Re: [UUPoly-L] Poly Reality

[alan7388@comcast.net]

> Anyone who is serious about the legalization of multi-partner 
> marriage needs to create a whole package of legislative bills 
> aimed at preventing abuses... and changing various family and
> business laws to accomodate the new marriage structure...

This issue is MUCH, MUCH more complicated than same-sex marriage.

Legally, gay marriage maps exactly onto the existing legal regime for marriages -- a vast body of practical law and custom. At least this has been true for the last few decades, since husbands and wives became legal equals. But while there is only one kind of couple-marriage, there are MANY DIFFERENT kinds of bonded poly groups. Each would require its own different legal regime. Issues of inheritance, pensions, and community property, for instance, are probably very different in the eyes of a V or an N group than for a group that considers itself to be an equilateral triad or a cross-coupled quad.

Moreover, poly groups often informally morph from one type to another. Changeability as the need arises is considered a fine thing in most groups' concept of poly ethics. How would the law keep up? Nor do relationships between any two people in the group have to be all-or-nothing. (I have friends who would be furious at not being considered a triad after 12 years together, even though sexually they are a V.) How would fuzzy edges be sharply drawn, and how would proof of the edges' current locations be determined in disputes? 

It's WAY too early to try to settle such issues. Good law follows reality, rather than trying to get ahead of it. As polyamory becomes more routine in society, reasonable approaches will become more apparent.

The more you examine it, in fact, the more I think it makes practical sense to have a clear, binary, sharply defined married-or-unmarried state between pairs only. (Ducks and runs for cover!!!) Contract law can be developed to handle rights and responsibilities in larger chosen families, at least for the foreseeable future.

When we're living in a Heinleinian society circa 2200 AD, the law will have sorted itself out a lot better than we could try to do now.

Alan