Polygamy - Why Is This Illegal?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/canadian-polygamous-leader-found-guilty-of-having-25-wives/

We are told over and over that gay sex is about 2 adults' private lives and is nobodies business, why is this any different? As long as all the husbands/wives are of legal age, why is this the government's business but sodomy is not?

For that matter, why is prostitution not legal? It's a woman's body, after all, isn't it? That's the argument for the pro-choice side, and in the case of prostitution, no baby is being harmed.

Obvious double-standards by the government make me crazy. I shouldn't be surprised tho, the government allows themselves an outright ponzi scheme (SS) but makes it illegal for you and me. Harumph.

 

Let's not forget the hypocrisy of gambling being illegal in most states.

We're allowed to wager unlimited sums speculating on a stock price's gain/loss in the future, but can't legally bet $100 on the performance of a pro sports team on Sunday.

Both can be mastered by learning to research and factor in analytics and circumstances surrounding the proposition.

Neither buying stock options or making a bet are purchasing an actual object, service, or stake in a company. It's merely speculating on an outcome you have no control over.

 

I think the reason is that Jesus said you should only have one wife. His adherents outnumbered every other kind of voter for a long time. Now that us pagans are ascendant a lot of the old norms are being relaxed.

But there are a lot of sound sociological reasons for monogamy. Take a look at the status of women in polygamous societies for a taste of the anti argument. I am 69 and would probably be ok with paying some poor family a nice bundle of money for their teenage daughter if it was considered appropriate in our society for me to marry her and add her to the harem. The society I did grow up in and whose norms I respect finds that prospect repulsive and I share that view.

 

Fundamentally, the only problem with polygamy is how do you manage the government interaction? As hard as it was for the government to shift course for gay marriage, allowing the marriage "partner" to be gender neutral in a 1:1 relationship, how does it deal with a 1:many marriage situation? Contract law, tax law and government services would all have to be reevaluated for polygamy. The complexity is significant. Imagine 1 wife wants a divorce...what type of alimony/child support does she get? In the case referenced above, do all 25 wives get visitation rights if the husband is in the hospital? In most cases where you have large polygamous families it seems as if there is a significant social welfare component. Is it in the best interest of society if some dude has 10 wives and 30 kids, working a full-time job and still on welfare?

The difference between allowing sodomy and gay marriage is that the outcome really doesn't effect others around them. I'm sure there are some polygamous families that can say that but the high profile ones always have an effect on the social services sector.

 

To be fair, rather than looking at the polygamy issue in the abstract, you're using one of the worst case scenarios for how a polygamous relationship could come into being. That's like being hostile to the gays because of the nefarious views taken by the NAMBLA people just because they happen to also be gay. Yes, you might have young girls exploited in polygamous relationships just as you might have young boys exploited in gay relationships. However, those kinds of speculative hypothetical scenarios aren't a reason to deny consensual adults the right to marry each other just because they believe in having more than two people as parties to the marriage.

 

You're not wrong on any of this, but we've been told that the right of consensual adults to marry is fundamental (Of course, the written law says no such thing, but that doesn't matter since people don't know or care what a judge is anymore.) and that it's society's duty to change their laws, values, and priorities to accommodate that fundamental right.

And let's be honest. Those accommodations can be done, even if they'd be messy. We can change our laws relating to child support and alimony (where applicable) to address these scenarios and develop common law precedent for them as we did with monogamous marriage. Ditto for hospital visitation. And it isn't as though we'd be the first place to have polygamous marriage. (In fact, gay marriage was a far bigger departure from a historical standpoint.) We can look to how other societies and cultures have handled these scenarios if necessary or come up with new ones.

You're also right about welfare, but we can change laws pertaining to welfare. Furthermore, since when do we deny people fundamental rights based on possible welfare implications? People to make all kinds of catastrophically stupid decisions that lead to welfare dependency every day. Are we allowed to stop them? For the most part, no.

 

Tribes of old allowed for polygamy because fathers often died young (hunting, war, etc.) and the surviving wife and children needed support from a wealthier patriarch in the tribe. This is no longer the case today with government support like social security, welfare, women in the workplace, etc. At some point, polygamy became engrained in the culture to the point of rich men buying teenage women to fill the harem. To this extent, the crazy feminists have a point about patriarchy. But, before feminists came along, most cultures had already scrapped polygamy. So, polygamy today seems like it is going in the wrong direction. I bet it goes nowhere.

 

It will not be illegal in the future. This is thanks primarily to Anthony Kennedy who decided that the people, acting through their democratically elected representatives, may no longer set the terms of marriage.

Accordingly, it is just a matter of time not just for polygamy but for many other forms of marriage. This is what happens when you set important legal precedent without considering all its potential future ramifications.

 

But it's not about that. It's about the free choice of consenting adults to marry and form families structured as they choose. And again, I'm not defending the merits of polygamy. I think it's totally messed up. However, I'm looking at the issue as the Supreme Court (which adopted the logic of gay marriage activists) instructs us to took at it.

 

It will be fringe - I think most people intuitively understand what I wrote.

 

It doesn't matter what most people understand. It matters what five people in black robes understand, and their precedent isn't on our side.

 

Yeah, it may be legal but I don't think it will be culturally relevant. Further, the justices likely won't allow it if it doesn't have cultural support. Unfortunately that is how the law is decided today.

 

I never really cared whether gay marriage was legal or not. I was, however, somewhat infuriated that the SCOTUS took up the case in the first place. They should not have done that. It was not their place to substitute their policy judgement for that of the people. IMO, they were acting outside the Constitution.

Instead, the burden was on the proponents of gay marriage to persuade enough of the neighbors and fellow citizens to support their position. This is the very nature of democracy. This is how it works. This is how things change. Yes, it can be slow and messy but that's part of why it works. But Kennedy and the liberal block were not willing to wait for democracy to take its natural course. It was taking too long. They grew impatient. The decision had little to do with legal rights or the law. It was about speeding up social change. Which is outside their prescribed duties. The problem for us, of course, is that there is not mechanism to rein in the Supreme Court when they do this. We are basically stuck with them as the final arbiter of whatever they decide to be final arbiter of. This is one of the big reasons presidential elections matter so much, and why the 2016 election in particular was so crucial.

In any event and to get back to the topic at hand, I was trying to think of a type of marriage where the state might still be able to deny a license. The only situation I can think of is marriage to minors. The Court has allowed certain rights to be suppressed in some situations -- for example, school management. And so with child marriage, I think. But even this area is tricky and the details vary greatly among the states.

But other than children, I am not sure further restriction on marriage can withstand legal scrutiny. This not only means polygamy but incestual marriage (among adults -- siblings or child-parent). Maybe in the future, a criminal will be able to marry his computer and cloud storage to prevent their testimony against him (spousal privilege)? Maybe, in the future, you will be able to clone yourself then marry your clone? I dont see how any of this could be stopped anymore, thanks to Anthony Kennedy. They really piss me off sometimes.

 

You are correct that adult-child marriage is probably not going to be on the table, but you can never be sure. So long as we're making up rights that aren't based on any sort of written law or any kind of legal or cultural tradition, anything is possible. These issues are being decided 100 percent on arbitrary grounds.

If they have trouble forcing the issues where they want them to go, they'll simply reframe them. Look at the sodomy laws cases. When the issue was framed about a right to have gay sex, the gay rights side lost. See Bowers v. Hardwick. However, when it was framed about a "right to privacy," they won. See Lawrence v. Texas. Same statute, same relevant facts. Opposite result.

 

To me, it's not a simple issue. What do we think the age of consent for marriage should be?
What would your 16 or 17 year old self say to that versus whatever age you are now?
What should the age of consent be, generally?

Personally, I am prepared to live with the process on these type of issues. I am wary of the SCOTUS sticking its nose into more and more issues, and issuing what are in effect national rules on what are largely social matters. The Constitution set up a system to deal with these things, they should let it work.

 

It's not a simple issue at all. It's a very complicated and values-laden question that isn't supposed to be part of the judicial inquiry at all. It's supposed to be answered by the people through their elected representatives at the state level. Issues like this are precisely why we have state governments. They're supposed to resolve these issues in accordance with the values and principles of their constituents. If that state wants 10 year old girls being allowed to marry their dads, that's their right. Yes, it's f'ed up, but there is no general constitutional rule against f'ed up laws. (Otherwise, half of what the California Legislature does would be unconstitutional.) Your remedy against that kind of law is to move to a state that doesn't have such a law.

 

You're actually being too generous to the feds, because you're treating the states as governments of enumerated powers when they're actually governments of general powers. The national government can only do what the Constitution says it can do. If it's not expressly authorized, it's prohibited. The state governments can do anything except what the Constitution prohibits. If it's not expressly prohibited, it's authorized.

 

Old habits are hard to break

 

If only our Federal Courts ruled that way.

 

There was a time when they did or kinda, sorta but not really did. There are two issues at play - the granting of federal power and the limitations on state power. During the 1930s, FDR basically redesigned the Court with 8 appointments. They weren't all liberals as we would define them now, but they were all believers in broad federal power and generally gave a very expansive interpretations to the Constitution's granting of federal powers (especially the commerce clause). As you probably knew, the point was to get the Court to stop striking down New Deal legislation, and that's sorta where the big federal government era in constitutional law began.

But there's also the issue of restricting state power. The judges who opposed the New Deal (the so-called "Four Horsemen") weren't believers in state power. They were believers in the Lochner Doctrine, which was the idea that the due process clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments created unwritten rights (especially economic rights), such as the right to contract, which was used to strike down state minimum wage laws. Well, the Lochner Doctrine rested on the same premise that cases like Roe v. Wade did - that federal courts have a right to strike down state laws simply by deeming the interest involved to be a "fundamental right" even though it's not found in any written law. Well, many on the Right liked the results of the Lochner Doctrine, because it made it much harder to restrict free enterprise, but from a purely legal standpoint, it was just as wrong as the crap they dish out today.

Nevertheless, the repercussions of the FDR court battles went further than just who was on the Court in the '30s and what parts of the New Deal became law. Law schools started churning out students and faculty members who largely embraced the FDR-friendly view, so over time, the legal profession as a whole (law, judges, etc.) mostly goes along with it. Accordingly, they view federal powers extremely broadly, and the Lochner Doctrine is largely discredited by legal scholars. However, the fraud of it all is that most of the same people who think Lochner was terrible use its same rationale to push social liberalism. In other words, they're a bunch of intellectually dishonest frauds.

 

Talks about how to handle a person married to two or more (ie man with two wives). What if those two wives wanted to be married to each other? Then what about the case where those wives wanted to have multiple husbands? How much say does a person have in their spouse getting married to another?