Can anyone name a single legitimate reason why polygamy is illegal?

You'd be surprised how sympathetic I am to your situation. My ex-wife left me and the two kids (6 year old daughter, 3 year old son), then she was awarded custody in the divorce because in Texas the woman *always* gets the kids. I paid between $2,000 and $3,000 per month in child support for 14.5 years. I lost two houses and I'm in an apartment.

 

Its not that uncommon for an alpha woman to keep multiple beta males around who tolerate eachother. I find it rather sexist to presume that women wouldnt be able to compete with men in a polyamorous society.

 

Once again, no justification for your statement. You've decided where you'd like the line drawn, so end of discussion. Any opinion presented which doesn't fit with your view is met with "we shouldn't" or "that's idiotic". Must be nice, being so sure about the correctness of your position. No need to carry on a discussion, as you've got the proper legal definition all figured out.

 

Exception to the rule.

 

Maybe you have never heard of the Mosuo, a matriarchal Chinese village. There it is the women who chose from multiple mates and run society. They call it "walking marriages". Seems quite interesting and something we in the west might learn from.

 

What makes mine so special?

 

Common misconception #1: All spouses in a poly unit are sleeping together, or haveig sex together. My husband and I do not have a sexual relationship with each other. I can honestly say that I love and am in love with him, but I have no sexual desire towards him. And the same goes for him towards me. For that matter, neither he nor the woman that is my legal wife have sexual desires for each other. But again, they love and are in love with each other.

A poly unit can handle as many people as the members who comprise it can handle. If the most one member can handle is 8, then even if all the others could handle more. If an incoming person could only handle 8, but the poly unit already has 10, it would not be a good match for them to join.

 

That only applies if you are discussing the legal recognition of a marriage. Actually anyone can marry their tomato plant right now with no legal consequence. Go have a fulll blown ceremony. It won't be legally recognized. This thread isn't reallly about whether or not polygamist marriages exist? They do, and in numbers larger than most suspect, probably. The question is whether or not they should be given legal recognition. Which is why the issue of being able to give informed consent is paramount.

Restricted between man and woman shouldn't be as the law should be free of any gender specifics. While I would under most circumstances say that the restrictions on number of people should not be there, it is recognized that it has been there for a long time and influenced the laws beyond the simple fix that SSM needed. As noted before, legally speaking, it would be a lot easier to alter the law to recognize a marriage between siblings than for polygamy.

 

That only applies to polygyny. However, right now, among the poly community we have people in polyandrous marriages as well as polygamous marriages where there are multiples of both husbands and wives, such as my family. There are plenty of rich women out there and by your logic they would horde all the quality males. Additionally, there is much debate as to when Christianity actually forbade polygamy. Even Paul acknowledged that Christians could be in polygamous marriages by noting that leaders should be monogamous. Of course that whole passage has been under debate for centuries.

 

Who's asking you to?

 

Incorrect. Polygynous and polyandrous marriages have been around since recorded time, as well as same sex marriages. The Christian Church tries to deny this, but history shows otherwise, and even the Bible has many examples.

Actually it is, but a lot would also depend upon what level you are looking at. On a strictly legally basis, there is nothing in the law which requires either sex or offspring. Thus there is no point in preventing such joining for the purposes of the benefits that comes from the legally recognized marriage. Additionally, if the worry about offspring with birth defects is your primary worry, then what is the point of restricting same sex incestous marriages? Or ones where one or both involved can show they are sterile? If we are reallly worried about birth defect children, then we need to ban any couples who could bear children who have the same or higher chance as a first generation incestous breeding (which is defined as no common genetic ancestors within 5 generations). So that would include women over 40.

I have no problem with having a set point as a rule of thumb, and then allowing for people to provide proof that they meet the criteria for maturity to make these decisions. Actually we already mostly do that with our minor emancipation laws. I'm just not sure how that applies to consent for sex and/or marriage.

 

Relationships like that should not be rewarded with a marriage certificate. Society should not give them tax breaks or insurance breaks. Like it or not, marriage should be between one man and one woman per their genome.

 

Relationships like what? If you are referring the loyalty issue, he did point out that these variations exist in two person opposite sex marriages as well. How would you propose policing/enforcing such?

History disagrees with you throughout time as well as across cultures.

 

Ok, 99% of all human societies limited marriage to a man and a woman. Not EVERY culture did that.

 

An ideal society (in my opinion) would not give marriage licences to gays or polys. No licence, no marriage.

History can say whatever it wants.

 

And yet in spite of your viewpoint...we have same sex marriage and all the tax breaks, insurance breaks, sole-survivorship...society has spoken and society moves on.

 

You are holding onto a lot of modern Christian propaganda, and this is coming from a Christian. The Jews and the early Christians practiced polygamy, collectively, for centuries or longer. The accounts are there. Additionally, we have accounts of polygamy from multiple societies. This doesn't mean that monogamy wasn't the more common practice, and such would be the case today. Only that polygamy was practiced by a multitude of cultures throughout time.

 

I don't have a reason for it to be illegal but why would any man want that? I suppose if you could give them each their own house you could pull it off, but it doesn't take long for fertile women living under the same roof for their cycles to synchronize. I had two teenage girls and a wife all pmsing simultaneously for several years, and Willy wonka doesn't make enough chocolate to tame it.my boy and I got some good fishing time in but that only goes so far.

 

All I can say is there are those of us who do desire it, and not just men. I am very happy with my two wives and husband. Now as to the PMS thing, both wives have been through or are going through "the change". And I didn't have my daughters during their teen years. My first wife, when it was just the two of us never really had bad periods, and according to my second wife neither did she. I have know units with multiple women, many also with more than one man. They get along as well as any monogamous pair where the woman stillll has her period.

 

Agreed. The title of this thread is "Can anyone name a single legitimate reason why polygamy is illegal?" So the discussion revolves around where to draw the line which states what is legal. My main objection to Questerr's post: it's difficult to have a discussion about where the legal line should be drawn if you initiate the discussion by stating where it is the line must be drawn, and remove from the table any input from sources which you arbitrarily deem to be irrelevant. If we are to broaden the legal definition of marriage, it is legitimate to start asking specific questions about what the word "marriage" really means, and what constitutes a marriage. For instance, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is the notion of the covenant marriage, where a man, a woman, and God are united in a marriage bond with far reaching implications. We were asked to remove this from the discussion, for reasons which escape me. If we are specific about what we allow into the discussion and what we disallow from the discussion, we can force the arrival at a certain conclusion. It's subtle, it's disingenuous, and we should be aware of what it is we're doing when we do such things.

Once again, you make a statement here about what the law should be without providing any justification whatsoever for why the law should be that. Should sibling marriages be allowed? Should polygamous marriages be allowed? Should marriages between adults and minors be allowed? We can state our opinions, and that's all well and good, but can we provide a reasonable justification for holding these opinions? And is it ok to force the removal of sources of justification prior to entering into the discussion?

 

That's just factually false. The great majority of all societies known to anthropology have practiced polygyny, which was virtually universal in hunter-gatherer and nomadic-herding societies until modern states with advanced economies outlawed it.

 

Are you saying that's good, or bad? It must have been adaptive at some point, or it wouldn't have been so prevalent.

 

Cuz there aren't enough women to go around?

 

But the legal issues can be solved by changing the laws to allow for multiple spouses or group marriages, in the case of say life insurance just name each party and divide up the money as the person sees fit. My father did that with his life insurance I get so much of a percent, my sister so much and a charity so much. This is also supported in his Will.

 

It would depend on the demographics of the population in question. For various reasons such as wars and dinosaur hunting expeditions, men live shorter lives on average than women. This is fine if there are enough wars and dinosaurs to hunt, but if the number of women and men are about equal, then we have a reason to keep anti-polygamy laws so that men can reproduce. Throw some big type of war in the mix and there will be far fewer men than women, and women's eggs will go to waste if they cannot find a husband.

Few men and many women make it necessary for polygamy.
Same number of men and women make it necessary for monogamy
Few women and many men make it necessary to cull the male herd with a war or a dino hunt.

The basic idea is that we exist in order to reproduce. Since a single man can successfully keep a baker's dozen women pregnant, it's advantageous to have more women than men. That is, if the husband can afford the resources to keep those wives safe, healthy, and pregnant. Providing resources is what men are good at, whereas women are not.

As to the question, with a near equal number of men and women, monogamy laws make sense because polygamy laws would give the rich a dozen wives, which would mean eleven poor guys would be unwelcome. Sorry guys, but I just don't trust you near my harem. I'm not going to waste resources raising your children, so you have to go.