The state does, will, and always has regardless of the culture recognized and legalized the issue of marriage. The fact that this country recognizes the church marriage is simply setting aside a formality. The only issue this debate is about is benefits.

The argument that the state should “get out of the marriage business” is both absurd and unreal. It won’t, and it can’t. How do you divide up property when contract is broken? How do you divide up kids? How do you determine child support? The answer is: by agreement with court oversight, or by court rulings. Either way, the state is involved, and always will be. There are real concerns about force and fraud in the break up of a marriage. It is not unreasonable for the state to have a system in place to make sure that a spouse who helped build a strong home by staying home rather than working is protected when the other spouse decides that it is time to buy a convertible and date his college aged kid’s roommate.

Believe it or not, even a libertarian can see that having a stable home is good for society. Messing with a system that has worked for thousands of years is not to be done lightly, and frankly I think most of you have looked at your libertarian dogma book and said, hey, this is just like a business partnership. Let everyone join in. It isn’t a business partnership, except if your name is Clinton.

Next, we have a system of benefits in this country that recognizes marriage. The State has a system, and private business has a system. The State has every right to determine that it will recognize only traditional recognized married families. No one is denied equal access under this system. Everyone has the exact same right to marry one person of an opposite gender. Of course, the govt also has the right to expand its benefits as it sees fit (barring certain constitutional issues such as race discrimination). And it does. NYC e.g. allows (or used to) “domestic partners” to get benefits from its city employees.

Of course, private benefits can redefine this system as it sees fit. And it has. Lots of companies offer benefits to domestic partners or civil union relationships. Bully for them.

Dealing with the added strain on the court system and benefits issues is a reasonable justification to limit marriage to its “forever in the history of mankind” definition, recognizing of course that polygamy has been allowed in some cultures over time — cultures where men were always dying fighting wars and new warriors needed to be made.

Finally, everyone seems to ignore the obvious — you can live like a homosexual married couple or polygomous couple if you want, you just don’t have the recognition of the state or certain state offered benefits. You can live together, sleep together, leave property to each other in your wills, share benefits if your employer allows it (some employers don’t insure married couples’ spouses, so that is not certain anyway), write a living will for your partner, own property jointly and even have a “marriage” ceremony if your heathen preacher will give you one (I use the term heathen only because none of the texts of the major religions can remotely be read to approve of same sex marriage, and it is a stretch to argue for polygamy in them).

Peronally, I have no problem with “civil union” type laws. I have no problem with employers chosing to give benefits to whomever they see fit. That said, I actually think civil unions are very suseptible to abuse and may be more trouble than they are worth for this so called “fairness” issue. As Canada’s law has proven, people just start looking for “benefits” partners, not life partners. Brothers and sisters and bowling buddies form civil unions to get one on the insurance of the other. Then they looke for another “civil union” for pay or out of friendship.

This whole issue is a pandora’s box, and it isn’t just to be dismissed as religous fundamentalists run amock.

Also, you can’t realistically talk about public policy as if the onion were peeled back to its core. The onion has layers that you must work with. We have state sanctioned marriage — always have and likely always will in the US until we are destroyed like Rome. We have lots of govt. benefits that depend in some way on the marriage recognition. They aren’t going away so we can make polygamy OK just b/c libertarians don’t like those programs.

Finally, we have a population that recognizes the historical significance of marriage as it has been understood in Western countries for hundreds of years. It has worked. It isn’t some social experiment anymore. It deserves more than a Scalia like flip of the chin.

But these sorts of matters will be made clear within a matter of years of the time polygamy would be accepted. You give the lawyers five years, and we’ll have some legal precedent to draw from.

who says it has to be bilateral? There are probably hundreds of thousands of adults in this country, if not more, who practice polyandry in some form. Consenting adults, I mean, not the abusive form practiced by folks who use Mormonism as a cover for their abuse. Why do they need to be coerced into a bilateral contract?

Answer: It’s impossible.

The question pertaining to polygamy is very much separate from that of same-sex marriage. Polygamy is a more complex matter because it pertains to the nature of complex contracts within the law. What if one partner in a bond of three wants out? Worse, what if all three want out so they can go their separate ways? Who pays child support and who gets custody?

Another scenario. In the hospital… A Terri Schivao type of ideal. Man is on the bed and two wives arguing over life and death. Who’s right is it to pull the plug or leave him alive.

This man later dies without a last will and testament, who gets what in his estate?

In a gay couple, the matters is as simple as the case of a heterosexual couple. In a bilateral contract, there is a clear scale being balanced between two people in divorce. In a hospital life-death scenario the single spouse makes the decision. Under the protection of a same-sex marriage, a gay person can pass property to clearly defined spouse.

When there’s more than two people involved, there is no longer a clear path for separation. No longer is the contract fully reciprocal. Now it’s more of a legal partnership than a marriage.

Aside from being a historic tool of patriarchal oppression (women as property), polygamy complicates marriage to the point that it is no longer marriage.

And Andrew Sullivan is right. There’s no such thing as a “polygamous orientation”. A heterosexual person can learn to be happy with just one person. However, psychologists have found a same-sex orientation. A gay person with a person of the opposite-sex is not the same thing as a straight person with the opposite-sex.

It’s almost like telling a Republican they have the right to vote so long as they vote Democrat, only it runs more closely, because how you vote doesn’t affect you as closely as who you spend the rest of your life with.

I?ve made the argument in the past that state sanctioning of homosexual marriage will inevitably lead to state sanctioning of group marriage. Charles Krauthammer, one of the most gifted conservative columnists living today, makes that argument much mor…

We’ll probably have gay marriage in the US within 5 years (in some states), and pretty well within 20 years nationwide. 20-25 years after that, we’ll have legally sanctioned polygamous marriages. Whether or not they’ll be officially called marriages by the governments providing the license, remains to be seen. But this is coming, whether people like it or not.

Personally, I don’t really care if two gays or 8 polys want to “marry” each other. It doesn’t affect me either way. Although, I can imagine what the introduction of QINKs (quad-income-no-kids) will do to real estate values!

As long as we are talking about consenting adults (and I can see that you are), I completely agree with you; it is not the state’s business. Many of these arguments against alternative marriages (gay, polygamist, etc.)have to do with certain legal benefits married couples receive versus non-married couples. It is absolutely ridiculous for the state to pay Social Security benefits to multiple spouses in the event that the bread winner dies.

The argument should be that the state should not be providing these sorts of benefits at all to anyone. If anyone should help out it should be voluntary. It is sad to see that so many ‘conservatives’ have completely missed the boat on this issue. I guess it’s up to us to set them straight.

In late 2003, a little known issue caught the attention of my wife and me: Polygamy…Our attitude was that consenting adults should be able to engage in any relationships they want. The problem is; however, many of these ?wives? are not consenting a…

The problem is, primarily, that we have created a situation where the legal contract and the religious ceremony are one and the same. In my reading of the First Amendment, the government should not be recognizing a religious ceremony as being a binding legal contract anyhow. The best thing that could happen for the religious definition of marriage is for the state to get out of the business altogether.