’m not saying these things are unsolvable. Just… there’s a bunch of little things like that that would, in fact, have to be specified.)
(I’ll avoid commenting here on the extent to which the system presently mucks things up, since that’s outside the scope of the discussion.)
Relax the condition that prevents person A from marrying person C if A is already married to B. This allows A, B, and C to marry one another, or allows A and B to both marry C but not one another, as they choose.
Most legal practices related to marriage won’t be altered by this.
Some will—the practices that assume that “A’s spouse” uniquely identifies a single individual—and those practices will have to change. For example, if the law says that in cases where A dies intestate then A’s spouse inherits, then the law will have to either be modified or a canonical interpretation arrived at to handle the case where “A’s spouse” is more than one person.
I agree that this adds some complexity to the law.
For example, one relatively braindead way to do this is to assert that for those laws, “A’s spouse” is understood to refer to their spouse with the longest tenure. (aka “senior spouse”)
The tenure/seniority rule does seem to be a shaky one. Anyways, I’m not claiming that these are unsolvable, merely that “legalize poly marriage” is insufficiently specified, and there’s several tunable parameters that need to be tuned.
You propose for marriage to be non transitive. That’s fine, but then that does lead to other things like how tax/insurance/etc should work. (One possibility would be that joint filing benefits be completely separated from marriage and instead work like this: Anyone is allowed to jointly file with ONE other person.)
There will be a number of other things that need to be addressed, though. I’m not at all opposed to poly stuff, merely that if one wants some form of legally recognized poly marriage, my question is basically this”what… precisely, is it you want the law to do? Taboo ‘legalized poly marriage’”
Agreed on all of this.
More generally, what I want laws governing marriage and parentage to do is formalize social support for family arrangements in a way that provides equal support for all families that share the properties that I value supporting. The most important of those properties is a commitment by an individual to provide logistical, economic, and psychological support to another individual in times of crisis.
Within the specific context of poly marriages, I want the law to do that for families that include more than two adults, but that’s just a special case of what I think marriage and parentage law (more broadly, family law) is for.