Gay Marriage, Polygamy, and the Case for Civil Unions For All

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/if-gay-marriage-wins_b_676365.html

Most importantly, check out the part near the bottom where he makes the case, in a very well-reasoned and thoughtful manner, that a full legal recognition of gay rights including marriage by the Supreme Court would be soon followed by a similar protection for 'polyamorists.' I think it's an interesting argument; I think it's possible that polygamy/polyamory wouldn't be found protected any time soon even if gay marriage is (which I think it might very well be), but I can see the argument that it should be. And that's sort of my point, and it leads to my broader point, which is really about the business of marriage in the first place.

Like many people, I think, I would be uncomfortable for legalizing polygamy. Not because I think that the kind of polyamory Weigant talks about is repugnant; I have no problem at all with having three women, or five women and three men, or whatever, decide to live in a kind of communal sexual relationship, if that's what they all really want. But quite honestly, I think it's just empirically true that having the government recognize polygamy of all sorts would result in having one sketchy old guy manage to coerce half a dozen eighteen-year-old girls to marry him, and then he would have the government enforcing his power over them. Now, obviously, I'm making an empirical case there, and I would be open to being convinced that I'm wrong on the facts. But I think it's a useful place to start in posing the following question:

What's the point of marriage in the first place?

And by that, I mean what is the point of state-sanctioned marriage. The point of having two (or more!) people fall in love and decide to live together for a long time or the rest of their lives and spend a lot of time together and have lots of sex and maybe have kids and raise them is pretty damn obvious, and I'm not questioning it. But why does the damn government need to get involved, anyway? (I'm not a liberterian, but I'm a social libertarian and I believe in questioning things, so I get to say that!) I think there is one very specific answer to that question, and I think that answer is very illuminating to the question of polyamory.

Because I think the answer to why we have government marriage is that in the bad old days, a marriage license was a sex license. Fornication, after all, used to be illegal. But of course, society kind of has a stake in making sure people do have sex once in a while, namely continuing the species, so they decided that if they have you a piece of paper and had a priest say a few words, maybe God wouldn't mind if you had sex. With one particular person. To continue the species. Which is in the bible. And hey, the government was officially religious anyway, so the government approval and the church's approval really went hand-in-hand.

Anyway, we moderns are more enlightened than that, and most governments now don't have a problem with it if you and the girl you meet in a bar Saturday night go have sex. (And I'm not being sexist, or heteronormative; it can work either way!) Of course, some governments like Somalia probably still do have a problem with that, but they have bigger issues than the ones I'm talking about. So now we just have the situation where we have this outdated, leftover concept of copulation licenses called government marriages. Is there any good reason for the government to issue marriages, though?

Wouldn't the following system work pretty well? How about when two (or more!) people fall in love and decide they want to live together, they do so. If they decide to have kids, they do so. If they decide to hold a big ceremony and dress up and make speeches and tell people they just got married, they do so. If they want to go on a honeymoon afterwards, they do so. And at this point, the government doesn't give a damn. BUt, the government also provides for some sort of civil union or something, the name might want to be snazzier and also a little less inherently about a romantic relationship, whereby two (or more!) people can gain joint rights with respect to one another, relating to assets and tax status and not having to testify against one another, etc. Maybe the societal expectation would be that these unions would generally go to people living in a consensual long-term sexual relationship, or maybe it would be sort of normal for other people to get them, too. Now, of course, I think the government would have a right to ask a few questions about why it should give those people, say, the right not to testify against one another, because you really wouldn't want to just go handing that right out to anyone who asks for it. But with some sort of demonstrated codependency, people not in romantic relationships could get them. Maybe the three women living together in a communal sexual relationship could get an at-large union as well.

Wouldn't that solve the sticky problems around polygamy? Of course three or four or five consenting adults could tell people they were all married to one another. They could also, quite probably, get some sort of communal codependency rights from the government. Meanwhile, there would be no particular reason why the government would have to give those legal rights to the fifty-year-old Mormon and his eighteen-year-old "brides." Or even any fifty-year-old and eighteen-year-old, if an abusive relationship was suspected. Now, sure, you could have a corrupt government that didn't want to exercise its duty not to bless that kind of abuse (or even its duty to prosecute that kind of abuse), but at some point you can't build a corruption-proof government.

I think the matter of whether gay marriage logically leads to polygamy makes a strong case that it would all be better if the government didn't do nominal marriage. Maybe it'll never happen, but hey, at least some of the time I like to think about policy, not politics.