Interesting op-ed piece in the Ottawa Citizen:
Looks like a historic legal battle is shaping up over polygamy, the outcome of which will surely be determined by the Supreme Court of Canada.
I understand why, for political reasons, the government feels compelled to fight polygamy tooth and nail, but I suspect the government will lose. The polygamists have what seems to be an unassailable constitutional position. If polygamy is an expression of their religion, and if the participants are all consenting adults, then I don’t see how the state can say no.
Note the words “consenting” and “adults”. No court would allow you to take a child bride, commit sexual assault or practise kidnapping simply because you say your religion allows you to do so. But a three-way marriage between consenting grown-ups? That’s different. Sure, it strikes many people as a weird arrangement, but so did gay marriage — which is now legal. Again, it’s about consenting adults. A marriage between, say, a 20-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman would strike me as weirder and even more unappealing than a marriage involving one man and two wives, but that’s not sufficient grounds to make such marriages illegal.
The government is going to argue that polygamous marriages violate Canadian values such as equality of the sexes. But go into some religious communities right here in Canada and you’ll find traditional marriages (one man, one woman) that do not uphold what secularists would consider sexual equality.
I’m not championing polygamous marriages. I’m just saying that in a free society, especially a constitutional democracy, it’s probably impossible to prohibit them.
Adults sure do tend to consent to a lot of insanse stuff. Alas for the day adulthood and consent became the bedrock of democratic ideology/ethos. Or was that day one?
I’ve often wondered why people haven’t used the same argument to justify incest. Interestingly enough, this type of argumentation apparently doesn’t hold up for cannibalism as we found out in Germany a couple of years ago.
It seems the state could argue that polygamy is inherently unhealthy for the women involved, even if they consent to it. Thus, the state has a compelling reason to prohibit it.
Another argument against polygamy:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/10/should_polygamy.html
Why presume that polygamy necessarily involves one man and multiple women? The point is that “saving us from ourselves” is precisely what the state isn’t allowed to do in a liberal democracy. Polygamy is “unhealthy for the women involved” in the same way that homosexual marriage is unhealthy for the men and women involved, i.e. in subjective ways that are beyond the state’s ability to arbitrate. Polyamory is basically enshrined in our culture at this point, so why prevent men and women in polyamorous relationships from expressing the beauty of that mutually supportive and loving relationship in the context of marriage?
The liberal state saves us from ourselves all the time. Seatbelt laws. Motorcycle helmet laws. That’s but two of many, many examples, which is why so many theoretical critiques of liberalism as an ideology fail because they never really intersect with living, breathing liberal societies.
You can make a fine case against polygamy on secular grounds. Monogamous marriage is “clean.” It’s streamlined. Get married, and you instantly know who can pick up the kid from school, who can pull the plug at the hospital and who inherits the estate. Polygamy would necessitate all sorts of codicils to iron those details out. Everybody gets this, and that’s why no court or legislature is going to go along with some specious “you’re discriminating against polygamists” argument. Polygamy would wreck marriage in a way that allowing gays to marry does not. The slippery slope argument just fails when you think about it more than 2 seconds.
We do live in a polyamorous culture, but again, nobody wants to formalize what is, by design, a web of informal relationships designed to avoid the entanglements of marriage. People tend to be polyamorous either because they want an easy way out of any given relationship, and marriage is not easy to get out of, or they’d like to be in a monogamous marriage but their own cussedness prevents them from settling down (which, at their more honest or less sober moments they’re likely to acknowledge).
But again, by definition legalized polygamy is just a mess, and even secular liberals can understand that and withstand that, if for no other reason than a commitment to logic and empiricism, while not sufficient to save one from eternal damnation, is fairly reliable when it comes to determining just what kinds of contracts a given state is going to honor.
I really don’t think we should legalize polygamy, but if a person is going to retreat in to liberalism in order to justify the legality of homosexual marriage (in what is almost always a contravention of the will of the majority) they have to see it through to it’s logical conclusion. The arguments against the legalization of polygamy amount to this: it’s bad for the culture. Guess what the argument against the legalization of homosexual marriage amounts to: it’s bad for the culture!
The rhetoric about “living breathing liberal societies” is just that, rhetoric. My point is that a very extreme, legalistic and no-holds-barred sort of liberalism is being deployed in the battle for the legalization of homosexual marriage, and should that strategy triumph, there is unlikely to be anything left standing of the sorts of institutions and traditions of political economy that have allowed liberal societies some measure of humanity. A quote from A Man for All Seasons is apropos:
“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
I actually agree with your general sentiment about the way societies, liberal or otherwise, have to work. My point is that an extremely dangerous game is being played with the rhetoric and political/legal strategies being deployed toward the end of the legalization of homosexual marriage, and that one cannot be logically consistent and at the same time insist that the prohibition of polygamy is equally arbitrary.
I presumed it because all the cases I’ve ever heard of involve one man and multiple women. And I take it as axiomatic that in our culture, polyamorism is more associated with selfishness and deception than with loving, committed relationships. (E.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmuFlaFYdgE)
But maybe you’re living in a different culture. I’m in the United States.
Polygamy is already here. What we may or may not witness now is the legal recognition of the practice.
You are taking as axiomatic things that are completely arbitrary (the same claim people make about so called heteronormativity). I can’t help you there. To continue to play devil’s advocate: if you outlaw polygamous marriage, only outlaws will have polygamous marriage. That explains your perception of it as a negative institution. I’d be willing to bet that 99% of the people with an opinion on this subject have never met a single person that has participated in a plural marriage.
Repeating: “And I take it as axiomatic that in our culture, polyamorism is more associated with selfishness and deception than with loving, committed relationships.”
You say this is arbitrary, but you’re wrong. The far-flung majority of people in this culture believe that a committed relationship between two individuals is preferable to simultaneously dating or marrying several individuals. Ask your friends.
Many people in our culture obsess over finding that special someone. An entire industry worth untold millions exists to help them. (See Match.com, for example.) We write songs, books, TV shows, and movies about monogamous love and all its associated magic. Falling in love with your soulmate is an accomplishment highly valued in our culture.
Only a tiny number of people in our culture are concerned with participating in a polygamous relationship, and what I’ve seen, none of them are very happy or well adjusted.
Playing Devil’s advocate, you wrote “Polyamory is basically enshrined in our culture at this point.” Then you write “I’d be willing to bet that 99% of the people with an opinion on this subject have never met a single person that has participated in a plural marriage.”
The Devil would never contradict himself in such an absurd manner. Sorry, Hill, but Satan needs better advocacy than what you’re providing here.
I don’t think you are getting my point. Every argument you make applies to the question of homosexual marriage (and even if it didn’t, they are completely arbitrary arguments as well). Saying that “a lot of people think it’s bad” means absolutely nothing.
I am not in favor of polygamy, but what you are saying really amounts to mere assertion and literally nothing more. You can insist it all the more fervently, but that will not change its logical status.
“You say this is arbitrary, but you’re wrong. The far-flung majority of people in this culture believe that a committed relationship between two individuals is preferable to simultaneously dating or marrying several individuals. Ask your friends.”
This argument has no, repeat zero, logical force whatsoever. If you don’t understand that, there is no point in discussing this. Do you not see that an identical argument can be (and was) made about homosexual marriage 50 years ago and is still made (albeit in a statistically attenuated way today)?
The rationale used to justify the legalization of homosexual marriage also justifies the legalization of polygamy, regardless of what a lot of people might feel about the subject. This is precisely the point: that the sort of liberal rights theory at work here will ultimately end up contravening some of our deepest intuitions about what is right and wrong, which is precisely what is happening.