Re: [UUPoly-L] Poly reality

["Kelly Cookson" <kc62301@hotmail.com>]

> Here in the United States, you will never be able to legalize group 
> marriage
> for polyamorists without also legalizing polygamy for traditional sexist
> men.

> > True, perhaps -- just as legal monogamous marriage legalizes monogamy for
> > traditional sexist men(?).

We already have polygamists abusing women. If we legalize polygamy, we are 
broadening the population of men who might consider polygamy as a way to 
take advantage of women. Are we going to allow guys to marry multiple wives, 
setting up separate families that don't know about each other? Are we going 
to allow guys to legalize their cheating by letting them marry new wives 
against the objections of current wives? Why get divorced when you can just 
abandon your first wife and children, marry a new wife, and go live with the 
new wife?

But beyond the issue of abuse is the issue of social change. If a 
multi-partner marriage divorces, do all partners have to divorce and some 
remarry, or can some stay married? Who is responsible for who's debt? How do 
you handle child custody? What about inheritance in multi-partner marriages? 
What about insurance? Does an insurance company have to give the same family 
rate regardless of how many partners are in the marriage? Does an insurance 
policy cover husbands or wives who joined the marriage after the policy was 
issued? Can you list some husbands and wives as benefactors and not other 
husbands and wives? Does a company now have to pay benefits to 5 adults 
because they hired 1 adult who is in a multi-partner marriage? If a company 
allows benefits for 1 husband and 1 wife and their children, but a 
multipartner marriage has 11 children from its various husbands and wives, 
which children get to be on the company benefit roll? Only the genetically 
related ones? And so on, and so on...

Multi-partner marriage is not like same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage fits 
in well with the two-person marriage schema to which our society has 
adapted. Multi-partner marriage is a large enough social change that it 
needs to be planned...at the very least the law that makes multi-partner 
marriage legal needs to be part of a package of legislation that tries to 
make the transition as smooth as possible by anticipating and dealing with 
abuses and making changes to family and business laws.

When I see polyamorists get serious about creating such a package of 
legislation, I might support the legalization of multi-partner marriage 
myself. But until then, I don't see why I should take the legalization of 
multi-partner marriage seriously.

:-)
Kelly

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