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.
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.