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Michaelos comments on Wikipedia articles from the future - Less Wrong Discussion
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(Note: This is just a copy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States with minor edits: I'm speculating what it would look like if polymarriage laws are potentially 50 years behind same sex marriage laws.)
Polymarriage in the United States:
Polymarriage is legal in a majority of U.S. states and recognized by the United States federal government. Polymarriage is legal in 32 states, the District of Columbia, and ten Native American tribal jurisdictions. One more state, Missouri, only recognizes polymarriages established in other jurisdictions. Several hundred marriage licenses were issued to polygroups in Michigan and Arkansas between the time their bans were struck down by federal or state courts and when those rulings were stayed. Most Americans live in a jurisdiction where polygroups can legally marry.
The movement to obtain civil marriage rights and benefits for polygroups in the United States began in the 2020s, but became increasingly prominent in U.S. politics following the 2043 California Supreme Court decision in Yudkowsky v Baliene that declared that state's prohibition to be unconstitutional. During the 21st century, public support for polymarriage has grown considerably, and national polls conducted since 2061 show that a majority of Americans support legalizing it. On May 17, 2054, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state and the twelfth jurisdiction in the world to legalize polymarriage following the Supreme Judicial Court's decision in Alexander v. Department of Public Health six months earlier. On May 9, 2062, Malia Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to publicly declare support for the legalization of polymarriage. On November 6, 2062, Maine, Maryland, and Washington became the first and only states to legalize polymarriage through popular vote.
I wouldn't trust that to result in anything useful, because http://xkcd.com/1431/.
Interesting. The first time I read about this was in Heinleins The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. My personal opinion is that the construction should be legal but not neccessarily have the same custody and tax rules. The same rules is difficult anyway because you can't just ignore one part (the gender) but need to add lot cases resulting from extra element(s) present. The biological aspects (one biological father and mother) could be dealt with in analogy to adoption as is done with surrogates. But the many real life/law pragmatics of pair-relationships (marriage customs, custody, heritage,...) probably make it difficult to treat this the same way a 'traditional' marriage.
You would have to change a lot, but there is a natural basis to judge on: there's already the tax-law definition of 'household', and you could allow any or all of a household to file as a unit. It would also be very feasible to make a simple formula for the tax rate given the number of wage-earners in the household. The only trick would be dealing appropriately with teenager's first jobs.
On the contrary, I think divorce and child custody would be the thorniest issue (as it is in binary marriage divorce).
Honestly, I think those would get easier rather than harder. If you no longer have a set limit on 'roles' in the marriage, you don't have cultural intuitions about correct outcomes, and designing a system that is simple and easy to execute gets easier.
I don't know enough about U.S. laws. But from my understanding here in Germany it would be quite complicated...
As a side note, thank you snarles! This really was a neat exercise, because as an inexperienced writer who likes writing, this gives me the fictional idea of "United States v. Windsor, polymarriage version" where an older altruist polygroup is suing the United States federal government to legalize polymarriage because one of their members died and because of the lack of tax benefits, means would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars that they could be giving to save the lives of poor people, so OF COURSE they're fighting it in court because lives are at stake and it doesn't matter to them that those lives are far.
I wonder how many more generations of allegedly unfuckable boys our feminist society casts out before we start to see some serious pushback against women's sexual freedom. Polymarriage can only accelerate this process because the natural alpha males, and the ones who can pass themselves off as alphas with game and pickup coaching, will monopolize most of the women in this social trend.
One-man-many-woman marriages are a hallmark of societies that limit women's sexual freedom. Polyamory as practiced in more sexually-liberated and secular contexts is much more balanced.
In other words, you have it entirely backwards.
Do we have statistics that back this up? I'm cautious about the normalization of polyamory because it seems potentially easy for it to collapse down to patriarchal polygamy.
Is The Handmaid's Tale seriously a desirable world for you?
Have you tried reading history so you're not constantly generalizing from fictional evidence?
Have you tried not making broad assumptions about people's factual knowledge because they disagree with you?
I could have asked about the desirability of any other society with horrible oppression against women, like the Taliban regime, Saudi Arabia, Imperial China, or the U.S. in the 1950s, and the question would still be relevant: Would you enjoy living in a society where gender is a basis for differences of power?
Really, that's your idea of "horrible oppression against women"? Yes, the 1950s were in many ways better then today, technology based on atoms was still progressing for one thing, and the system was a lot less dysfunctional in all kinds of ways.
Sure, I suppose today's particle accelerators count for nothing. But technological progress is a matter that may merit its own discussion in another thread. It's the situation of women we're discussing here.
And yes, the 1950s were terrible. A society before the pill meets every definition of "it sucks to be a woman." Moreover, a society before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape, before massive access of women to universities and positions of power, before equal pay, before no-fault divorce, before sexual harassment was identified as such, and before widespread coeducation, is a society that oppresses women. Heck, I'm a man, and I'd have hated to live under those conditions.
Pushback against women's sexual freedom would be a tragedy. How can the likelihood of such a trend be reduced? (Profoundly disagree with the whole 'alphas monopolizing women' PUA thing, but still.)