Should polygamy be illegal?

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Harry Dresden

All I wanted was a Pepsi
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I honestly can't think of a good argument against it. Besides potentially complicating tax benefits. But if our country's marriage policy is that gay marriage is fine because it's consenting adults and polyamory is fine because it's consenting adults, why is polygamy illegal? It also has religious backing, like the fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims, so there's not even a strong religious case against it.
 
Banning polygamy was the olden days' solution to the problem of 90% of women wanting to be with 10% of all men.

It's basically de facto legal nowadays since marriage is no longer a requirement of adulthood.
 
>I honestly can't think of a good argument against it. Besides potentially complicating tax benefits. But if our country's marriage policy is that gay marriage is fine because it's consenting adults and polyamory is fine because it's consenting adults, why is polygamy illegal? It also has religious backing, like the fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims, so there's not even a strong religious case against it.
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Pedophobe said:
It's basically de facto legal nowadays since marriage is no longer a requirement of adulthood.
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Exactly. You don't even need to be married to get all the benefits of being in a union anymore, you can get at least some of the important ones by just living together with your spouse or polycule for a few years.
 
Someone once told me the real reasons Muslims are polygamous is so each family can easily produce 10+ children, rapidly outpopulate the other ethnicitys/religions they transplant in to and provide plenty of able bodies for jihad when the time comes. They will theoretically always have an edge when it comes to population for that reason, whilst most Christian families barely break even with offspring. (Note: I don't condone polygamy. It's just a thought)
 
LongTallTexan said:
I honestly can't think of a good argument against it.
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A lot of the rights conferred by marriage are self-limiting because it's assumed you can only marry one person at a time. If that changed, a lot of laws would need overhauling. Inheritances will become trickier, tax returns will become trickier, divorces will become trickier, custody rights will become trickier, unpicking asset trails in large polycules will become trickier, criminal enterprises will be able to gay-marry each other to be completely immune to coerced testimony, immigration sham-marriages will become rampant, child support laws will need redoing, etc. etc.

I'm not saying these are unstoppable hurdles or anything, but there's a lot of accomodations that would need to be made for polygamy that aren't an issue at all for gay marriage or common-law polyamory.
 
Dyn said:
A lot of the rights conferred by marriage are self-limiting because it's assumed you can only marry one person at a time. If that changed, a lot of laws would need overhauling. Inheritances will become trickier, tax returns will become trickier, divorces will become trickier, custody rights will become trickier, unpicking asset trails in large polycules will become trickier, criminal enterprises will be able to gay-marry each other to be completely immune to coerced testimony, immigration sham-marriages will become rampant, child support laws will need redoing, etc. etc.

I'm not saying these are unstoppable hurdles or anything, but there's a lot of accomodations that would need to be made for polygamy that aren't an issue at all for gay marriage or common-law polyamory.
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As a trans polyamorous Muslim, I agree with this post.
 
Going back to fundamentals and first principles about why the State forces third parties to recognize any marriage or relationship as "legal" may help figure out whether those rationales apply in a compelling manner to polygamists or homosexuals or pedophiles or whoever else wants other people to be coerced into recognizing/tolerating their relationship as "legal".

Foundationally, the State's interest in legalizing marriage seems to be about disambiguation of inheritance claims, both of spouses and children.

Having multiple legal spouses does not serve that interest, so the argument for having multiple legal spouses is not compelling.
 
TheArtilleryman said:
Someone once told me the real reasons Muslims are polygamous is so each family can easily produce 10+ children, rapidly outpopulate the other ethnicitys/religions they transplant in to and provide plenty of able bodies for jihad when the time comes. They will theoretically always have an edge when it comes to population for that reason, whilst most Christian families barely break even with offspring. (Note: I don't condone polygamy. It's just a thought)
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Tribes in the Arabian peninsula were practicing polygamy since before Islam.
 
I always thought it was a terrible idea. However, as I get older my wife and I are basically housemates without benefits. She's done with sex but I'm still in my prime. I'm committed to my wife and can't dump her. I don't have an heir and I'm going to own a couple properties that are going to be a hassle to take care of.

Bottom line: harems are starting to make more sense to me.
 
It irks me that you missed an important distinction
The question conflates private consensual agreements between adults and state marriage as a bundle of legal privileges

If three or four adults want to live together, fuck each other, pool property together, or sign private agreements, then what exactly is the rights-violation that would justify prohibition? I'm not seeing any, and nobody identified one. Abusive sects, rape, demographic agendas, or the brainwashing of girls are separate violations that would still be violations in a monogamous context. Coercion, grooming, fraud, captivity, those are violations that ought to be prohibited. But the number of adult partners involved does not by itself create those violations. If the concern is child welfare, then please identify the specific abuse, neglect, abandonment, or coercive dependency that is inherent to non-monogamous family structures and address that directly.
Now, whether plural relationships are wise, stable, or culturally desirable, those are different questions from whether they should be illegal. That is, just because you don't like something does not automatically justify banning it.

If the real point is narrower, i.e. "state marriage law was built around a two-person template and gets messy with inheritance, taxes, custody, testimony, immigration, and divorce", alright. In that case, the argument is not "polygamy should be illegal", but rather that a state-designed legal package becomes cumbersome when it's expanded beyond the shape it was designed for. Which would be a limitation of the state's marriage machinery and not a proof that peaceful plural unions are illegitimate.
The premise that the state gets to decide which intimate arrangements are legal or illegal in the first place is doing more work than any anti-polygamy argument in this thread.
 
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