visagrunt wrote:
My civil libertarian instincts lead me to say that the state has no business regulating how citizens choose to form families and communities. People should be free to live in whatever social structures that they want.
But it's the "that they want," that causes me significant concern. Polygamy often goes hand in hand with a social structure that subordinates women to men, and children raised in polygamous families may be raised to perpetuate those views.
I have absolutely no objection to a mature, intelligent woman deciding that she wants to live in a family with sister-wives.
I am wildly opposed to a community shipping off underage girls to like-minded communities to be coerced into marrying men without their full and informed consent.
I have no objection to a mature, intelligent man deciding that he will wait for the approval of his community before marrying.
I am wildly opposed to exploiting the labour of young men using the enticement of the future consideration of being permitted to marry.
But (and this is an important but) these are not abuses that are inherent to polygamy--rather they are abuses that occur in some communities in which polygamy is practiced. It is the abuses that can properly be restricted by government, not the practice of polygamy itself.
Were there examples of real world culture in which polygamy was practiced in parity by both sexes I would see it as far less difficult, but our only models are poor fits for a free and democratic society.
Actually, this already exists in Western culture, we just don't like to admit it. The only difference between what most of us accept and what goes on in polygamist cults is that the cults institutionalize it whereas the reality of it in the rest of the west is much less structured and not formalized at all. In other words, there really is nothing legally stopping any man or woman from having multiple partners. It's just that we as a culture overall don't wholesale approve of multiple simultaneous sexual partners.
Not trying to perpetuate any racist stereotypes by saying this, but just look at what goes on in the public housing projects and rural trailer parks. I've seen girls 19 years and younger with 2 babies and a third on the way, all with different daddies--and most likely at least one of those fathers had fathered children with other girls/women. What is that if not some strange twist on polygyny/polyandry?