Polygamy- why try to make it illegal while avoiding the issue itself?

so, this is a big thing right now in BC, with a huge trial about whether or not polygamy should be legal or not and stuff like that.

throughout the trial, what I've read leads me to believe they are trying to make polygamy illegal due to everything other than polygamy itself.

for example, here's one of the latest headlines: http://www.theprovince.com/life/girls+have+been+smuggled+into+marriage/4316972/story.html

a man essentially sold off two of his daughters to be married off to a man in Utah, who was quadruple their age.

wow, okay, that gets everyone completely riled up and obviously that's horrible, so polygamy should be banned for sure! except polygamy wasn't the problem here.

would it have been any better if the man sold only one of his daughters off for marriage and the "husband" didn't have any other wives? I don't think so.

Will banning polygamy stop this sort of child prostitution? No.

Will banning polygamy prevent parents from brainwashing their children to think they are only good for being married off to someone they have no choice over? No.

And look at the flipside. If you did manage to ban those two this above, would it stop polygamy? No. Some people have "open" relationships because they knowingly choose to, as consenting adults. From what I can tell, the papers are just shouting "Polygamy!" to get people riled up and interested while they're passing a useless law that doesn't address any of the real problems.

edited 20th Feb '11 4:31:37 PM by willyolio

Yeah. I think that banning anything because of moral reasoning is a terrible idea.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

They already made it pretty obvious that it's impossible to ban polygamy on any logical grounds, so they try to associate with stuff that plugs the heartstring of the public...funny thing is, many people have a painfully hard time noticing this.

Even funnier is how I'm willing to bet quite a few number of people who opposes polygamy are just secretly jealous. I'm curious to see how many singles are okay/opposed to it, and how many married couples are okay/opposed to it.

edited 20th Feb '11 6:03:25 PM by Signed

"Every opinion that isn't mine is subjected to Your Mileage May Vary."

Not that I disagree with you Drunk Girlfriend, but aren't all laws based on moral reasoning?

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To a large part of the viewing public, this is the one and only kind of polyamory that exists.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Religious moral reasoning? Or, religious moral reasoning that only applies to a single group of people but not anyone else without any logic put into it?

• I guess it's like how murder is illegal. Most religion opposes murder. But this sentiment is also held by non-religious people, and pretty much everyone as well. And there is a good reason why it is illegal. Murder is not illegal because everyone doesn't like it, but it's illegal because it is genuinely bad to have in society. Hence making murder illegal is a good law.

• An example of a bad law would be the ban on human hybrid research. Only religious fundamentalists have any serious issues with it. Most normal humans do not have much of a problem with the concept, and more importantly, there is no real logical reason for why it should be outlawed. But it's forced into law anyways since many financial backers happen to be religious.

Outlawing breeding and research of human-animal hybrids is an example of a bad law.

The opposition of polygamy would appear to be the 2nd example. It's opposed not because it is harmful, but because a few people just don't like it. And worse, people are using something that has nothing to do with polygamy to oppose it.

edited 20th Feb '11 6:22:03 PM by Signed

"Every opinion that isn't mine is subjected to Your Mileage May Vary."

Not at all. Banning polygamy because of nebulous reasoning and citing the actions of the bad apples would be like trying to ban dog ownership because some people raise dogs to fight.

You certainly can't claim that outlawing murder is the same way.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

Well I have to agree, the trials in BC were the most idiotic display of moral panic I've ever seen. They said everything from underage forced marriages to rape, yet they charged them "polygamy" and utterly failed when the courts threw their cases out. Of course the courts did that, why not charge them with the actual crimes; rape and forced marriage and underage activities. Maybe the tories can win some votes riding on an "those evil activist judges" campaign policy but the truth of the matter is that the guys in Bountiful BC broke normal laws that have nothing to do with polygamy.

I think the crown prosecutors largest problems is attempting to get the wives to testify that they've been abused so they go after the charge of polygamy. However that is idiotic. It would be exactly the same as rape crime in Canada, where the woman who've actually been abused still have a low chance of coming forward and so instead we just charge potential rapists with totally different crimes instead. I extremely dislike "justice" by any means necessary. You have to fix the problem and that's a much harder issue to tackle, so people just go "UGH POLYGAMY!"

edited 20th Feb '11 6:23:26 PM by breadloaf

I.. Can't think of any real reason to keep it illegal. On the one hand, I'm against polygamy as an individual, but not enough to make other people not be able to do it. My boss, who is awesome, has two bisexual girlfriends. One of which he is legally married to, the other which he had a marriage ceremony with in Jamaica. The three of them are one big happy awesome family and it works out.

Then I stopped and thought to myself.. What if some rich bastard wants like a million wives and mistreats them all, that's fucked up right? Well at least in the US(I'm not sure about how that works on your side of the fence OP) Women tend to win divorce cases. If they don't want to stick around, they'll just gtfo and get alimony, so in the end, if a polygamist male is a complete bastard to his wives, it's going to come and haunt him in a very expensive way. If they were stupid enough to sign a pre-nuptual before marrying said bastard, then they are too dumb to live anyway.

So yeah, rock on polygamy, it ain't for me, but why not?

Except in Utah. Just because I like seeing all those stupid fucking mormons and quiverfulls bitch about it. Fuck I hate quiverfulls.

Because there's no real logical reason to keep polyamory illegal, so its opponents just strawman it instead.

I don't think morality should be used synonymously with religious legislation. lincoln stamped out slavery for example because he thought it was wrong. His believe in the freedom of man was part of his moral values.

Anyway On Topic, yeah the were other more serious crimes they should of been arrested for. Trying to get them on Polygamy was just stupid.

edited 20th Feb '11 6:49:06 PM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

Well, you can object to polygamy in terms of marriage. Marriage's a two-person thing, and there should be a new term for such a social contract between three or more people. But there's no logical reason to force your views regarding polyamory on others.

Except for 4/1/2011. That day lingers in my memory like...metaphor here...I should go.

To be fair, there is a possibility that legalizing it could result in an unacceptably large inflation of the kind of thing the court case was (or should have been) about, sort of like we're discussing with prostitution in the other thread. However, as the nations that recognize it are pretty much all in Africa which rather has its own problems, we don't really have a good body of research to go on that would be particularly relevant to first-world culture.

edited 20th Feb '11 7:05:40 PM by Pykrete

You mean like with gays?

As Barkey already said, the OP's link contained some pretty asinine moral panic and strawmanning.

Everyone knows how I feel about this issue, so let's just turn this around. Would it be acceptable to anyone at all to ban monogamous marriage, simply because of a few egregious cases of domestic violence?

I'm going to go with no. Doesn't stop a few fuckwit conservatives from trying the other thing, though. And people wonder why I would cheer if they banned organized religion.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

@Barkey: Not quite. I'm for gay marriage, by the way, whereas I'm neutral here. Gay marriage is such a minor divergence from heterosexual marriage there's no appreciable difference, other than the inability to have kids. Which is not what marriage is about.

Polygamy, on the other hand, is a wholly different thing. Multiple people, many different dynamics, a serious hassle for the legal and administrative systems if we tried to squeeze it into marriage as a whole, etc. We should just come up with a new category.

Except for 4/1/2011. That day lingers in my memory like...metaphor here...I should go.

^^ The question isn't just that though. It's how representative the abusive cases are of the general body of each kind of marriage.

That said, for polygamy it's a big unknown. One would need at least need a couple examples of (actually developed) countries and how it affected things to begin to make any kind of case against it, and frankly nobody really has that.

edited 20th Feb '11 7:28:59 PM by Pykrete

Frankly I'm of the opinion that marriage as a legal institution should be abolished. It will save the courts time in the long run.

edited 17th Dec '11 10:30:51 PM by joeyjojo

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Well, I read this one book by Fern Michaels titled Under The Radar. It is about a polygamist sect in Utah called Heaven On Earth. This sect is portrayed as a cult that treats every 12-year-old girl as a Baby Factory. It is a group of pedophiles who hide behind religion. It gets paid money by the government, but it seems to be stealing the money. The members want to have kids with Down Syndrome, so that they can get even more money! Boys are treated as slaves who could be thrown out. The police either turn a blind eye to it, or are polygamists themselves! If you try to meddle in the cult's affairs, they'll capture you and take you to the compound to brainwash you into becoming one of them! Naturally, the leader is revealed to be a Hypocrite, because he expects his followers to live a simple life, but he himself lives the high life with plasma TV, laptops, satellites, and things like that!

The above, I must point out, is from a work of fiction. Still, it begs the question: are Real Life polygamy sects like this?

edited 17th Dec '11 4:15:55 PM by TiggersAreGreat

Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!

Real life polygamy sects, yes. They can be pretty terrible. but the problem is the "sect" part, not the "polygamy" part.

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What Octo said. It also needs to be pointed out that non-polygamous sects can be just as horrendous.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

In theory I have no problem with polygamy (or polyandry or group marriage). The practical problem is that the two most common strains of it are Islam and fundamentalist LDS in which the rights of the women involved are ignored, to put it mildly. Do I think it's possible to have polygamy without abuse? Yes, but it ain't easy.

Trump delenda est

But then forbid the abuse - which it already is, anyway! (Though there should be really way less respect for 'cultural differences' or 'religious freedoms' in such cases, but that's a different topic). Don't forbid something which in itself hurts nobody (if done consensually, but if not then that already is a crime all in itself).

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The problem with "legalizing" polygamy is as Ultrayellow said. It's not that polyamory is a bad thing (so long as it's all between consenting adults, sex is no one's business but the three people involved and the shop where they bought the equipment), but that current marriage laws are designed for harmoniously merging two legal identities into one person with two heads, so to speak. Group marriages would require new legislation, which would be a pain in the ass even if half of the population didn't oppose it on moral* grounds. I disagree with Ultrayellow that it needs to be a new category altogether, but I agree that the laws in general will need a rewrite.

As an intermediate measure, I'm in favor of setting the laws to read the way the U.S. federal government currently treats gay marriage, and starting from there: "You can do whatever the hell you want, but we don't have to recognize it." Banning polygamy, of course, is pure moralism.

• Sidebar: As for the religious vs. moral argument, I think that that's meaningless and the people who are saying "lol fundies" are just stroking themselves. "Marriage is between one man and one woman, and always will be forever, because God said so" is a values-level moral principle. You can disagree with it and mark the fundamentalists as enemies, but pretending that they don't exist is probably a bad practice.

That all in itself, even if we disregard polygamy here, sounds like a very dated interpretation of marriage to me, at least in that radicality. Which of course would mean there is some truth that marriage laws might need to be rewritten...

If the government doesn't recognize it is in fact not a marriage. Marriage is foremost a social/legal construct and only secondarily religious. Unless of course you mean the states with "you can do whatever you want", i.e. letting the states recognize it.

I think it's perfectly valid to laugh about deontologic ethics.

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