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Emile comments on Poly marriage? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (127)
Adapting the law on man-woman unions to also cover man-man unions does not involve any technical hurdles on the legal side, it's just applying existing laws in a slightly different context.
Marriage with more than two people, however, would require many changes to the text of the law (except in places where the law already covers polygamy).
We have changed the legal traditions and practices surrounding man-woman marriage (especially with regard to divorce and child custody) far more in the past 80 years than would be required to make poly marriage workable.
Downvoted for "Disingenuous". If you disagree with a point, it is generally better to just counter it, than to accuse the commenter of making it in bad faith.
ETA: Downvote removed, following removal of the accusation.
I've dropped the word, I agree it was inappropriate.
This. Poly marriage is also more complicated because of child custody (in particular given the increased instability of a relationship the more people who are part of it). Also significant is that there are multiple kinds of poly arrangements and covering them all in a useful legal way is difficult.
I say this as someone generally supportive of poly relationships. Eventually it'll be a fight worth having, but I'd wait for the current struggles over gay marriage to die down (I give that about 20-30 years)
It has died some time ago in more socially progressive countries, but none recognize a group marriage, so, I agree, clearly social mores are not the only or even the main issue.
My guess would be that, just like in Physics, in Law the general n-body problem (ahem) is much less tractable than the two body problem. I suspect that there are many relevant legal issues that have not been even touched and will have to be addressed, before a reasonable group marriage framework can be constructed. Child custody/support/rights, potential for spousal abuse are some of those.
On general grounds, one would also expect the stability of such a union be much less than that of a 2-person one, thus reducing the need for legal protection. Most polys freely admit that they have a "primary" and one or more secondaries, who are not in an equal position. Again, the analogy with orbital motion is quite interesting, but I will not push it further.
I don't have statistics on poly relationships, and I doubt that anyone has good statistics.
Still, so far as raising children is concerned, I think you're conflating two situations. A poly relationship might be considered unstable if one or more people leaves, but if a core group remains raising children, it might be more stable for children than a couple that breaks up.
The burden of changing many legal texts is not nearly a sufficient reason to deny some people equal legal rights.
Do you mean normatively or descriptively (i.e. “a sufficient reason why we should denied”, or “why we have denied”)? I agree with the former, but I'm not so sure about the latter.
Both. Descriptively, the practical difficulty of changing the law isn't the reason the law hasn't been changed in this way; the reason is that a great many people would oppose it on religious, moral, and other normative grounds. Many other laws have been changed over time despite the changes being nontrivial to implement, because the necessary people agreed in those cases that changing the laws was for the best.