When you said above that status was the real reason LW-associates oppose legal polygamy, you were implying that these people are not actually convinced of these issues, or only pretend to care about them for status reasons.

If polygamous people where high status they wouldn't voice nor perhaps even think of these objections.

I think it's kinda weird that government is in the marriage business to begin with, but probably it is useful to have some sort of structure for dealing with the related tax / property / etc. concerns.

I tend to agree. Customizable contracts would be the best solution. This way we wouldn't straight jacket people into one size fits all marriage. Some people might like marriages where infidelity is grounds for divorce and the cheating party is penalized somehow. Some people might like marriages that have to be renewed every 10 years, to minimize any hassle with any potential divorce or allow a time out on the relationship. ect.

This would make everyone from the traditionalists to those seeking novel arrangements happy.

When you said above that status was the real reason LW-associates oppose legal polygamy, you were implying that these people are not actually convinced of these issues, or only pretend to care about them for status reasons.

If polygamous people where high status they wouldn't voice nor perhaps even think of these objections.

I think it's kinda weird that government is in the marriage business to begin with, but probably it is useful to have some sort of structure for dealing with the related tax / property / etc. concerns.

I tend to agree. Customizable contracts would be the best solution. This way we wouldn't straight jacket people into one size fits all marriage. Some people might like marriages where infidelity is grounds for divorce and the cheating party is penalized somehow. Some people might like marriages that have to be renewed every 10 years, to minimize any hassle with any potential divorce or allow a time out on the relationship. ect.

This would make everyone from the traditionalists to those seeking novel arrangements happy.

I wonder what kind of legal recognition might work to encourage and recognize pet owners who have developed particularly deep (I'm not talking sexual necessarily) bonds to their pets. Considering the benefits of such relationships to society I think they deserve some recognition, not really marriage (which was brought up by some commenters), but something.

This game sounds awesome, I am going to try and search for it so I can test this.

"Extremely tendentious" is not what I want. The ideas of 80k make a lot of sense to me and a lot of what Mills was arguing did not, but I tried to paraphrase them as accurately as I could, or leave quotes in when I couldn't. [1] Which parts do you think badly represent their sources?

[1] For example, "The language of probability will always fail to capture the possibility of system change. What was the expected value of the civil rights movement, or the campaign for universal suffrage, or anticolonial struggles for independence? As we have seen most recently with the Arab Spring, every revolution is impossible, until it is inevitable." was originally [misunderstands probability] but I tried to be fairer to him and avoid my own biases by using his own words.)

ITYM 'good'?

Yes thank you for the correction.

I've certainly heard the argument that polygamy is tied into oppressive social structures, and therefore legitimizing it would be bad.

Same argument can and has been applied to other kinds of marriage.

Would you say this is rationalization?

Yes. Because legalizing such marriage would if anything improve the legal standing and options available to the women in such marriages. It would also ensure fairer distribution of resources, not to mention custody issues in case one of the parents dies. Also Polygamous marriages in the US and Europe are a fact on the ground, a social reality, that we should deal with. Refusing to do so is just perpetuating discrimination.

FWIW I'm very skeptical of the whole "status explains everything" notion in general.

Status doesn't explain everything, it does explain situations like this.

I think the real reason people in the social circles LWers tend to hang around in oppose poly marriage is because they don't want icky Muslim and Mormon men getting married to more than one woman.

People likely to practice polygamous marriage are low status in our societies, thus we tend to see forbidding that as a good idea. This is how humans work. Everything added onto this is just clever rationalization imo.

Oh, I had forgot about Mormons - here in France, Muslim immigrants are the first thing that comes to mind on discussions of Polygamy.

The OP knows that gay marriage is a heated political issue. I think it's a fair inference that they know polygamy is, too. The OP brings up both, as well as the question of whether "polies [should] campaign for the right for a civil union."

I'm pretty sure that the OP is talking about polyamory, not polygamy (I don't know if you were unaware of that, or if you deliberately brought up polygamy as an analogy).

If I wanted to be cynical I'd say that polygamy and polyamory describe pretty much the same phenomenon, except that polygamy is detestable and reactionary and oppressive, whereas polyamory is the complete opposite; or that polyamory is when it's done by fashionable white people, and polygamy is when it's done by weird brown foreigners (I don't think either of these is a fair statement!).

I agree with your main point - I don't particularly want to see more discussions of social policy on LessWrong, especially when they don't push the analysis very far.