Creepy bastard Rulon Jeffs poses with his newly acquired wives shortly before he died of old age.
William Saletan has two posts up about the slippery slope threats made by conservatives regarding gay marriage—basically, that if we allow that, then polygamy and incest are next. Saletan agrees with the slippery slope argument, but doesn’t think it’s a bad thing to switch from the taboo model of managing human sexual relations to the harm reduction/privacy model that he thinks is the groundwork for homosexuality. I’m not saying that he’s strictly wrong in his views on tolerance of cousins marrying or polygamy—consenting adults and all that—but I think his assumptions about the groundwork that made same-sex marriage possible is all off, and it taints his argument.
I don’t think that same-sex marriage is becoming more socially acceptable because people are more interested in privacy. I think it’s a matter of increasing egalitarianism and feminism especially. And so I strongly disagree with him that the tides are turning towards more social acceptance of cousin marriage and polygamy.
Cousin marriage doesn’t really seem to be a feminist issue, but the implication that Saletan is trotting out—that there’s some tide turning in favor of allowing it—goes against history in a big way. Saletan has got to know this, since he trots out cousin marriers like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. In half the states of the U.S., marrying your first cousin is legal, and those are the sort of laws that hang on from the past, and are not recent innovations that stem from increasing tolerance. The incest taboo in American and Western European cultures has recently expanded to cover first cousin incest,* and my sense of it is that it’s a result of people’s greater mobility and urbanity. We just meet a lot more people than in the rural past. We have high school, college, and internet dating now. Cousin marriage has become a marker of severe social isolation and backwardness.
The El Dorado raid tells me that society is becoming harsher on polygamy, not more tolerant. And it’s about egalitarianism—we’re more aware than ever, thanks to books like Under the Banner of Heaven, of how brutal and unfair polygamy is to women. It’s also unsustainable, because inconveniently, our species tends to produce equal number of men and women, so polygamy is going to create a huge underclass of men that can’t marry. Saletan admits that polygamy is pretty much inseparable from child marriage, but suggests that if there was a way for it to be adult and consensual, society would have to tolerate it. Maybe, but I don’t think it’s ever going to exist without the teenage brides aspect, because fully empowered women are going to say no to polygamy the vast majority of the time. And it’s not just about jealousy, as Saletan suggests. Polygamy is about the domination of women, about treating women like collectible totems, and there’s not a way to do that without reducing women to property.
Legally, we can’t step in and prosecute polygamists who keep it all adult and legal, not without ensnaring people that are into polyamory or just plain adultery, things that fall out of the scope of massive social issues and are private matters. But we can and we should pounce on the child abuse aspects to prosecute the hell out of polygamist cults. I highly doubt that they’re going to rethink the age at which they push girls to marry to avoid prosecution. Half of the reason these cults appeal is that they give their members reasons to feel persecuted for being true believers, and thus violating the social constrictions against raping teenage girls is just too delicious an opportunity. But of course by doing so, they give the government a reason to go after them with both barrels.
*In fact, it’s gotten a little ridiculous, with people having strong taboos against not just your first cousins, but second and third cousins, too. There was a frustrating episode of “30 Rock” where Tina Fey dumps a guy that’s perfect for her because he’s like her 5th cousin. I mean, I get that they had to hustle him out of sight because her wretched singleness is the source of many jokes, but I just didn’t buy that people would give a shit if distant cousins got it on.
89 Responses to “The slippery slope doesn’t slope that way”
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Polygamy as practiced by the FLDS can be challenged on the same legal grounds as can the ban on same-sex marriage. According to their system, men can have multiple wives but women can’t have multiple husbands, so the system is fundamentally discriminatory.
If same-sex marriage were to be legalized everywhere on the grounds of gender equality, the same legal reasoning would strike down the basis of FLDS polygamy. So it’s pretty silly for conservatives to claim that legalized polygamy is the inevitable consequence of legalizing same-sex marriage.
I think the problem is that women could easily start a shoot-off religion where they get to have multiple husbands. No one is stopping them. Technically, that women don’t take advantage can be construed as a choice.
Theres a theory about this that says polygamy in places like Saudi Arabia have produced such and underclass, and thats a big reason many of them volunteer to be suicide bombers or get involved in radicalism–they can’t find women to marry.
Not sure I buy it, but something to consider as well.
Actually, even in Muslim societies where polygamy is legal, it’s rarely practiced, so that theory is pretty much disproven by the facts. There are places where huge numbers of men are going unmarried, but that’s more about economics than gender ratios.
I’ve seen more conservative types try to argue that serial monogamy is a form of polygamy and has the same male underclass effect, but that’s pretty ridiculous, too. Women practice serial monogamy at the same rates; we aren’t used up and undateable after a break-up or anything.
The widespread nature of polygamy in FLDS is pretty unique because it’s so damn unsustainable. If they didn’t have the larger American society to absorb their excess young men, they’d be fucked. The system would just fall apart.
Indeed. It should be pretty obvious by now that hetero marriage leads to polygamy and whatever evils fundies want to associate w/ same-sex marriage. I’m pretty sure FDLS wouldn’t want wives having sex in the first place. And both hetero and polygamous marriages are based (in olde timey tradition) on husband as the head of the family and wife/ves subjugated to him. All in the name of religion. Same-sex marriage turns the power dynamic on its head. What kind of cognitive dissonance is going on w/ the conservative crazies? Or maybe they never took a WGS class. Sigh.
Polygamy and polyandry can be tricky. On the one hand, the cult of weird old men banging likkle girls model is evil and wrong. But I really don’t think a man marrying two women or a woman marrying two men is unsustainable, and seems like a perfectly valid lifestyle choice for some people. One of my best friends just isn’t content without two boyfriends. Why can’t she marry two men?
Theres a perfectly, if not “good” at least rational reason why the Old Testament banned homosexuality. In a small, ancient desert tribe where the extinction of your group could be just around the corner, you want as many people as possible to reproduce. A few people not having children (gays and lesbians) could mean the difference between extinction and survival come the next war or plague.
What the fundies don’t get is that in the modern age, we don’t have to really worry about underpopulation and thus homosexuality is rendered totally harmless. Not to mention we have other ways to reproduce now besides hetero sex anyway.
The sociological arguments are all well and good, but on what rational, Constitutional basis could a state whose Supreme Court legalized gay marriage not also recognize multiple-partner marriages between consenting adults?
Once you weed out the child brides and statutory rape, I’m not sure what the compelling state interest would be. After all, they don’t get a religious exemption from child abuse investigations, as we all recently saw in Texas.
Ananael Qaa-the fundamentally discriminatory legal grounds you’re talking about for legalizing same-sex marriage are as applied to the application of state law/regulations under, in the most recent instance, the CA state constitution.. the Mormon sects that practice polygamy are not state/gov’t institutions and religious doctrine is not a state statute/regulation. More importantly, it’s the polygamists that would bringing the claim of discrimination…i imagine the polygamists wd make the same challenge as same-sex couples w/ an extra dash of 1st Amend. and maybe under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act???
If polygamy was legal, I’m thinking that women could bring a discrimination claim against a church that prohibited them from taking multiple husbands, but that could be tough…how to regulate the church under the commerce clause?? That would take some fancy footwork I think.
Also, I’m pretty sure that FLDS has specifically banned polygamy. It’s older splinter sects that still practice.
For the same reason, IIRC, the ancient Greeks and Romans prohibited multiple-partner marriage. It makes property disputes/divorces way too complicated for the state to handle.
Think of how nasty and messy divorce is between two people. Now imagine it between a husband and five wives, or between a husband and his three wives, and the second husband of the second wife.
nor,
The simple reply to that is “marriage is a contract between two people”. Polygamy doesn’t work under that model (while same-sex partners do).
Of course, a group of consenting adults could be polyamorous together, but only pairs would be legally recognized by the state. Nothing wrong with those arrangements, of course.
“In a small, ancient desert tribe where the extinction of your group could be just around the corner, you want as many people as possible to reproduce.”
…and I would argue that the value of an individual to his/her tribe depends on a great deal more than the mere ability to produce copies of yourself.
If homosexuality was such a burden, why was the proclivity not eliminated from our DNA?
Just as there are a great many valuable LGBT people today, there must have always been “different” people who nevertheless proved to be valuable to the other people they lived with…
I don’t have a problem with the idea of consenting adults practicing plural marriage in any form they choose.
That’s because making it legal for ADULTS wouldn’t affect the FLDS case in the least.
It is also because it would be rare if a married couple decided to marry a third person with the consent of all involved, and then tried to aquire a fourth plural spouse, again with the consent of all involved … I can’t see any polys I know going for that sort of heavy legally binding contract stuff.
In other words, we should ban religious marriage if we want to get rid of polygamist abuses and one man-one girl underage weddings. Religion is a far larger gateway to that sort of crap than gay marriage ever could be. What part of “two consenting adults” do the bigots not get?
“If homosexuality was such a burden, why was the proclivity not eliminated from our DNA?”
That’s easy — because is said situation, you were reproducing whether you actually wanted sex with the opposite sex of not. Social pressure and all that, rather than a matter of doing what/who you want. Therefore, the gene still gets passed along.
Come on, even today, folks the world ’round still marry and procreate with the other sex while actually being homosexual.
“Come on, even today, folks the world ’round still marry and procreate with the other sex while actually being homosexual.”
…which is one reason why it wouldn’t necessarily be a burden.
However, I was thinking of other things like specialized knowledge or skills that could be of tremendous value whether you reproduced or not…
“What part of “two consenting adults” do the bigots not get?”
As soon as you open your mouth and the sound starts coming out, their ability to understand grinds to a halt…
Agreed, norbiz. But I think you could easily tolerate polygamy in the letter of the law and will still have the stick to break up these cults because of statutory rape laws. I just don’t see the fundie Mormons giving up the teenage flesh that easily.
Nobody’s ever seen a contract with more than two parties?
“…and I would argue that the value of an individual to his/her tribe depends on a great deal more than the mere ability to produce copies of yourself.”
Not in a society where an infertile woman was considered cursed, or where one rabbi said that a man without children was the same as a murderer. An insular group with strict community laws and an initiation rite (for men) that was um. . . slightly unpleasant could only hope to perpetuate itself by having kids.
“Nobody’s ever seen a contract with more than two parties?”
I’m slacking off instead of drafting one as we speak.
True is that in the FLDS and similar cults the polygamy is the least of the issues. Of course that’s what the media hops on because it rises lots of meaningless relativist issues.
All the polygamist cults practice child abandonment, child sexual abuse, forced marriages, and rape. The fact that there is more than one wife is practically beside the point, yet “polygamy” is what all the coverage is about. The rest is treated as an eccentricity of the cult leader, rather than the actual crime being committed.
You know that, and I know that, but a lot of the unrepentant sexist pigs believe otherwise, I’m afraid….
blc,
LDS (regular Mormons - Latter Day Saints) eschew polygamy.
FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) practice it; they’re a group that split off of the LDS church, and polygamy is one of the things that makes them FLDS, rather than LDS
Also, I’m pretty sure that FLDS has specifically banned polygamy. It’s older splinter sects that still practice.
No, LDS has banned polygamy. FLDS is a splinter group, but a shockingly huge one.
Of course, a group of consenting adults could be polyamorous together, but only pairs would be legally recognized by the state. Nothing wrong with those arrangements, of course.
Pairs of legally married couples or just groups of singles could form the equivalent of group marriages by forming a limited liability corporation where the assets of the group become the property of the corporation with members as shareholders. Any issues with regards to who is sleeping with who would be left undefined in the legal sense and up for negotiation between consenting adults (who have to be of legal age to incorporate).
This would provide groups of close friends with the ability to form what is essentially a legal Karass for the purpose of communal child rearing, collective administration of property and pooling of resources in order to mitigate the problems created by rampant and unrestrained capitalist greed that has otherwise made home ownership without ludicrous debt a fantasy.
it wouldn’t be marriage, though.
I think they’re so big, too, because they’ve been allowed to fester without government interference for so long. It’s tough. Because the polygamy becomes the focus—instead of the child rape and other abuses—it becomes easy for people to believe that it’s a religion that’s being unfairly persecuted and so they turn on the government for it. This El Dorado case seems to be a turning point, though. The public is finally getting why this has to be done. I’m usually adamant that the government needs to be careful not to persecute people with weird religious beliefs—in part because all religious beliefs are weird in my opinion—but FLDS crosses a line big time.
I think legalizing multiple party marriages might not be the worst idea. Serial wives in Mormon cults have no recourse when their marriages go sour but to flee, which leaves them impoverished. They deserve the right to divorce and get alimony or child support, or at least some of the marital assets.
Norbizness,
I think the difference is that a polygamous marriage is inherently unequal, b/c husband has more than one wife, but each wife only has one husband, and is not married to the other wives. It allows one party to the initial contract (marriage) to dilute the value of that contract (marital property) by bringing in a third party. The same would be true for a woman marrying multiple men. Now, what if everyone in the group marriage were truly married to eachother? Then what? Could a wife divorce another wife without divorcing their shared husband? What would the legal effect of that be?
In short, all technical questions aside, what would an egalitarian plural-marriage look like?
“The sociological arguments are all well and good, but on what rational, Constitutional basis could a state whose Supreme Court legalized gay marriage not also recognize multiple-partner marriages between consenting adults?”
Taxes is one. The federal and state tax codes are not set up to deal with more than 1 spouse. Huge parts of the tax code would need to be revised.
Community property laws is another. All based on 2 people in a relationship.
Custody laws is a 3rd.
The existing legal precendents governing relationship/property issues can instantly be applied to same sex couples, but not 3 or more partners.
Are you kidding? Churches can discriminate against anyone for any reason. Even if they take money from the government under Shrub’s faith based initiative, they can still discriminate against the people they hire to run those charities. If they come up with a religious reason to discriminate against women, gays, disabled people, people of other ethnicities or race, and especially people of other faiths, no one is going to stop them.
Sure, and how many of those contracts automatically include more than 1,000 rights and responsibilities? Plenty of those rights get pretty hairy when more than two people are involved. For example, any child born into a marriage is automatically both parties’ child under the law. How does that work with several spouses? If one woman gives birth to a child are all the spouses that child’s parents? If yes, how would visitation and child support work out if the marriage doesn’t last?
With two-person marriages right now, if one party wants out, the marriage is dissolved. What happens in a plural marriage if one person wants out and everyone else stays in? What’s the mechanism for keeping the marriage together while providing for only one person to leave? How does division of assets work out? Right now, marital property is divided evenly. What happens if there’s one man married to several women? Are all those women obligated to contribute their assets to the wife who wants out? Are all those women obligated to pay their husband’s ex-wife alimony?
Extending marriage rights to same sex couples is easy. It only requires a minor change to the law. Extending marriage rights to people who want more than one spouse is an unbelievable clusterfuck.
Show me someone who pipes up “what about polygamy?” in a discusssion of SSM, and I’ll show you what is almost guaranteed to be a jerk arguing in bad faith. Polygamy is a whole other set of problems, for reasons Dr. T did a perfectly good job of describing above.
And Erika too.
This isn’t directed at anyone in particular, because both the media and everyone at every blog I read is making the same mistake, but I really wish people would be more careful with the word “polygamy.” Polygamy denotes any plural marriage, and therefore technically does encompass what the FLDS is doing, but the word that describes the misogynist practice of a man taking multiple wives without a similar option available to women is “polygyny.” Maybe it doesn’t bother anyone else, but I’m a copy editor so I get really nitpicky about language.
#8, The even simpler reply is that legalizing same-sex marriage is about eliminating enforced sex discrimination, and sex discrimination is wrong.
You can choose whichever consenting adult you want for your marriage partner, but being *forced* to choose an opposite-sex partner restricts your (and your partner’s) freedom of association.
Once re-framed as a sex-discrimination issue, the slippery-slope argument becomes less convincing.
Colleen, you beat me to it. I was scrolling down, looking for some acknowledgment of the misuse of language, and was cooking up my comment, and there you were. Yay for you. Boo for polygyny.
Nobody’s ever seen a contract with more than two parties?
How many multiparty contracts include child custody arrangements?
Erika/Bitter: I definitely agree with the logistical difficulties, but given the growth of the right of privacy, it’s still semi-difficult for me to see why bigamy among consenting adults wouldn’t be upheld on Lawrence v. Texas. Some FLDS members tried that tactic before the Utah Supreme Court in 2007; unfortunately, one of the wives was a minor and had had two children before her 18th birthday, so no dice.
As somebody who used actually like Constitutional law, I like the original rationale in Reynolds v. U.S. (1878):
“Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people. At common law, the second marriage was always void, and from the earliest history of England polygamy has been treated as an offence against society.”
blc wrote:
When I suggested, months ago, that it won’t be terribly long before a same-sex couple goes to a Catholic priest and requests a nuptial Mass, gets refused and then sues the Church, nobody had the least bit of concern for that argument, saying that the First Amendment protected the churches from such.
But, of course, the 2000 initiative didn’t stop the California Supreme Court from saying it was invalid, did it? Courts do pretty much whatever they want to do these days, and I’d never say that a particular judgement is impossible to reach.
Include protection for religious organizations, to immunize them from lawsuits from couples ~ or moresomes, if polygamy/polyandry is ever legalized ~ where the church cannot be sued by people because it refuses to compromise its religious beliefs, and you’d have fewer objections to same-sex marriage.
How many multiparty contracts include child custody arrangements?
I’d like to see some, actually.
I consider it fundamentally unfair that in order to establish legal rights to care for two children I have raised since they were toddlers, I would need their biological mother, who sees them about once a year, to legally sever her ties with them or to somehow declare her an unfit mother and have the state do it.
If my husband dies, my children can be torn from the only family they can remember ever having, taken away from the little siblings they love, and forced to live with someone they barely know. And the only recourse to this is to force a woman who does, in fact, love the kids, although she barely knows them, to legally declare that she is not their mother so that I can be.
Why the fuck can’t I be the mother, *too*? I’ve put in the time, the energy, the money — I supported these kids when neither of their biological parents had jobs, I tucked them in at night, I get them up and get them ready for school, I do *everything* for them a parent should do but if my husband dies I lose all legal right to keep them in my home and care for them. My husband can’t even declare me their guardian in event of his death (well, he can, but if she wants custody it won’t stick.)
So I personally want to see multiparty child custody arrangements where three people who are *not* legally married — such as a legally married same-sex couple *and* a biological opposite sex parent, or a legally married opposite sex couple *and* a biological parent who is the estranged partner of one of the married couple — can all be considered parents to a child and all have equal legal rights. I would favor a litmus test to ensure that non-biological parents are actually behaving like parents, of course, such as asking teachers of the children “who comes to the parent child conferences” or determining who puts in the highest percentage of child care time. But there should be a legal model that puts a non-biological parent on an equal footing with a biological parent, *without* having to first strip the bio-parent of rights. it would be helpful in enforcing that open adoptions stay open, too.
Erica wrote:
Except that’s not true. Catholic Charities in California was ordered to provide contraceptive coverage by the state, even though artificial contraception is considered immoral by the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities in Boston had to end it’s century-old adoption service, because it could not comply with state laws requiring non-discrimination in child placement with same-sex couples.
Yep, them dastardly librul judges.
Completely redundant. Churches do not have to marry anyone they do not want to. Right now, they could refuse to marry someone because they don’t like the groom’s hair, and that is legal and will stand up in court.
Of course, the Catholic Church is being sued left and right for discrimination against women who want to be ordained as priests.
Oh, wait…
Okay, I can see that the conflation that drives me nuts whenever marriage rights start being talked about has begun.
Marriage in the United States is, in fact, a civil institution, not a religious one. You may have a religious wedding if you so choose, but it is not a valid marriage unless you have a proper license from the state. You can have a full 90-minute Catholic nuptial Mass, but unless you have that piece of paper from your state that says, “Yeah, go ahead,” you are NOT legally married.
Similarly, you can go down to the courthouse, get that piece of paper, be married on the spot by a judge without any allusion to God whatsoever, and be legally married.
Being legally married does NOT REQUIRE being married in a church or religious institution of any kind.
If polygamy were legal, you could sue your state or county for not issuing a marriage license, but if your church refuses to perform the wedding, you’re SOL, because a church can do whatever they want with their membership. Any attempt to sue your church for discrimination would — rightly — be laughed out of court.
If you want a polygamous marriage between a woman and several men to be recognized by a church, you will need to follow the grand old American tradition of founding your own religion, because a lawsuit will get you bupkis.
Can’t give you a number, but I’ve seen some child custody agreements in which the grandparents have guaranteed rights, so it’d be no surprise to find a child custody agreement with three or more parties excluding the child(ren).
Yes, and if people turned into racoons or end tables or “Gilmore Girls” DVD collections on their 30th birthdays, we’d have to lower the minimum age to qualify for a Senate seat.
I know Saletan suffers from the “reliably contrarian” variant of High Broderism, but really, is it to much to ask that his counterfactual propositions not involve conditions that he himself admits are actually impossible?
That was intellectually dishonest even by your own usually low standards, Dana. Most of the hated liberals in here don’t think that you can sue a church for not approving of your marriage. You found one who did and are acting like you discovered the secret conspiracy. A random blog comment does not the law make. If you could sue a church and force them to marry you, divorced Catholics would have done it a long time ago.
Now, you’re probably right that legal gay marriage will make it more common in churches. Because churches have to appeal to people’s desires or they die. Free market and all that. Gay people who want to get married will create a demand that smarter churches will want to fill.
Dana, you’re conflating two things. Religions who engage in the world in secular ways have to follow the same law as the rest of us.
I think the solution to your concern is to deprive all clergy of their right to marry in the eyes of the law. If you want to be legally married, you have to go to court or have a notary sign off on it. Then, if you want, have the religious ceremony but understand that it’s not legally binding.
In other words, separation of church and state protects the church.
But that’s just it, Amanda: in our country, clergymen do perform the state function of witnessing the contract of marriage. They are under legal restrictions not to perform marriages they know to be legally invalid.
I have to ask, though: if so many people in here think that churches already have such an immunity, why would y’all object to an added statutory protection? After all, to you it would change nothing, while some of us would have less unease at the notion of legal same-sex marriage.
“…why would y’all object to an added statutory protection?”
Frankly, I can see that turning into the marriage equivalent of the pharmacist who thinks he knows better than your doctor what drugs you can and cannot have.
Some JP somewhere will claim that it’s against their civil rights to allow someone else to act on theirs.
Whatever.
In the end, Gay people will be allowed to marry. It’s inevitable. There are already example in other countries and god has not subjected them to his awesome smiting.
Dana, look at it this way. If Gay people are legally allowed to get married, you’ll be able to bitch about it ’til the end of your days. Isn’t that worth something to a conservative curmudgeon like yourself?…
Moderation, lovely moderation,
Moderation is really our friend…
if you can believe it, i had never heard the distinction b/w FLDS & LDS. My impressions were the splinter sects from LDS, as it were, were not centralized.
i was poorly being sort of tongue in cheek & thinking out loud about the idea that a woman could try to bring a lawsuit in the same way that you would bring an action against an employer under title vii. and i conflated the two ideas together, but would there be grounds for the gov’t to be able to bring an action against a church similarly to how the gov’t applied civil rights acts under the commerce clause in the 60’s in cases like like heart of atlanta motel, etc.?? .i mean it’s all just sort of fantasy, 1st Amen. issues aside. It’s an interesting idea to me, members of a church suing the institution for discrimination. Can you imagine a universe where title vii doesn’t specifically exclude religious insitutions…nuns suing the American Catholic Church b/c they are prohibited from becoming priests? there is the whole 1st amend issue but that would still be fun.
and from the perspective of the state, why couldn’t each marriage be treated as separate and distinct? in terms of child custody, taxes, etc. i know it’s more complicated than that, but i’m not sure it’s untenable. there has to be a way to afford the women and children in polygamous families w/ some legal protection. which i suppose can be considered as an entirely separate issue.
I don’t think they have an immunity, I know they have an immunity. A Catholic church is under no obligation to marry 2 jews, a Lutheran church is under no obligation to marry 2 baptists, etc, etc.
If you really believe gays will successfully sue a church for not allowing them to get married in said church, you really are quite thick.
won’t someone please consider the overwhelming (and somewhat hypersensitive) majority’s fee fees? FOR ONCE? WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF TEH CHRISTIANS?!?! Why must life present so many brain-exploding challenges to them? We must cushion the blows, liberals!
Except that’s not true. Catholic Charities in California was ordered to provide contraceptive coverage by the state, even though artificial contraception is considered immoral by the Catholic Church.
Yes, because they had employees who were non-Catholics. They were imposing their religious beliefs on non-Catholics as a condition of employment. That is not allowed.
Catholic Charities in Boston had to end it’s century-old adoption service, because it could not comply with state laws requiring non-discrimination in child placement with same-sex couples.
Yes, because they had adoptive parents who were non-Catholics. They were imposing their religious beliefs on non-Catholics as a condition of adopting a child. That is not allowed.
See the difference? You can impose all the restrictions you want in the context of conducting church services, but once you start employing or providing services to people who are not members of your church, you can’t demand that they conform to your beliefs.
Also, you seem a little confused about who can and can’t perform weddings. Many clergy are licensed by the state to do so, but they have to belong to a denomination that’s recognized by that state. If your minister belongs to a denomination that’s not recognized, your marriage will be invalidated by the state.
Not only that, but non-religious people can perform marriages as well. In California, you can have a friend designated as a Deputy Marriage Commissioner for the Day to perform your ceremony for you. They don’t have to be a minister of any kind — they just need to pay $35 and get the rule book and they’re good to go.
And you know why that exists? It’s because of people saying things like:
Fact is, when you reach fourth cousin, the degree of consanguinity between the cousins is no higher than it is between two random (unrelated) people.
In areas of the world where large families occur, or have occurred in the last 100 years, it’s actually fairly easy to run into people who are related. You get a family with seven kids, one marries into another family who had five or six siblings, another into a family with six, another into a family of four, and the the respective siblings marry out, and you quickly generate an enormous web of family connections.
Good example is my own family. On both my parents sides they’re descended form several generations of large families (they’re fourth cousins as a result). This has resulted in the fact that I can travel across Canada and I’ll give you good odds that I’ll run across some cousin (second, third, fourth or fifth), many of whom I didn’t know existed. Social mobility has increased the chances I’ll run into relatives, because, whereas before all I would have had to do is move to a different province and be away from relatives, now I can’t because they’ve spread out as well.
It’s going to be worse for succeeding generations in my family in terms of relatives because they won’t be able to depend on (formerly) “safe” markers like racial makeup: my brother married into a family who has black members, I have another cousin who’s married to Chinese-Canadian guy in Vancouver, and I know another relative who was dating an man whose parents came from Mumbai.
This is actually how it is in a lot of Latin American countries. You get your civil marriage, which basically is a JP signing the certificate (if you do a ceremony with the JP, it’s pretty funny - do you swear under civil code section 4523 subsection B article 1 to forswear all others and cleave only unto your wife? that sort of thing), and then if you desire, you get a religious ceremony. Civil w/o religous is fine, but the other way around isn’t valid. It’s funny because they are a lot more socially conservative but they have such a strong anti-clerical tradition going back to the church’s strong connection to the Spanish crown that they retain this separation, even though they often don’t have the separation between church and state that we have in other arenas.
I would agree with norbizness that you could slide down this slope to legal polygamy (some of the practical difficulties should be the burden of the state to resolve, not the burden of polyamorous folks who for some reason want to formalize their relationships), but also agree with Amanda that you would never see it on a wide scale without the sort of social control exercised by FLDS leadership. Just one small example - those men could not afford to have all the wives and children they have if they were legally married because then the women couldn’t apply for welfare. The sheer cost of such large families is one thing that really limits polygamy in Muslim countries that allow it, even without full legal rights for women there.
re cousin marriage, if you marry your first cousin in a state where it’s legal to do so, and move to a state where it’s not legal, the second state will treat your marriage as legal. So will the federal government. There is no DOMA and no “OMFG cousin marrage!!!1!!” hysteria to stop you.
I’m sure I’m not relating this quite right and will be corrected by the various historians who hang out here, but IIRC in the Middle Ages, this was pretty much how you got a divorce. If you and your spouse couldn’t get along or wanted to marry someone else, there was always some way that you were related within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, which made the marriage eligible for annulment. It worked out especially well for royalty and aristocracy since they were already fairly closely related.
Those were the grounds under which Henry VIII originally tried to get his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled: since she was his brother’s widow and they had to get a special dispensation from the Pope to get married in the first place, he then tried to claim after the fact that the marriage was null and void from day one. It probably would have worked if Emperor Charles V (a) wasn’t Katherine’s nephew and (b) wasn’t holding the Pope essentially as a prisoner.
Yeah, let’s actually not slam the cousin-marriers, please. If it wasn’t a sibling type relationship, there is nothing psychologically improper, and if they are 2nd cousins and further, I don’t even think there is the slight increase in likelihood of genetic defects Saletan mentions wrt first cousins.
(And no, I’ve never been attracted to any first cousins, and haven’t met any second cousins. That I know of. But it is entirely possible that I might have, without knowing it, when I went back to where my grandfather’s family was from during grad. school.)
If I threw a vote out there to abolish the legal entity of “marriage” completely and reduce it to a ceremonial event, like a baptism or a baby shower, that people could have or not as they chose with whomever they chose and it would mean as much or as little as they wanted it to, would I get pointed at and called names by anyone..?
Seriously, seems like a totally painless solution to the whole tax-code/divorce division issue of polygamy as well as unfairness issues held by anyone who currently can’t marry whomever they want legally. So, take “legality” out of it.
Erika:
I suppose the law could allow for either kind of marriage — one where there’s one husband and many wives or one wife and many husbands, and one where there’s multiple marriage partners of whatever sex. You’d know when you got married which kind it would be.
So in your example, if it were a marriage of the first kind, the husband would pay everything (or conceivably the leaving spouse might pay if she were more wealthy). If it were the second, everyone would chip in (or share in the settlement equally), because it wouldn’t just be their husband’s ex-wife, it would be theirs.
The first is kind of like one parent, many children. The second is like siblings being siblings, all to each. Which could become complicated if I wanted to join more than one marriage, like I can have half-siblings from different parents.
Which brings us to actual children, which complicates it further. Would they be children of the family or of the individual parents? How would you be sure whose they were? Force DNA testing? Even that wouldn’t help if I married identical twin brothers — an unlikely occurrence, but not impossible.
In other words, I think it could be worked out, but it wouldn’t be easy. Same-sex marriage is much easier. It’s just allowing me to marry a woman instead of a man if I so choose. How that equals polygyny and dog marriages in winger heads, I have no idea.
Seriously, seems like a totally painless solution to the whole tax-code/divorce division issue of polygamy as well as unfairness issues held by anyone who currently can’t marry whomever they want legally. So, take “legality” out of it.
So we then set up an entire parallel system to legally determine who each person’s next of kin, financial heirs, medical decision-makers, etc. are? Is there a separate form for each status, or can they all be combined into one form? What happens if one person is designated as your financial heir and a different one is your medical decision-maker and they differ about whether or not your money should be spent keeping you on life support?
If nothing else, the Terri Schiavo case should demonstrate that having people with competing legal claims on a family member can get very ugly, very fast — and her parents didn’t even have a leg to stand on, legally, in that case.
Colleen and JW - I’m totally with you on making the polgamy/polygyny distinction. In part because to constantly use polygamy when you mean polygyny seems to imply that the only polygamy IS polygyny.
I’ve never been big on marriage - one of the reasons why my last boyfriend broke up with me - but if polygamy became legal I confess I’d be very tempted to get me a bunch of mail-order husbands from China. I understand lots of men there can’t find wives.
And if I could get at least one that looked like Bruce Lee…and a Jackie Chan mmm… naked martial arts demos every night chez Nancy! yee haw!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WTl_ZSaeDBo&feature=related
I have to ask, though: if so many people in here think that churches already have such an immunity, why would y’all object to an added statutory protection? After all, to you it would change nothing, while some of us would have less unease at the notion of legal same-sex marriage.
Is anyone against offering specific statutory immunity to churches, even though they objectively could never need that immunity? No.
Does it ever, under any circumstance, shift marriage equality out of the realm of ‘icky, boys KISSED! OMG!!!1!’ and into the realm of a rational conversation? Not yet.
But keep swingin’, Dana, no one disagrees. It just doesn’t make any damn difference. See CA, MD, OH, AZ and NM law and proposed legislation for a reality check.
I don’t think that same-sex marriage is becoming more socially acceptable because people are more interested in privacy. I think it’s a matter of increasing egalitarianism and feminism especially.
Yes, and trying to slam cousin marriage into that same frame makes Saletan the Tool o the Day.
It’s transparently irrational for one of my mom’s two grandchildren to have a better set of financial and custody protections than the other, just because her parents have an odd number of penises.
And she will call any talk radio program in North America to explain it really slow. So will my mother in law and my state Rep, whose grandchildren have two moms. Makes a huge difference, assimilation does.
So yeah, it’s increasingly obvious that same-sex marriage is the right thing to do, to make the state treat similar families the same way.
We have such protection, Dana. It’s in the Bill of Rights, just before the part about guns.
The idea that churches will be sued to be forced to marry same-sex couples is a lie. Either you know this, or you are such an ignoramus that you don’t know the difference between “the Catholic Church” and “Catholic Charities”.
If you’re going to troll, do it around dumber people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Thanks.
I think it’s plausible that a court could find pretty decent grounds (I’m not saying it would be right) to exclude any group with an unequal number of appropriate-sex partners from the equal-protection arguments about freedom to marry. And certainly way too many of the laws that confer benefits based on status as a spouse make the assumption of only one spouse — fer instance social security survivor’s benefits…
Mnemosyne: “So we then set up an entire parallel system to legally determine who each person’s next of kin, financial heirs, medical decision-makers, etc. are? Is there a separate form for each status, or can they all be combined into one form? What happens if one person is designated as your financial heir and a different one is your medical decision-maker and they differ about whether or not your money should be spent keeping you on life support?”
Um, the same thing that people who AREN’T MARRIED do now,..? How is this a new thing…?
“If nothing else, the Terri Schiavo case should demonstrate that having people with competing legal claims on a family member can get very ugly, very fast — and her parents didn’t even have a leg to stand on, legally, in that case.”
The Terry Schiavo case demonstrates that having marriage be a legal situation in no way diminishes the legal ugliness, yeah? I think I’m resting my case…
When the right bleat about if you legalize same sex marriage you’re opening the door for all manner of perversion, there’s a good answer for it.
Marriage is (or should be) about a union of equals, an egalitarian institution, and as long as this is the frame, the ‘other perversions’ they’re talking about won’t happen.
Marrying your dog? Dogs and other animals are not sentient and can’t consent. Marrying children? Minors can’t consent either.
As for the incest angle, I was taught when growing up that marrying third cousins is probably no more dangerous genetically than any two random people, and that it’s the genetic closeness that’s the problem.
Um, the same thing that people who AREN’T MARRIED do now,..? How is this a new thing…?
Because if you are not married, the assumption is that your parents are your legal heirs. This is why so many gay people end up being fucked over if their partner dies: even if your partner wills everything to you, your partner’s parents can contest the will because they are the automatic legal heirs and you are not. They may not win, because the courts are much more willing to recognize long-term gay relationships than they used to be, but they can still make a lot of trouble.
I’m assuming that you’re not in a long-term relationship, because otherwise the advantages of, say, not losing your house because your partner didn’t leave it to you in his/her will and his/her family comes and takes it away from you might be a little more obvious. Or being banned from your partner’s hospital room because you’re not “really” family. All of that stuff seems very distant when you personally don’t have to worry about it.
The Terry Schiavo case demonstrates that having marriage be a legal situation in no way diminishes the legal ugliness, yeah? I think I’m resting my case…
Only if you’re under the mistaken impression that her parents actually had any legal say in her healthcare. Her parents spent years trying to prove that they should be her legal next-of-kin, not her husband, and they were turned down by every court they tried that maneuver in. If he had not had that automatic legal right granted to him by marriage, she’d still be on a feeding tube today, because your parents are your automatic next of kin, followed by your siblings, followed by any other blood relative … unless you’re married, in which case your spouse is automatically your next of kin.
FWIW, I did some research on the subject, and anthropologists estimate that 20% of human marriages throughout history were between 2nd cousins or closer.
“Because if you are not married, the assumption is that your parents are your legal heirs.”
The thing is, a zillion people who aren’t gay and aren’t in long-term relationships and aren’t married, and somehow this whole situation is not a living nightmare for them. You can leave your stuff to whomever you want. If they’re an asshole, they’ll contest. Hearking back to Terry Schiavo, a marriage license is absolutely NO guarantee that you will be legally allowed to speak for your spouse. The problem is having asshole parents, not whether or not you’re married.
“I’m assuming that you’re not in a long-term relationship, because otherwise the advantages of, say, not losing your house because your partner didn’t leave it to you in his/her will and his/her family comes and takes it away from you might be a little more obvious.”
You are assuming incorrectly.
The only thing that’s obvious to me is that this is so easily preventable by simple putting both your names on the house title. Problem solved!
You just keep emphasizing my point about how being married doesn’t save you from asshole parents, the more you detail the episode of Terry Schiavo.
I’m sorry, I think you doth protest too much. Have you a pro-marriage agenda outside of the rather dubious legal advantages it grants you, of some description, by any chance?
Wrong. Thanks for trying to use “but I don’t like marriage either” as an excuse to whack on same-sex couples, but it’s more than a little transparent.
Geez, I hope that’s not the way you’ve “solved” the problem in your case, because if one of you dies, the other will be in for a nasty shock when the other person’s family comes along and insists that you give them “their” half of the house immediately. Because since they would be the legal heirs, they have a perfect right to insist that you sell the house and give them their half of the proceeds. And even if that doesn’t happen, the surviving partner will get hit with a tax bill that a spouse would not.
What you will need to do is put the house into a trust and then leave that trust to your partner. Or get married and the problem will be taken care of automatically.
I’m trying to figure out what my sinister purpose would be in promoting the idea that gay couples should be allowed to marry and have the same rights as straight couples, but I’m drawing a blank. Unless you’re hinting that Gay Marriage Will Destroy Us All, so my support for gay marriage means I’m bringing about the End Times or something?
“Unless you’re hinting that Gay Marriage Will Destroy Us All, so my support for gay marriage means I’m bringing about the End Times or something?”
That’s it! I’m sure I read about it somewhere in Revelation…
“In a small, ancient desert tribe where the extinction of your group could be just around the corner, you want as many people as possible to reproduce.”
Funny how the small, ancient desert tribes of North America didn’t have any moral problems with same-sex orientation, despite constant threats to their continued existence as a people from natural disasters, competition for scarce resources with other people, and ultimately colonization.
In fact, they managed to find a place for such people in their society where they were valued and honored for things other than their ability to reproduce as MikeEss suggests.
(I haven’t read the whole thread yet, forgive me if someone’s already made this point.)
Dr. T - Tax, community property, and custody hassles are not Constitutional reasons the court might consider when deciding whether there is a state interest in interfering in the polygamists’ right to privacy - they aren’t Constitutionally relevant, only practically so. When the Federal Supremes noticed that blacks had equal rights, the entire jurisprudence of property and social relationships in this country was turned upside down - deed restrictions against polygamists buying property are not common the way deed restrictions against black ownership(or rules regarding admission to schools or eligibility for jobs or mixed race marriages, etc.) were.
Custody could be be joint and several. (I.e. all members of a marriage be considered fully custodial unless an agreement otherwise exists, with custody handled during divorce. That way, non-genetic parents’ custody rights are protected if genetic parents leave/die, with the ruling principle being ‘best interest of the child’ like family court is now.) We already can handle multiple legal heirs(most people do, after all, have multiple children, and we no longer practice primogeniture), the rules there can be ported to polygamous marriage for divorces and/or estates. Divorce would be one individual breaking off from the rest. The hard case is when members of the marriage want to break off some ties, but no one agrees as to which should be cut. Disputed divorces exist in the current world, though, and we have ways of handling them.
Tax is easy - treat all partners as ‘jointly’ or ’separately’ allowed to file and take deductions. If two partners file ‘jointly’ and the third ’separately’, or even the third and fourth ‘jointly’, that shouldn’t be too hard to deal with in this computerized era. Kids have to be dealt with under ’separately’, now, so I see no reason that rule couldn’t be extended to a poly case.
Or, more ambitiously, make tax deductions be based on households rather than marital or dependant status. If Jack is dependent on John and lives with him, the IRS shouldn’t care if John and Jack are father and minor or disabled son (or elderly father with adult son), married, living together as a couple, or John giving Jack a place to live while he gets back on his feet financially. Jack depends on John’s income in all cases, and John should be able to deduct him. Won’t ever happen, unfortunately - too many marriage worshippers around, and possibly to easy to abuse.
Personally, if we ended up having to deal constructively with legal polygamy, I’d leave marriage as a one-to-one thing, with consent of existing spouse or spouses. (Example - A marries B. B can marry C if A consents, but A and C aren’t automatically married, though they can marry if B consents. If C wants to marry D, B has the right of consent, but A has no say if A isn’t married to C. ) This makes divorce easier to deal with - it is still between two people.
“In a small, ancient desert tribe where the extinction of your group could be just around the corner, you want as many people as possible to reproduce.”
In just about every human community, reproduction has never been a problem. The limiting factors are food supplies, and specifically periodic shortfalls.
Exposing unsupportable infants has been nigh on universal.
Mythago: You have got to be kidding about me bashing same-sex marriage, ever, for any reason. If you’re not, congratulations! You are absolutely the first person who has ever dreamt of accusing me of that, up to and including all the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people who know me a lot better than you do, a list that goes amazing far! back in time, given that it starts with my mom and continues with my sister.
Mnemosyne: “because if one of you dies, the other will be in for a nasty shock when the other person’s family comes along and insists that you give them “their” half of the house immediately. Because since they would be the legal heirs, they have a perfect right to insist that you sell the house and give them their half of the proceeds.”
If that’s ever actually happened, that’s terrible. However, I have a really hard time believing it does outside of one or two freak incidences, rather like lighting strikes in frequency. But if you have evidence that this is any kind of widespread happening, I’d be more than happy to reconsider my stance.
” Have you a pro-marriage agenda outside of the rather dubious legal advantages it grants you, of some description, by any chance?
I’m trying to figure out what my sinister purpose would be in promoting the idea that gay couples should be allowed to marry and have the same rights as straight couples, but I’m drawing a blank. Unless you’re hinting that Gay Marriage Will Destroy Us All, so my support for gay marriage means I’m bringing about the End Times or something? ”
I wasn’t thinking that you had a SINISTER purpose; rather I was thinking you had a mindlessly sentimental one. Abolishing the concept of legal marriage, period, would give same-sex couples the exact same rights as straight couples, and it would also eliminate discrimination against couples of any combination of gender(s) who don’t want to validate the patriarchal construct of “marriage” by supporting it with a legal ceremony of their own.
Nah, I don’t think Gay Marriage Will Destroy Anything, Other Than The Same Stuff Marriage In General Destroys for Anyone Participating In It.
The entire reason why gay marriage came up as a problem in the first place is that you had thousands of gay men dying of AIDS whose partners discovered after the fact that the few legal protections afforded to unmarried partners meant that they were thrown out of hospital rooms, barred from their partner’s funeral by family members who hadn’t spoken to their partner in decades, and lost property they had purchased with their partner to the legal heirs.
Are you too young to remember any of this? I know it was 20 years ago. But you had — and still have — people who lived together for 30 years who were left with nothing because they had no legal rights within that partnership.
You’ve chosen not to marry. Good for you. Why is it so important to you that other people not be allowed to marry, either? Why is it important to the point that you’re willing to deny them civil rights because that civil right is not important to you personally?
The right to sit at a lunch counter and be served is, by far, a less important right than the right to be allowed to form a family with the person of your choice. Are you going to start talking about how stupid civil rights people were for doing sit-ins over such a minor right?
“If that’s ever actually happened, that’s terrible. However, I have a really hard time believing it does outside of one or two freak incidences, rather like lighting strikes in frequency.”
FWIW, I have a gay friend (a hair stylist of all things) whose long time partner died a few years ago (cancer, tragic, he was young). His partner’s family went stark raving nuts, up to and including attempting to get him kicked out of the house the two of them were buying together. It was only by the skin of his teeth (and good lawyers) that he was able to keep his house.
For all intents and purposes, those two men were married, and had been for 15-years or so. But even the legal framework they constructed in the absence of being allowed to get legally married was just barely enough for justice to prevail.
I guess this is one of the reasons why I believe allowing full marriage - no substitutes - is the only solution to problems like this. Anything less will somehow get turned into a way to discriminate…
Yes, there’s nothing more mindlessly sentimental than worrying about property rights. Only a sentimental fool would worry about someone being barred from making decisions about their loved one’s medical care.
Mnemosyne: I am fairly young, but more pertinently, the place I lived during that time frame was not conducive to conversations about gay people, other than overhearing lots of crude jokes and/or threats to kick some ass. Sad but true. More relevantly, I was thinking about the gay couples I know NOW. Only two couples now; the third couple quit being one about five years ago when one half of them died, of liver cancer. Of course, their families are all at least fairly supportive, which I think is where the real problem lies (when they’re not). For example, I’m also thinking of my great-aunt, who was her husband’s second wife–after he died, even though she was both his wife AND on the house deed, his children took her to court to try to force her to sell. And of course I am thinking of the ever-present Schiavo case. I just don’t see marriage as the cure-all for nasty, greedy family like you do.
I have actually chosen to marry, twice! And I can tell you that the system has a massive amount of in-built defects. I don’t oppose anybody’s choice or desire to build a family with someone else; I just fail to see why “marriage” should be a legal concept at all, for anyone. As far as a ceremonial, religious or emotional bonding issue, I am all for that. I do of course recognize however that marriage is about as likely to go away as a legal instution as pigs are to fly, so since I can’t have that, I totally support same-sex marriage and always have ever since I can remember.
Hi MikeEss,
As I was saying to Mnemosyne, since I know there is no chance in hell of marriage as an entire legal concept going away, ever, I choose not to pursue that in my bursts of political activism and confine my letter-writing blogular and personal support to absolutely throwing it open to same-sex couples, without mercy towards that “civil union” substitute crapola. I am so sorry about your friend, also.
Mostly, sentimental fools avoid making living wills, which brings all this doubtfulness about “medical treatment” upon themselves. And you’re going to have property rights issues if you have more than one possible legal heir and at least one of them is a nasty, greedy person. Harsh but true.
Lisa KS, thanks.
It was a few years ago, and it’s easy to see he still has a hole where this relationship has not healed over (and probably never will). We went to the funeral, just for support, and it was really rough. Place was packed. We live in a very red part of SoCal, so there wasn’t a lot of support expected. They had to soft-pedal the gay thing pretty strongly, which I thought was kind of rotten.
Nasty stuff…
I just don’t see marriage as the cure-all for nasty, greedy family like you do.
Where did I say it’s a cure-all? It removes one level of problems, but the magical Marriage Fairy does not come down and fix everything if your relatives are determined to make trouble. It just makes it much more likely that you’ll win your case, because the law gives primacy to the spouse over other relatives.
I have actually chosen to marry, twice! And I can tell you that the system has a massive amount of in-built defects. I don’t oppose anybody’s choice or desire to build a family with someone else; I just fail to see why “marriage” should be a legal concept at all, for anyone.
Again, the fact that marriage didn’t work out for you means that no one else should be allowed to do it? Seriously, that’s the argument of a 5-year-old. “I don’t want it, so other people who want it suck and are stupid. Nyah.”
I do of course recognize however that marriage is about as likely to go away as a legal instution as pigs are to fly, so since I can’t have that, I totally support same-sex marriage and always have ever since I can remember.
How are you totally supporting same-sex marriage if you think marriage should be banned for everyone?
“Marriage” isn’t what didn’t work out for me. My relationship with each of those two men didn’t work out for me, as all my relationships and all everyone else’s relationships but their last one don’t work out. And that’s the problem with marriage. It confuses legal constructs with emotional relationships. Marriage as a legal construct does actually function in societies where it was or is used for that purpose–to unite familial property and monies. Marriage as a legal construct is a nasty failure where it is used as a whip to force people to stay in an emotional relationship via the power of law and under the threat of loss of valuables and children, enforceable by the state, should the emotional relationship not work out. I don’t understand why anyone DOES support it, frankly, outside of those who also support an outright patriarchy.
However, as I said, I know that too many people have bizarre cultural and emotional ties to the idea, so I don’t even go there as a practical matter. Next best thing is to support everyone who is adult, sane and mentally competent having the right to marry whomever and however many whomevers they want, as long as all parties involved are fully consenting. So that’s what I do as a practical matter. That includes same-sex marriage.
Lisa, the problem is that in many states, non-married people cannot jointly own property–meaning, they don’t get survivorship benefits.
So both names on the title only insures you an interest in the property, and the legal heirs of your partner can challenge you and maybe, depending on state law, you’ll only end up with the money you spent on the home being refunded to you.