Polygamy

[ccharles000]

Poll question: Polygamy

Do you support Polygamy if it is done by consenting adults?

[mrreowwr_kittty]

1. The problem is, it's so rarely practiced by truly consenting adults.

[blondeatlast]

2. What thecatburglar said. Show me an example of a freely-chosen, contented polygamous/polyandrous

relationship and we can discuss it.

Edit: yes, I typed "couple" first. Oops.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

4. I actually know of one

They're all adults and have been together for a couple of years now. The women were a couple first and then the man entered the relationship.

[blondeatlast]

10. My bad--because I know of two examples. I've just been so disgusted

by the Jeffs nutsos for so very long (well over a decade) that I'm not seeing clearly on the issue right now.

I'm breathing and thinking now, I promise! :thumbsup:

[mrreowwr_kittty]

6. Which is why I HATE the show Big Love.

Sorry, but educated women with options do not choose to be part of a litter of wives for some egomaniacal chauvinistic assmunch like Bill Paxton's character. GMAFB. It really presents an unrealistic image of polygamy. What it really is can be found at places like Colorado City, AZ and the Yearning For Zion ranch in TX.

[blondeatlast]

13. I find that show disgusting--but as I admit to above, I do know of two multi-partner relationships

that seem quite happy--and egalitarian. I think it is just that I'm so close to them I don't even think about it anymore. It's just three in each, one has two men, one has two women, all involved seem fine with it.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

15. Multi-partner and egalitarian, or open relationships are one thing.

Coercive situations where very young girls and powerless women are owned by a male and have limited or no freedom are what characterize *most* polygamous cultures.

[mike_c]

18. but that's not what the poll is asking, is it...?

Do you support "Coercive situations where very young girls and powerless women are owned by a male and have limited or no freedom?"

or

Do you support "polygamous relationships between consenting adults?"

This illustrates a common problem in politics and government-- the tendency of people to react to a completely different issue than the one under consideration.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

23. The poll is not asking a question that it's my place to answer

It's not asking if I think consensual polygamy should be legal, which quite honestly I'm ambivalent about, because of the social and economic ramifications. As to morality, it's not my place to say. The OP is asking if I support polygamy. I don't. But I don't support any other kind of relationship either. They don't need my support. :shrug:

[mike_c]

24. then why go out of your way to reframe the poll question...

...in entirely different-- and vastly contradictory-- terms?

[mrreowwr_kittty]

26. Why go out of your way to chastise me for not answering a question?

I'll 'reframe' any damn question I want. Sorry, not interested in going down the rathole of hypotheticals, anecdotes, and libertarian utopianism while 13 year olds are being raped by their uncles and it's called "freedom of religion".

[blondeatlast]

19. Oh, hell yes. I went to college in Flagstaff, AZ and worked summers in Lake Havasu City,

very close to Colorado City where Jeffs originated the cult.

We'd get the runaway young girls as well as the cast-off young men and I'm all too aware of what they went through.

The first young man I met asked ne for spare change outside of a McDonalds in Flag (I was with others who had a good idea where he had come from but didn't let me in on it). We all sat down together and he told me his story--up until then I had had no idea what was going on, I just knew we were always advised to avoid stopping in Colorado City.

I'm damn ashamed that neither Arizona nor Utah had the guts to bust these child abusers long ago (the boys are abused and abandoned as well as the girls).

Thank God someone has.

Edit: Sorry, cb--I forget you are from the area; I didn't mean to talk down to you!

[aikoaiko]

36. Class of '91 - NAU

I actually did an interview at Colorado City (formerly Short Creek) for a sociology class (one of Doug Dehger's advanced classes, if you know him).

It was fascinating.

[Mme. Defarge]

12. IMO it would spell the end of any

social protection and equality for women, and would lead to social chaos.

[Diane R]

3. There is a (nearly) equal number of men & women. What happens to the left over men?

[Deja Q]

9. You know what they say,

"The Lord helps those who help themselves." A *cough* handy expression, wouldn't you say? :evilgrin:

:hide:

[mrreowwr_kittty]

11. They make good cannon fodder, silly!

Seriously. Polygamous societies are predicated on the notion that women are chattel and a handful of men should own them, as they do all the other property. The remaining men, who are sexually disenfranchised, are either cast out (as in FDLS communities in the US) or their anger and aggression is channeled into doing shit work or fighting wars or committing state-sponsored terrorism (Middle East, Africa).

[Withywindle]

35. Why are you assuming polygamy always = multiple wives?

There'd be a few extra women left over if I got all my picks. :evilgrin:

[Richard Steele]

37. Because that's what the word MEANS.

"Polygamy" is defined as a man with more than one wife.

"Polyandry" is the term for a woman with more than one husband.

"Polyamory" is a relatively new, non-gender-specific term
which describes both situations.

[Withywindle]

38. No. it comes from the Greek "gamos" which means marriage.

It literally means "multiple marriages"

"polyandry" means "multiple husbands" (andros = man)

"polygyny" means "multiple wives (gynos - woman)

[Richard Steele]

39. So build a time machine and use it to find someone who considers your argument RELEVANT already.

Words mean what they mean NOW; what they may have meant
two thousand years ago is a subject that is much more
INTERESTING than it is IMPORTANT.

[Withywindle]

40. Dude, chill!

You'll find what I wrote in any decent dictionary anyway.

"Polyamory" isn't equivalent because it implies relationships but not necessarily a marriage-like commitment.

[Richard Steele]

46. OK. Will do.

Wandering about DU, as is my wont, I learned tonight that
your cat's breath smells like cat food.

That's one of my favorite quotes, and it's worth
about a million bonus points in my book,
so I'll "chill" as you kids say.

[NuttyFluffers]

41. they are still the valid terms used in academics, law, etc. so sadly you're still wrong.

but it's OK, i understand you are passionate about this issue.

polygamy
polygyny
polyandry
polyamory (more vernacular than the others)

they are valid terms and easily understood by their very root. playing regional vernacular semantics makes things rather ugly to discuss (i still shudder at the ignorance about 'racism' and such nonsense terms of 'reverse racism'). better to work off of a stable table of definitions.

[Richard Steele]

42. But that's the thing: there is no "stable table of definitions". Never was, never will be.

Languages are FLUID- they don't stay on tables.

[Lorien]

45. I believe that single women outnumber single men by a significant amount

men tend to die younger (often from high risk jobs or acts of sheer stupidity) and, some articles have said, that artificial hormones in dairy products keep fetuses from becoming male, resulting in a higher numbers of female infants. Go to a singles night at any club and you'll see three women for every man. It's depressing (speaking as a single woman myself).

[Warpy]

5. Other

Anything consenting adults do with each other is none of my business.

[Chulanowa]

7. If it's truly consensual? Sure

I could honestly care less what consenting adults do to themselves. But polygamy in practice is much less consensual than it is indoctrinated.

[Deja Q]

8. No.

People can choose to do what they want, even if I disagree with them. Not my business, so I shouldn't care if a guy likes to have rampant sex a goat, gets a disease, then spreads it to other goats... or indeed other people.

Except I genuinely do care. If I didn't, I wouldn't have replied at all.

Can three or more people genuinely be in love?

Is having 7 wives, one for each day of the week, really about caring for all of them? Or so the male can rationalize infidelity? While it is true some species screw anything that moves and think nothing of it, other species do practice monogamy. And maybe I'm out of time or from a parallel universe, but I like to think humans are better than guppies, rabbits, or leaches. Oops, I might be wrong...

And is this physical love primal sex, emotional love, imitating dolphins, or what? Mind you, dolphins and whales often have to do it as threesomes due to their bulk combined with their ambient environment...

[dysfunctional press]

14. i'm all for it on a relationship level- if three people want to live as a triple, more power to them

but i don't support it when it's more of a forced religious doctrine nature, as practiced by the flds sects.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

16. As a liberal, I don't care what consenting adults do with each other.

Neither should any other liberal.

[ccharles000]

17. I agree.

[mike_c]

20. how consenting adults live is none of my business...

...unless they ask for my advice. I can't believe the number of supposedly liberal people here who want to regulate others' relationships. I guess the fundamentalist republicans don't have a total lock on that attitude after all.

[avenger64]

21. But no man should marry 2 republicans ...

... that's just gonna leave him with dumb children.

[devilgrrl]

22. Yes. But only for men. Women with multiple partners are whores.

:sarcasm:

[mike_c]

25. I want extra....

...butter. :popcorn:

[Princess Turandot]

27. What do you mean by polygamy?

If you mean a group of consenting adults (adults being adults, not 16 year olds with 50 year olds) involved in a multi-partner relationship/ living/ sexual arrangement, I don't think most of modern society really cares.

It's when you are talking about multiple legally licensed marriages, where the issue becomes more complicated. I actually suspect that when Utah applied to become a state, the concern over polygamy had as much to do with the practical as much, if not more so, than any objection on moralistic grounds. When folks emigrated to the US at the turn of the century, the steam ships bringing them over had to keep a record of certain information and answers to certain questions, one of which was whether the person was a polygamist. (According to my grandparents' documents, they responded 'no'.) The government's concern in those cases was that 'marriage' was not being used as a way to bring people to the US who would have no actual means of support on their own.

Pretending for a second that gay marriages were legal, so as not to confuse two separate matters, who marries whom in a polygamous marriage, from a legal perspective? In the case of the 19th C Mormons, the man married several women; the women were not married to each other. They were in many instances viewed as property imo. What would happen today? From some of the comments in this thread, it is likely that in some cases at least, each individual would want to be married to the rest of the group. What happens if one person divorces the rest, from a property/support perspective? If one man and a one woman biologically have a kid together within the spousal group, what is the relationship of the kid to the other spouses? Are rights immediately vested or do they require adoption proceedings? Are the rest of the spouses responsible for the child financially? Do they have rights that extend past the legal relationship in the event of divorce or death? If the bio-parents die, do the remaining spouses have rights that take precedence over other bio-relatives of the bio-parents? Or, in the same case, would the remaining spouses be forced to be responsible for a child that they may not actually want? Would laws exist to define each of these things? Would they vary from state to state? Or would the relationships be defined by the 3 or 4 or 5-way pre-nup of sorts? Divorce lawyers do well enough on one-to-one marriages: I think they'd be lobbying for legalized polygamy if they thought there would be enough takers.

Then there is a situation which actually occurs from time to time. A man marries 3 different women in 3 different places. The women have no relationship to each other. Is the man required to reveal his other wives when he marries a new one? If he dies, who gets what? If he divorces, etc. etc.

America may retain echoes of its Puritan ancestors but I suspect the objection to polygamy (legalized multiple marriages) rests mostly in the practical.

[riderinthestorm]

44. Best practical answer on this thread

Legally, it's a minefield.

Emotionally, from the accounts I've read, it's a minefield - way worse than your average twosome.

Physically, people are definitely getting cheated.

Financially, someone is always getting cheated from what I've seen.

Socially, we all pay when women are degraded and minimalized to being less than full and equal partners in a relationship.

We can say that as "good liberals" we shouldn't care what "consenting adults" are doing but reality shows when polygamy encompasses issues such as welfare fraud and the degradation of women then it's fair game for scrutiny and critique - and should be by every caring liberal.

[GreenPartyVoter]

28. It's not for me. I don't share well

[frebrd]

29. I support a combination of polyandry and...

polygamy in a consensual, truly egalitarian, communal relationship.

[backscatter712]

30. Key words are "consenting adults".

If everyone involved did truly give informed consent, then sure, let them get as nasty as they want. (barring things like incest which result in things like kids with birth defects...)

Unfortunately, things like the polygamy cult that we've seen in the news do not give the wives the opportunity to give informed consent - they're told to participate Or Else...

Or Else gets reallllly ugly.

[Greyhound]

31. Polygamy, polyandry, whatever. Consenting adults are free to do whatever

the hell they want, nobody else's business. I like Heinlein's concept of contract line-marriages.

[lightningandsnow]

32. Well, I'm in a rather non-monogamous relationship myself so I'd say yes.

My girlfriend has a boyfriend, but they have an open relationship. So, I don't think it's fair to judge people negatively simply for having non-traditional relationships.

That being said, consenting and adult are the operative words here - something that's almost always absent in fundamentalist religious forms of polygamy.

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[mike_c]

34. doesn't polygamy simply mean "married to more than one person?"

I think lots of folks replying in this thread are confusing polygamy and polygyny. Polygamy would include polyandry and golygynous/polyandrous combined group marriages, too.

[DaveJ]

43. I don't think many adults would consent to it.

Obviously if someone's single they can do whatever they want.

But, are you talking about only one spouse having many spouses? It seems unfair to the person who has to share... I just can't see how a member of a concubine would be happier sharing.

And if both spouses can have many spouses, then that's just wacked out. We'd end up with a society of a bunch of intertwined marriages, which would be hell to keep track of for taxes, insurance, child custody, etc.

[krispos42]

47. Yeah, I guess so

It would have to be where each new partner gets the written concent of all previous partners, and is married to all of them equally.

In Joe and Linda are married and they decide to bring Ethan into the relationship, then both Linda and Joe would have to sign off on the marriage to Ethan, and Ethan would have to marry both Joe and Linda.

If later on Joe, Linda, and Ethan decided to marrie Rosie, then all three would have to sign off on it, and Rosie would be married to all three.


I doubt more than a tiny fraction of marriages, probably less than 1%, will be multiples, and the vast majorities of those would be three-way ones. So, yeah, there will be sensationalistic stories about 20-member marriages, but those will be about as common as families the size of the Druggers'.