(May 23, 2012 at 7:11 pm)Ben Davis Wrote: Anyone/any number of people should be free to commit to whomsoever they choose in whatever 'marital' construct they see fit as long as all parties are consenting & uncoerced. Matters of will, testament, decision-making etc. should be based on standard, free legal agreements (similar to tenancy contracts) which are freely available, binding when completed according to due process (witnesses etc.) and subject to change, without state interference, according to the will of the parties involved.

Ben Davis, if the real world actually worked like that, I would have no problem extending legal recognition to polygamous groups of whatever size and gender composition the members please. However, as far as I'm aware, the real world doesn't do that, and so I hesitate.

I see one key and fundamental difference between gay marriage and polygamous marriage: complexity. For the most part, I think, marriage laws (at least in the United States) have evolved to the point where the gender of the participants is not as big of an issue as it used to be; in same cases, it's completely irrelevant. To use taxes as an example, does it really matter in any concrete way whether it's Adam and Steve or Adam and Eve's names that are on top of that form? And if Adam and Steve divorce, then existing divorce laws can accommodate their situation, whatever it is.

However, polygamy is a whole other ball game. What if Adam, Eve, and Sarah's marriage breaks apart? Who gets what stuff? Is a three-way split of all assets necessarily the best way to go? What if Sarah was the housewife, so to speak, while Adam and Eve worked? Should Adam and Eve both pay her alimony until she gets on her feet? Or, what if any children born into the marriage are only Adam and Eve's? Does Sarah get visitation rights? If so, does she have to pay child support? What if Adam wants to leave the relationship, but Eve and Sarah want to stay together? Etc., etc.

In other words, setting up a system whereby all parties in a polygamous marriage get a fair and equitable deal strikes me as being an enormous headache for any legislature that takes that challenge on. And any system that is not fair and equitable to all parties would not have my support. However, I would support a compromise arrangement in which all parties are required to work out these details on their own in advance, pending approval by a judge and/or some other governmental oversight. (Did somebody already suggest this? If so, your idea was great!)

With that all being said ... in the meantime, if a group of people wants to live in the same house, have sex with each other, fork out whatever legal fees are necessary to set up contracts to protect themselves if it all goes to shit, and call themselves married (in social situations, that is, not legal ones)? As long as all parties are truly consenting adults, I say knock yourselves out. I've got more important things to do with my life than judge your choices.

Hi Morganna,

(May 26, 2012 at 12:21 am)Morganna Wrote: However, as far as I'm aware, the real world doesn't do that...

I know but it should and that's the reason to try.

Quote:I see one key and fundamental difference between gay marriage and polygamous marriage: complexity...

...In other words, setting up a system whereby all parties in a polygamous marriage get a fair and equitable deal strikes me as being an enormous headache for any legislature that takes that challenge on.

Indeed. So much of the current legislature has been riddled with monogomous memes for so long that it might seem an insurmountable problem but I'm confident that it wouldn't be beyond the ken of humankind; we've managed to create legislation for other marvellously complicated situations, why not for this one?

Quote:However, I would support a compromise arrangement in which all parties are required to work out these details on their own in advance, pending approval by a judge and/or some other governmental oversight. (Did somebody already suggest this? If so, your idea was great!)

That was me, I think... if not, it's certainly along the lines of the ideas that I've suggested and the originator gets my kudos.

I'm polyamorous and I'm an atheist. I'm also the sitting President and a founding Director of Atlanta Polyamory, Inc, and a founding Director of the Atlanta Poly Weekend conference. I can answer a few questions here from both personal experience and observations from within the community. First off, we tend to avoid the term polygamous due to both religious and legal connotations, and we avoid use of polyandrous and polygynous due to implications of gender inequality. We do not support forced marriage, or forcing anyone into a life that they do not willingly choose for themselves.

Some relevant personal background on me: I'm in a long term, stable MFM triad (male-female-male three person relationship). We own a house together, we raise kids together...we do everything a normal couple does, only there are three of us. To answer one of the early question, we are far more financially solvent together than we were apart. We've been able to buy a house together...something that we could not do separately. We are completely open about our relationships, and we are free to explore other relationships. We have no veto power over each other, but we do have some basic rules in place to ensure safety for everyone, and we always take each others advice and feelings under consideration. We also have to face the consequences and responsibility of bad decisions, which helps keep those bad decisions in check. If it sounds like a free-for-all of random sex and dating, it isn't. M (the female in the relationship) hasn't dated anyone else in quite some time, B (the other guy) is in one other relationship for about the past year that has never progressed past the coffee date phase, and I have my first outside date in about a year this weekend. We aren't theoretically opposed to non-committal sex (if it happens, it happens), but we aren't promiscuous, and it just isn't who we are or what we do. We do, however, recognize and embrace within ourselves the capacity for loving more than one person.

The three of us consider ourselves in a commitment on the level of marriage, socially and ethically. Legally however, it's quite sticky. The amount of documentation required to make sure that we all have legal standing for each other and the kids in as many situations as possible while not legally married is mind-boggling. We still don't have it all of it worked out. To answer the question of estates, IANAL, but the legally preferred way to handle that is through the establishment of a trust which owns all of the common property in lieu of individual ownership. If a relationship ends, there will be a way of dispersing property to the departing individual or individuals already established within the trust itself. This is legally binding and takes the work off of the courts beyond the execution of the terms of leaving trust. Some people will opt for an LLC instead since it's cheaper and easier to establish, but they are not built for this type of thing and it's much harder for an individual to get fair representation when leaving an LLC. These relationships being legally recognized, if not through marriage laws, then at least through domestic partnership laws, would take a lot of the legal pressures off and save everyone involved a lot of money, time, effort, and stress.

For the question of kids, which inevitably comes up, there's no evidence that this is bad for them. Anecdotally, our 7yo can't imagine any other way and feels sorry for kids that only have two parents. According to Dr. Elsabeth Sheff at Georgia State University, who studies this specifically, her attitude is common among kids of poly relationships, and has found that kids of poly relationships are just as well adjusted as any other kids.

As for the legislative hurdles, they are big. However, I don't think they're as big as what the LGBT community had to face, and we have the LGBT community themselves to thank for that. They've paved the way in opening people's minds to the non-traditional, and they've given us a fantastic model and toolkit to follow and use in our fight. We're just starting our fight, but I think in the next 10 years, we'll have softened things, and by 20 years, we'll be starting to see some real change in way that the LGBT community is currently seeing today.

I read an interesting article in the Guardian which I wanted to share with you all. Part of it describes how we humans evolved to be serial monogamists.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2...tionships2

Interesting article. I know people who are poly. They don't have it easier.

(May 21, 2012 at 10:15 pm)Justtristo Wrote: With all the discussion of legally recognizing same sex marriages, I feel in my opinion the legal recognition of multiple partner marriages will be the next step.

My $0.02 on the subject, I am not a fan of the polygamous marriages which are allowed by the Islamic religion. Since that often leads to the oppression of women. However I cant think of any moral objection to legally recognizing multiple partner, so long as it is between mutually consenting adults.

No objections myself if it is consenting adults. The examples we sometimes see on, for instance, a TV documentary, always leave me wondering what happens to the young males in the community who cannot find a mate because all the alpha males have got several. Surely they would have to leave and the result would be a community of older men, each with lots of wives, and children. Can that work ?

Notwithstanding the example from Shrike1978 of a MFM arrangment, all the examples we see, and what most people imagine when they consider polygamy is men with lots of wives. A wife who had lots of husbands may not work so well (although I'm prepared to be corrected on that).

Regards

Grimesy

(July 11, 2012 at 8:52 am)pgrimes15 Wrote: No objections myself if it is consenting adults. The examples we sometimes see on, for instance, a TV documentary, always leave me wondering what happens to the young males in the community who cannot find a mate because all the alpha males have got several. Surely they would have to leave and the result would be a community of older men, each with lots of wives, and children. Can that work ?

Notwithstanding the example from Shrike1978 of a MFM arrangment, all the examples we see, and what most people imagine when they consider polygamy is men with lots of wives. A wife who had lots of husbands may not work so well (although I'm prepared to be corrected on that).

Anecdotally, as a community leader, I see a mixture of all types. In actuality, I personally know more long-term-stable MFM and MFMF groups than I do FMF, but I have no real reason to suspect that translates to the larger community. I suspect there's just as much FMF working out there, but the part of the community I'm most directly involved in isn't weighted in that direction. The other long-term model I see work well for some groups is the "line marriage" concept where you have a large, sometimes geographically spread out group of people with various connections to each other. Many may only be connected through other people in the group, and some may have never actually met at all, but they are all somehow connected through a line of committed relationships. These often break down into smaller subgroups of two or more people who are together on a daily or near-daily basis who have longer connections to people in one or more of the other subgroups. This has advantages of allowing various individual relationships to begin and end naturally without having to completely restructure the whole group when things change. While I'm not sure this model would work well for me, it is the model followed by a prominent skeptic-athiest-poly advocate whom I have an incredible amount of respect for, and it seems to work amazingly well for her.

I do see much more short-term FMF than anything else over the entire community, local and global, and I see a lot of it fail, but that comes more from the alpha-male mentality with an OPP (one penis policy) and wanting all the women who gets into it for totally the wrong reasons. Get into to have hot sex with all the women and you're destined to fail miserably. That something that completely amuses me, because my male partner and I are mostly hetero and definitely alpha personalities, but that whole idea is foreign to us, and completely against the ideas of personal choice and individual freedom that we teach.

A lot of the overall disconnect comes from the popular conception of religious polygamy vs. the realities of secular polyamory. When you break away from the fundamentalist Mormons and Muslim types, there's not really a religious element at work. Granted we have a large population of pagan and new age individuals and groups in the poly community who will tell you that it is within their religion, but they're still ultimately doing it for secular reasons, not by religious mandate. And when you get past the fantasies people have of this lifestyle, it ultimately comes down to the same realities as everyone else...an average night is sitting down to figure out the monthly budget and make a grocery list (taco night again??? But we just had tacos!) while complaining about what someone is watching on TV.

(May 22, 2012 at 8:22 am)Faith No More Wrote: Marriage should be about the parties involved having equal say and involvement in the relationship, and I don't see how that is possible with a polygamous marriage.

having more than two people means there can't be equal say?

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(May 22, 2012 at 9:20 am)kılıç_mehmet Wrote: Besides, how do you hope to actually feed and clothe them all, and feed and clothe the children that you might get from them?

that same question can be asked for monogamous couples. why does being polygamous mean family planning goes out the door?

Quote:I can tell you from personal experience that women do not wish to be involved in such a "marriage". Therefore it's usually done by forcing the old wife into accepting the new wife.

um wtf? i'd gladly enter into a polygamous marriage.

Quote:Even if you don't force her, she simply accepts, as she can't really do anything else if she refuses.

ever heard of divorce?

(May 22, 2012 at 12:59 am)Chuck Wrote:

(May 21, 2012 at 11:16 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Being married to a whole gaggle of women would be my definition of hell.

Nah, they'd use cat fights to keep each other in check.

If polygamy is customary, then having a gaggle of women doesn't mean one of them can take you for you half of all that you own, so their bargaining power decreases exponentially.

So long as the cat fights were conducted in slow motion pillow fights while scantily attired I suppose it wouldn't be so bad.

(July 17, 2012 at 12:53 pm)shrike1978 Wrote: I do see much more short-term FMF than anything else over the entire community, local and global, and I see a lot of it fail, but that comes more from the alpha-male mentality with an OPP (one penis policy) and wanting all the women who gets into it for totally the wrong reasons. Get into to have hot sex with all the women and you're destined to fail miserably. That something that completely amuses me, because my male partner and I are mostly hetero and definitely alpha personalities, but that whole idea is foreign to us, and completely against the ideas of personal choice and individual freedom that we teach.

Question: Do you know of any examples of

F-M
|X|
M-F

As in a Bisexual Polyamorous relationship between all it's members?