Asymmetrical Information

"Traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender"

?

Wow, never knew I could marry my Mom in a traditional marriage.

Until someone proves me wrong, I adhere to the theory that predisposition to homosexuality is a trait controlled by many genes, and having some of these genes gives (or gave at a time in the past) the carrier a survival advantage, while having too many have these genes results in not being attracted to women at all and not having any children.

People think that gay men tend to be, on average, more creative, smarter, better looking, etc., and here is a genetic explanation for it.

While there may not be a "natural" or "moral" reason to support gay marriage but not poly____ marriage, there is certainly a pragmatic reason: gay marriage requires comparitively very few changes to existing marriage law, while polygamy would require a total overhaul. Can you imagine a polygamous divorce hearing?

Let me get this straight. The vast majority of people are sexually jealous so our social institutions should enforce this inclination. But that the vast majority of people strongly prefer opposite sex partners should be neither here nor there in terms of policy?

If Saletan were consistent, he'd say that people with minority tastes about the gender of their partners should be allowed to have gay marriages and people with minority tastes about jealousy should be allowed to have polygamous marriages. That he does not reflects either his gut intuitions or political sophistry.

I'm not arguing for or against either gay marriage or polygamy, nor arguing that they can not be distinguished on other grounds. I'm just making the point that Saletan's argument from human nature can charitably be described as selective.

What people, even people who know economics, miss when it comes to polygamy is the fact that polygamy benefits women.

Legalizing polygamy would be allow for greater demand (prevously illegal demand) for women. Supply of women unchanged - the price of ALL WOMEN goes up.

Men with multiple wifes would have to compensate the 1st + n potential wife somehow --- women could now bargain/choose between being the nth wife of someone or someone's only wife.

Legalize polygamy and the men get screwed*.

*Sorry couldn't resist.

The other problem with the "natural" argument is that it isn't true. There are, in fact, people who are polyamorous and unbothered by jealousy when their partner(s) have sex with other people.

Yes, such people are very rare. But so are homosexuals.

I'm in favor of same-sex marriage and ambivalent about polygamy (here defined as 'more than two people involved in a marriage'). I have no theoretical objections (as long as all involved are adults acting on their own free will). But I do have some situational objections (for example as a way to try to get around immigration restrictions) but those can be handled separately.

The best argument against the slippery slope is not natural, but legal. Same-sex marriage won't affect current marriage law at all as far as I can tell. It's just opening up the benefits and responsibilities to those who can't marry according to their conscious at present.

But any form of polygamy is going to require some pretty sweeping legal decisions. In polygyny, the most common form historically, it's my understanding, that a man might be married to two women, but the women weren't considered to be married to each other. The most common form was/is for each wife to have her own household (even if it's within a single compound) And if the man died, they were either unrelated widows or co-widows, but most assuredly not married to each other. Getting into larger constellations just makes things murkier.

Now if enough people start living in polygamous or polyamorous kinds of relationships, then probably some kind of legal framework for dealing with them will have to be developed. But I think we're a _long_ way from that.

Meanwhile, the big change with same-sex marriage has already happened. Those attracted to their own sex are free to live together and settle down in relationships that resemble common-law marriage. Getting the state in on that fact only makes sense in order to protect the adults who are already in these relationships (and their children as well).

Being against state-sanctioned same-sex marriage and not against common-law same-sex marriage is probably a symptom of not having thought things out well enough.

I would strongly disagree with those who would outlaw unrelated people from establishing a household (or would like to see existing laws of that nature enforced) but they're being consistent.

I don't think you can assume that "Nature is clearly on the side of polygamists."

Nature would favor whichever arrangement left more descendents in the long run. Looking at animal species, one sees some are monogamous, others are polygamous. That suggests either strategy can be advantageous, depending on the species, niche, etc.

The fact that humans tend more toward monogamy suggests that routine polygamy may not be the favored strategy for us.

Neither can you safely argue that homosexuality is disfavored. Hypothetically, if you allowed homosexual marriage, perhaps the partners would be happier, and help their heterosexual siblings raise more children than the otherwise would.

If you ban homosexual marriage, homosexuals wouldn't necessarily be more likely to enter heterosexual marriages. They might remain unmarried, have no kids of their own, but be less happy, and thus less help to their siblings' families.

Of course, I'm just spinning hypotheticals here. The point is, one can't always easily tell which strategies Nature does or doesn't favor, based on simple analyses.

This article confuses two separate issues: (1) the natural tendency of people to not practice polygamy, and (2) the legality of polygamy.

It may be true that there is a natural tendency of people to prefer two-person relationships, based on jealousy or any other reason. However this has nothing to do with the legality of a relationship. And clearly there are people that prefer polygamy.

On the legal issue, I do believe that allowing gay marriage (two persons regardless of gender) does open the door to polygamy. For example, what legal justification is there for the limit or two people?

A recent Canadian Supreme Court decision allows swinging provided it takes place between consenting adults, based on the fact that it does society no harm. How is polygamy any different or worse?

By the way, I have no particular bias in any direction regarding either gay marriage or polygamy. I'm just considering the legal issues.

From a Natural perspective, traditional marriage and polygyny are clearly evolutionary desirable since they result in procreation, which is the very core of what drives Nature.

Most of the people vehemently opposing Gay marriages will not care for this argument, since they are often the same people who think Darwin and evolution are athiestic.

Sorry, forget the last comment, I should have read the last part of the posting more carefully.

The polygamy problem is not one of introspective evolutionary biology. The polygamy problem is Muslim immigrants who would wish to keep their women in purdah, and who would be happy to reproduce their benighted society in western countries. We cannot allow our liberal theories to blind us to this existential danger.

Just a few decades ago a married woman needed her husband's legal permission for basic economic transactions. Very few women of today would really want to be part of a 50's (much less 1900's) marriage.

Seen this way, same-sex marriage is part of a very longterm trend toward equality between marriage partners also observed in traditional heterosexual marriage. It may not be 'natural' but is clearly part of where western society is headed in terms of increased equality and autonomy.

Polygyny, the most common form of polygamy as traditionally practiced, is about fundamental inequality between partners both between men and women and between the wives where there is often a formal hierarchy. In those terms, traditional Chinese or Islamic forms of polygyny are clearly going against longterm trends in society and are not going to fly. For traditional polygyny to work it needs to have a _strong_ basis in religion and/or make it a real opportunity for the later wives, a better opportunity that is than they could get thru monogamy (why polygyny lingers on longest among the extremely wealthy and powerful - there are women that would willingly be Bill Gates's 6th wife, but not so many who would want to Bill Middle-Manager's 2nd wife).

More modern forms of polygamy (polyamory, groups of more than 2 with no defined gender characteristics, possibly 2 men and 3 women or 4 women or ....) would probably be more likely to fly but no one's talking about those.

"I adhere to the theory that predisposition to homosexuality is a trait controlled by many genes"

Well, homosexual behavior is pretty simply based on ability to bond with members of one's own gender and a liking for recreational sex. Virtually all people have both of these traits. The question is why some find such relationships more emotionally fulfilling than

I agree that a predisposition towards such relationships probably results from a lot of factors, I doubt if there's much genetic background beyond something that might make the pursuit of homosexual relationships a more likely response to life experience for one person than another. That is the same life experiences happen to two people, Pat and Terry. For some unexplained reason some genetic quality makes same sex relationships more attractive to Pat than to Terry.

Leaving aside all of the legal stuff for a moment, looking at all of those studies which show how many children are not actually fathered by who they "ought" to be, around 10%, looks like a significant portion of society is already practising a form of polyandy,/polygyny.

Enduring homosexual relationships, whether or not the subject of "gay civil unions", are not "marriages" unless the traditional definition of marriage is changed. They are, more accurately, "vagina dialogues" or "selective serial sodomies", or some other descriptive term. The whining over "gay marriage" is merely an effort to have a relationship which is historically and biologically abnormal be societally accepted as "normal".

By contrast, homosexual unions do not result in progeny, so from a Darwinian (or Natural) perspective clearly make no sense. The fact that homosexuality exists, and that it appears to have a genetic component, must be explained by some non-obvious Darwinian selection process (the "sneaky uncle" theory) or it's a fluke -- yes it happens but it is a Natural dead end.

Not necessarily a dead end. The best example I can think of from nature is the social insects. A vast majority of the population in those species cannot produce progeny, yet still confer an evolutionary advantage to the genes of the queen.

It's conceivable that homosexuality, if it's indeed genetic, confers an evolutionary advantage of some sort to the kin of the homosexual individual. What that advantage might be is wide open to debate, but there are tantalizing hints -- gay men are, for instance, slightly more likely to have multiple older brothers than straight men are; gay men and lesbians both are more likely to be lefthanded; gay men and lesbians are disproportionately represented in the caregiving professions (nursing, for instance); in many cultures(including our own), people with nontraditional gender orientations are often perceived to be more creative and better repositories for traditional wisdom and lore (though admittedly, whether this perception is accurate is hard to verify definitively).

If these differences are genetically related to whatever the cause(s) of homosexuality may be, then homosexuality may have evolved as a means to provide extra "worker bees" with specific traits to help perpetuate the genes of others in the family/tribe/species.

Nobody addresses the most fundamental question:

As long as there are no children involved, why should marriage be any of the Government's freakin' business in the first place??

(Childless) marriages between consenting adults should be simply a religious sacrament and/or a private contract.

If some guy wants to 'marry' another guy, it's none of my business. If he wants to 'marry' six (consenting adult) women, it's none of my business. If he wants to 'marry' his dog, it's none of my business -- as long as they don't mistreat the puppies, or expect me to pay for them.

"(Childless) marriages between consenting adults should be simply a religious sacrament and/or a private contract."

I don't understand, are you saying that only those with children should be able to obtain civil marriages?

What about those with a religious sacrement only, once they have a kid they're suddenly 'married' in a civil sense? I'm really not following this. Now there are cultures where a couple is not considered 'fully' married until a child (or children) reach(es) the age of four or five - it's a process with a number of ceremonies and no single moment when the couple goes from being not-married to married.

I don't think you understand the current status of marriage in the US. From a legal point of view, there are state-sanctioned civil marriages, period. Religious leaders are empowered to perform civil marriages, but if they don't do the state-mandated paperwork you're not legally married. The religious service is an add-on with no legal standing. Obversely, even if marriage was performed by a Catholic priest, the church can't stop you from divorcing and then remarrying, though they're within their rights to refuse to perform that second marriage ceremony.

Have you really thought this through?

The jealousy that people feel when their partners cheat on them is directly driven by your selfish genes not wanting to waste their carrier's resources on raising individuals they do not have a stake in.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where women tend to do most of the basic economical tasks of providing sustenance, there isn't the same emphasis on cuckolding and monogamy. When men don't need to provide for their offspring, they're less likely to care that their mate has been sleeping around.

True polygamy scarcely exists in the United States, but _de facto_ polygamy and serial monogamy are increasingly common and in some respects function the same as true polygamy.

"The jealousy that people feel when their partners cheat on them is directly driven by your selfish genes not wanting to waste their carrier's resources on raising individuals they do not have a stake in"

By "people" here, I'm assuming you mean "men", as women, due to physiology, have no such worries. Awfully hard to unknowingly give birth to another woman's child.

This asymmetry is at the root of much more than we're yet aware, I suspect.

From a genetic perspective, monogamy is a conspiracy between alpha females and beta males to secure exclusive access to alpha genes for the former, while securing the opportunity to reproduce at all for the latter. The sexual counter-revolution was led by alpha males and beta females, with their clearly differing interests.

Does monogamy offer benefits sufficient to offest the genetic raw deal it offers beta females?

I would like to see the same level of tolerance and ambivalence toward the different religious ideologies in the world. We should understand and learn each of these before spouting hate at one another. The web site www.onlineblessings.com provides a good background on the different religions. This type of homework should be done, the same as understanding Darwinism when discussing gay marriage.

Homosexuality doesn't necessarily have to be genetic. For instance, some people are born with their organ entirely reversed from left to right, with no genetic basis, just developmental chance. Homosexuality could have nothing to do with natural selection on genes; rather it could be just chance evironmental inputs in utero.

"Natural"??!? What sort of lame-ass criteria is that?

"Natural" is dying before your first birthday, due to disease.

"Natural" is never having enough food, and your children never having enough food.

"Natural" is having to move continuously, never having more of anything than you can carry, never knowing if you'll be able to find anywhere safe to sleep.

"Natural" means eating your meat raw, and often a little on the wormy side.

"Natural" is never thinking any thought more abstract than necessary for mere survival.

If we were to try to make someone live a natural existence, the courts wouldn't think twice before finding it cruel and unusual.

"The jealousy that people feel when their partners cheat on them is directly driven by your selfish genes not wanting to waste their carrier's resources on raising individuals they do not have a stake in"

By "people" here, I'm assuming you mean "men", as women, due to physiology, have no such worries. Awfully hard to unknowingly give birth to another woman's child.

Yes, but--particularly in the modern world--a woman's husband/male partner could go out and impregnate another woman, and therefore be responsible for that child's upkeep, diminishing the available resources in her own household. Also, I've heard this complaint coming from women in second marriages who resent that their husband still has financial obligations to his first family. The latter case--especially in cases where the second wife was a participant in breaking up the first marriage--strikes me as being a self-inflicted problem, but the former case seems a legitimate concern.

I have known a number of professional women (I mean, women with law or business degrees) who spent all or most of their reproductive years in stable relationships with married men (generally successful professional men). I have every reason to believe that they would have preferred more social recognition for those relationships than they received. So while polygyny may be more common in societies where women lack financial autonomy, I doubt that its incidence would be zero if it were legalized.

"Nobody addresses the most fundamental question:

As long as there are no children involved, why should marriage be any of the Government's freakin' business in the first place?? "

There are a lot of tax and legal issues tied up in marriage.

The most famous being that a wife or husband cannot be forced to testify against their spouse.

Another one is that the spouse becomes next-of-kin and has decision-making rights when the person is incapable.

Transfers between spouses are generally treated differently under tax legislation than other transfers. E.g. if I give my husband $30,000, I am not caught by tax on gift duty (in fact, the concept doesn't quite make sense, my husband and I pool our money).

Immigration rights also are associated.

And what happens if a person dies without a will.

Now many of these could be contracted separately, though I don't think you can legally contract a "can't be made to testify in court against me" deal. But it is convenient for the government to offer a standard contract of marriage. And since it comes with legal, immigration and tax privileges, the government can make an argument that it should have some say in who can enter it. (Imagine a gang all "marrying" each other in order to get the no-testifying advantage?)

y81-- I'm curious what the legal wives in those situations would have said if they weren't able to ignore their husbands' affairs, but were asked to sign on a junior partner.

Brittain33, you are asking whether the average woman with an adulterous husband who doesn't seek a divorce under our current legal regimen would seek a divorce if she were living under a different legal regimen and her husband suggested taking on a junior wife in lieu of a mistress. I have no idea what the answer would be on average, but surely in a country as big as this one, there would be some non-zero number of women who accepted the arrangement. (Although, in all honesty, most of the wives I know who remained with adulterous husbands were Catholic, so maybe they wouldn't accept polygyny. I am not sure what the Catholic church prescribes for a woman in a society where polygyny is legal if her husband wants a second wife.)

y81 - do you mean that a person could turn a two-person marriage into a polygamous marriage without their existing spouse's consent?

If so, definitely sign me up for opposing legalising polygamy. I see clear public benefits in requiring existing spouses' consent to adding another marriage partner. As I said, marriage currently comes with a portfolio of rights, including tax rules and inheritance arrangements. One party to the original contract should not have the right to change the terms so drastically without the other party having a say. (And being able to refuse your consent to the enlargement is a different matter from only having the option of divorcing, it allows for different negotiatied outcomes).

What I'm saying is that many married women accept their alpha male husbands having mistresses precisely because they get to keep the social status of being the wife, likely with extra spending money and freedom of their own, in exchange for turning a blind eye to a mistress who is a legal nothing and socially awkward, at best. The marriage endures because the wife can think of the mistress as utter shit, totally ignore her, and insist the husband keep her out of her sight.

As for your restatement of what I was saying, it's a leap from "adulterous husbands", which describes a very common phenomenon, to the kind of structured, recognized concubinage you described which is quite rare. Women who stay married in the latter case are getting some social status out of their marriage, above and beyond the money they could claim if they were divorced, and I presume that turning the mistress into a legal #2 wife would destroy that social status.

A lot more comments on here than what I got on my blog when I posted about gay marriage. Sigh...
Anyways, because this is the internet and I can contribute my two cents' worth thanks to the invitation of the blogger...
It's my opinion that marriage itself is a religious institution that shouldn't be endorsed by the federal government. There's no legal benefit of marriage that can't be contracted out (save the testifying thing, which should be abolished anyways). Everything else is establishment of religion, and, in many cases, a violation of privacy.
The only complication would be children. Children should be the responsibility of their genetic parents.
It's well documented that children fare better being raised by a maother and father, and this would ensure that the man and woman that created the child would stick around. Adoptions would be provided in the event of the death of the parents.
Again, just my opinion. But you asked.
Having said all that, I further believe that the people in a state have every right to arrange laws as they see fit, as long as civil rights are not violated.

Maybe there is a collective interest in marriages apart from the interest of individuals? If fathers invest in their children there's less crime, less capital spent on chasing women, less violence between men, less spread of STDs. There's a sort of prisoner's dielemma going on here. If everyone follows the rules, you can get the same number of kids (since few women have their maximum) with less negative side effects. But some men cheat and try and cuckold other men. The danger of cuckolding is higher if men invest significantly in their children.

Regarding gay marriage; I've known one or two 'gay' men with biological children. I'd really like to see a study on the average number of biological children a gay individual is likely to have. It would be a relevant question, right?

Re: polygamy. Right now we have serial monogamy, which is effectivly the same as polygamy. You can have several wives legally, just not at the same time.

Tracy W, if polygyny were legal at the time the first marriage was contracted, it wouldn't be a breach of that contract to take a second wife. Anyway, marriage isn't regulated by contractual principles; if it were, the courts would award damages for breaching that covenant about "till death do us part."

brittain33, I only meant "adulterous husbands" as a shorthand for "husbands who maintain a long-term relationship with another woman." Married men who engage in a series of flings probably wouldn't be affected by legalizing polygyny. But I suspect that the first set is larger than the second, although we have no way of knowing.

"I have known a number of professional women (I mean, women with law or business degrees) who spent all or most of their reproductive years in stable relationships with married men (generally successful professional men)." To me, this looks like polygyny, albeit without legal status to the mistress(es). However, with modern child support laws, mistresses can get a share of the man's income, without the consent of the legal wife. In every polygynous society I know of (including Mormons, Arabs, and Cheyenne Indians), the first wife would have veto power over additional wives, at least in theory (she might be afraid to use it), and traditionally helped choose the added wives. I suppose that for most women, the other advantages of legal monogamy outweigh that one privilege.

Of course, that's assuming that #1 wife remains married at all. Some parts of our society seem to practice serial polygamy (many wives/husbands, one at a time) more than monogamy, and that isn't good for anyone but the divorce lawyers.

It is nice to carry on a discussion like this with a bunch of people that know what "polygyny" means.

"It's my opinion that marriage itself is a religious institution that shouldn't be endorsed by the federal government. There's no legal benefit of marriage that can't be contracted out"

I see this a lot (usually from libertarianish types) and it raises a lot of questions)

You're in favor of abolishing civil marriage? So that atheists and the non-religious cannot get married?

Are you married? What kind of service did you have?

Is your wife or girlfriend aware of your views and principled stand to not messy your bond with state interference? If you were married by a priest or rabbi or whatever, did you tell him "The ceremony's enough, don't do the paperwork for the state, I don't believe in it."?

In addition to what Michael Farris says, I'm puzzled, as I indicated above, by people who refer to contract principles in discussing marriage. Do those people believe that the marriage contract should be enforced as written, with juries meting out monetary damages from anyone who violates the covenant about "forsaking all others, cleave unto her/him only, till death do us part"? That would certainly be a draconian regime!

And is juries are doing that, shouldn't they be meting out damages from those who violate the "I'll still love you in the morning" promise, at least when that promise induces detrimental reliance? I really don't think that regulating love and sex with contract law principles is very workable.

By contrast, homosexual unions do not result in progeny, so from a Darwinian (or Natural) perspective clearly make no sense.

FALSE.

The most successful land animal by biomass is the ant. The vast majority of ants never have any offspring, either. So clearly there is more to this argument than that simplistic comment suggests.

In fact, there is a strong cause to be made that (in humans) a low rate of male homosexuality could be evolutionarily favored, much like the lethal sickle cell gene.

This is necessarily speculative, but the easiest way to see this is to consider menopause. Why do human females, almost uniquely among mammals, shut down their reproductive systems while still healthy? The best guess is that human females can not bear children without social support (just like bees and ants). That large human head combined with the narrows hips required for bipedalism have made birth and early child care so physcially demanding that genes that come with a support network attached have a real advantage. Thus, maternal grandmothers may be more successful at furthering their reproductive success by foregoing additional children with whom they share 1/2 their genes and instead devoting resources to children's children with whom they share 1/4 of their genes.

Please look again at the last sentence, and then note that a maternal uncle (his mother is the child's granmother) shares 1/4 of his genes with a nephew or niece. So a similar argument could apply. A male, particularly an omega male, might be more repoductively successful helping raise his sibling's kids than trying to reproduce himself.

That what the bees and the ants do, after all.

if polygyny were legal at the time the first marriage was contracted, it wouldn't be a breach of that contract to take a second wife.

y81, Be absolutely sure, if I was signing a marriage contract while polygyny was legal, it would be one hell of a breach of contract for my husband to take a second wife.

Look, I'm fairly indifferent to if other people want to enter into polygamous marriages, as long as it doesn't affect my own marriage, and as long as I can have no part in it. You seem to be arguing for my husband to be able to take a second wife without my consent.

Anyway, marriage isn't regulated by contractual principles; if it were, the courts would award damages for breaching that covenant about "till death do us part."

Firstly, in many situations marriages are regulated by contractual principles (e,g. the effect on my next-of-kin status, wills, assumption about who any children born within the marriage belong to, etc). Secondly, I'm in favour of awarding damages for breaching a convenant about "till death do us part" - though not in favour of requiring specific performance. (In other words, I think you should be able to get divorced even without your spouse's permission, but there should be a price for that break if you're the one who first broke the marriage vow.)

"I'll still love you in the morning"
Verbal contracts are only worth the paper they're written on.

There is a massive difference between promises made in bed or in a club, and a formal contract signed between two parties, with two witnesses and a celebrant. There is a massive difference between regulating simple love and sex and regulating marriage. Marriage is a clearly established, public act. It's done by people who want the contract, and the public structure. It's making a relationship clear and formal. One can regulate marriage without being driven to regulate love and sex. (And I think there should be no legal privileges given to defacto relationships that don't involve children).

JohnJ - how can you contract out immigration rights? Or tax treatments? (I don't know about US tax law, but a number of the differences in NZ tax law between married couples and non-married is driven by an assumption that there is a "natural love and affection" between married couples. This does not necessarily work to the married couple's advantage. E.g. if I hired you to work in my business at a salary about twice the normal market rate, IRD's assumption would be that you're a very good negotiater. If I hired my husband, or my son, at a salary about twice the normal market rate, IRD's assumption would be that it's a tax dodge.)

Micheal, all I said was that state (legal) stuff can be done separate from the religious ceremony. If I want to contract out that I will pay for someone else's social security, why shouldn't I be allowed to?
Tracy,
Immigration rights: What is the point of allowing someone to marry someone of a different nationality? Usually it's to grant green cards to the immigrant. Is this really the best way to issue green cards? Why should someone be granted American citizenship FOR THE SOLE REASON THAT SOMEONE WANTS THEM TO? Then there's the matter of parental rights. If someone has a child with someone who's not American, obviously we'd want the child to be granted American citizenship, ergo the non-citizen parent should be allowed to stay as long as they maintain their parental obligation. All in all, this would happen, maybe, once a year. Far, far better than our current situation.
Or tax treatments: The tax code should be rewritten. There is absolutely no reason for the federal government to offer a tax break to someone solely on the basis of someone's say-so (I wanna marry this person; give us a tax break). Parental tax breaks should be decided based on that, but there should be no federal marriage tax breaks.
States have more flexibility, though. If they want to bundle package of legal contracts for which certain people can qualify, and call it "flutergork" or "marriage" or any other name, they can. They can even include tax breaks for whatever reason at their discretion.
Problem solved.
Or so I think. But I'd love to hear further criticisms, because this seems so simple I can't help but feel I'm missing something. There's no reason for a federal definition of marriage.

"all I said was that state (legal) stuff can be done separate from the religious ceremony."

That's effectively the status quo today in the US. There's no such thing as religious marriage there is civil marriage and religious figures can perform civil marriages. A marriage performed by a priest or whatever is not legally valid unless the priest or whatever does the state paperwork.

In some countries (I think often in Latin America and in Poland until a few years ago) there were separate civil and religious ceremonies. That is you had to have the civil ceremony ceremony first (the church wouldn't give you the religious ceremony without it) and if you wanted you could have the second ceremony in church (in Poland the church ceremony might take place weeks or months after the civil ceremony) but the couple is considered married after the civil ceremony.

So, effectively in the West _all_ marriages that have any legal standing are exclusively civil. How is your proposed plan any different?

Actually Slaten's argument attacked a logical fallacy that has been brandied about by opponants of gay marriage. It goes something like this:

Marriage = A and B

B is a bad idea and should be dropped from the definition.

Ohhh therefore you have to drop A too if your 'logically consistent'.

A is 'between two people' and B is 'of opposite sex'. He demonstrates that the reasons for A are quite different than the reasons put forth for B. Therefore just because some may advocate getting rid of B it doesn't follow that A must automatically fall as well.

Jane also gets the 'human nature' aspect of the argument wrong. The argument against polygamy is that it doesn't work because of human nature in the same way that communism doesn't work because of human nature. There's no obvious evolutionary reason why it shouldn't (there are plenty of animals that use polygamy as a model and it works just fine for them). Like communism people should be free to try it if they want too and don't force others into it against their will but is it a wise investment of time and energy for society to come up with a legal system supporting communism?

AS for Jane's evolutionary argument. What she doesn't account for is that humans are amazingly weak animals alone. A human woman, alone in the wilderness, who gives birth will almost certainly not last a week. For humans reproduction requires more energy than just spreading the seed around. Human females must be taken care of at least during the last stages of pregnancy and then children must be reared for a very long period of time.

Evolutionary advantage, then, goes to the humans hwo are able to form stable social units. Sexual jealously works to encourage that in very interesting ways. It encourages humans to form very small and tight social units (which are highly stable) but also loosely connected to other social units so risk is spread out and diversified in human societies. In this way even gay couples can offer the species an evolutionary advantage if they increase stability by 'settling down' with long term partners. Anything that reduces the risks adults face frees up resources that can be used for children.

This is also why we don't get upset when we hear about two 70 year olds who find themselves late in life and get married. Those two older people won't have children but they will offer each other support and lessen the likelyhood that their kids will have to care for them. Hence their kids can spend more time on making their own kids and instead of being a burden the older people can help in raising them.

JohnJ, there are a lot of problems with your suggestions. For instance, if I were allowed, by contract, to entitle someone else to my social security benefits after I die for the remainder of his or her life, obviously I would auction off that entitlement. The winning bidder would likely be someone very young, to whom the benefits would have the highest present value. This would be a total abuse of the system and it would swiftly go bankrupt. However, my capacity to do this is limited under the current system because I can only entitle someone else to my social security benefits if I also agree to about a million other things (i.e., the normal legal incidents of marriage).

BTW, in a group of libertarians like this one, everyone always speaks as if freedom of contract were some sort of generally applicable principle. But you can't contract with your doctor for a 10% discount in return for a waiver of malpractice claims, you can't contract with a sexual partner for lifelong fidelity, you can't contract away your social security benefits or your vote, you can't give property to your children on condition that they never sell it, etc. Marriage is hardly unique in this respect.

JohnJ
"Why should someone be granted American citizenship FOR THE SOLE REASON THAT SOMEONE WANTS THEM TO?"

Because one American citizen loves said person and wants to share their life with them?

Have you ever been in love? Have you ever been away from the person you love, and wanted to be with them?

Why would you not grant citizenship in this case? What better reason could there be for granting citizenship? Does government exist to serve its people, or people to serve their government?

As for tax law, I was not talking about tax breaks. There are no explicit tax breaks for being married in NZ - income is taxed on an individual basis (so my husband's tax rate is the same regardless of whether or not I am working). However, as I said, there are a number of cases where transfers within a family, including between a married couple, are treated differently from more market-based transfers. I gave the example of hiring someone to work for my business. This is presumably also an issue for your country's IRS, regardless of whether a formal marriage tax credit is given.

JohnJ, there are a lot of problems with your suggestions. For instance, if I were allowed, by contract, to entitle someone else to my social security benefits after I die for the remainder of his or her life, obviously I would auction off that entitlement. The winning bidder would likely be someone very young, to whom the benefits would have the highest present value. This would be a total abuse of the system and it would swiftly go bankrupt. However, my capacity to do this is limited under the current system because I can only entitle someone else to my social security benefits if I also agree to about a million other things (i.e., the normal legal incidents of marriage).

It's kind of interesting that no one has tried something like this. Gay men and gay women could strategically marry each other to win SS benefits from their partners. In fact, you could even do an Internet based matching service for this. Are you a gay man whose partner makes $60K per year? Get introduced to a gay woman who makes about that much too, marry her and it's as if you've gotten virtual marriage benefits.

Regardless, if Social Security benefits were made transferrable in the manner proposed above they would have to be converted into an estimated present value. That would prevent the easy abuse and bankruptcy quite nicely.

"Gay men and gay women could strategically marry each other to win SS benefits from their partners."

Well that would certainly damage the institution of marriage (if performed on a wide enough scale) more than tame same-sex marriage. Especially if all involved are absolutely open about their motivations. I can just hear Betty Lesbian now:

"Okay mr. justice of the peace, I can't marry the woman I want to, so screw you and your precious one-man one-woman marriage. I'm marrying this rich gay man and we'll game your little con for all it's worth! Pronounce us man and wife already!"

"The anti-gay marriage folks wouldn't have any slightest right to complain (not that that would stop them).

Well, michael farris, many rich men are hesitant to marry the women that they ARE sleeping with, because of the financial costs. I doubt that a lot of rich gay men are going to marry lesbians in order to confer social security benefits on them.

Michael Farris,

["Gay men and gay women could strategically marry each other to win SS benefits from their partners."

Well that would certainly damage the institution of marriage (if performed on a wide enough scale) more than tame same-sex marriage.]

It would be more likely to seriously damage the institution of "gayness", especially if they then produced progeny.

It would be more likely to seriously damage the institution of "gayness", especially if they then produced progeny.

I didn't know homosexuality was an institution. I thought the whole push of the anti-same sex marriage crowd was to keep it from becoming a recognized institution. If we ignore it, it'll go away, etc. Of course, the Washington monument does look like a giant penis. Maybe it's part of the vast gay conspiracy those upright religious leaders warned us about?

But I think the purpose of this mental exercise is to discuss people who are trying to game the system by entering into institutions whose tenants they don't intend to abide by. i.e. get married and don't have sex, or if you do procreate, raise the kid with your partner rather than the biological father.

At worst, it would be analogous to someone who enters the millitary during peacetime for the benefits, and then goes AWOL if a war starts. It posits using an institution for somthing other than its state-intended purpose.

Boonton said

Marriage = A and B

B is a bad idea and should be dropped from the definition.

Ohhh therefore you have to drop A too if your [sic] 'logically consistent'.

Honey, what you are missing is a simple point. Marriage is an institution thousands of years old, with a long established tradition of A and B. Some people want to throw out A, because, according to them, "it isn't fair".

Then, clearly, if we are suddenly going to change this instituation, whatever we change it TO must be logically supportable and have no similar arguments against it. Otherwise it will be changed again in five or ten years, delegitimizing it further.

It isn't a matter of logical consistency that we have to drop both A and B (and C = nonrelated and D = consenting adult), it is a matter of logical consistency and fairness that the NEW instituation of marriage must not have a glaring structural weakness similar to the alleged weakness in the old one. And the logical basis of the NEW institution has to be even STRONGER than the basis for the old one.

The main argument for eliminating "A = Man + woman" from marriage is
(desire) "homosexual people want it" combined with
(freedom)"if it doesn't harm anyone else, people should be able to do what they want" and
(fairness)"you shouldn't descriminate between people based upon who they are".

The third point, of course, can be written many ways. But if people desire polymarriage, why should we descriminate against them? Is there a principled reason to eliminate polygamy from this argument? If three guys (for example) want to be a family and have a mutual marriage, what principled reason is there for the state to deny that?

"Oh, dear, it's too complicated?" Remember, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts didn't care whether it was complicated when they unilaterally changed the laws of that state.
Fairness overrides complexity. Judges just say "figure it out - not our problem."

Besides, it is not that complicated in a community property state. Everyone files "Married filing separately" and reports one-third of each person's income. Done.

Divorce and estates are pretty darn messy now, they could do with some rationalization anyway,
but they wouldn't be that much messier, really.

I'm not arguing that polygamy is GOOD, just that the arguments against it are flawed by either (a) social arguments (that would have also been accepted about homosexuality fifty years ago, and therefore are suspect now if homosexual marriage is accepted) or (b) financial/economic arguments (that wouldn't be accepted now to prevent homosexual marriage).

That being said, if my honey got it into his head...well, he'd get it out again real fast.

Marriage is an institution thousands of years old, with a long established tradition of A and B.

And what you're missing is that marriage is an institution with a millennia-long tradition of A and B and C and D, where D is "members of the same religious denomination" and C is "not of different races", and we've gradually let go of D and then C in both the legal and social definitions without marriage vanishing from the face of the Earth.

Certainly many people fought eliminating D and C at the time, and many people are wistful about their elimination today and still uphold non-governmental definitions that include D and C. Nonetheless, what seemed like a requirement government must defend at the time has since become a historical marker that many people find embarrassing and even more agree should never have the government imprimatur in the first place.

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