So have I, but I've heard this complaint often enough that I believe it. Maybe it comes up more in big-city hospitals, rather than the one-room schoolhouse with the doctor's office out in the barn that you're used to? (joking!)

Seriously:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/17/archives-establishing-equal-hospital-visitation-rights

Oh, sorry, I thought you were speaking hypothetically before.



Yes. It's when you add on the possibility that people could be coerced into it that the moral aspects come in. Plus the external harms to society that Carlton mentioned, which might be practical or moral.



Hmm, maybe. There are various kinds of contracts that society recognizes as being so inherently unfair or unjust that it bans them entirely. Seems like the folks in the polyamorous relationships you mentioned would have to make the case that what they are asking for is fair to all involved. To return to the main topic of the thread a bit, it's not enough for polygamists to say "But you let the gays have it, why can't we have it too?" The polygamists have a higher argumentative hurdle to get over.

Yeah, that sounds reasonable enough. I was looking for more info on this topic, and ran across this hospital's guidelines, which seem to do a good job of balancing various considerations:

http://www.ipfcc.org/advance/topics/Bakersfield-Hospital-Visitation-Rights-of-Patients.pdf

So it may be that this particular issue of hospital visitation will eventually be separated from the marriage issue entirely. But that will still leave a few dozen or hundreds of other issues to wrangle over.

I was a tad surprised at some of the reaction to my comments, and I think that's in part because the only people I know who expressed a desire for some kind of plural marriage (both no more than acquaintances) are women. One is lesbian, and I therefore assumed she had two other woman in mind for the marriage. Why would that not be equal? Also, three bisexuals of either sex - what's intrinsically unequal about such an arrangement?

Going to Peter's request to pick an issue that is usually covered by marriage: if three people marry in the way my examples wanted to, inheritance (for example) would be equal. If one of the three is killed in a plane crash, the other two get the inheritance split equally. If two die, the survivor gets the inheritance. (If all three die it goes to next of kin or estate or whatever as per normal.) The marriage means they don't have to go out of their way to set up specific will-arrangements to have all this covered. That's the kind thing they're after.

Not that it seems worth it to me; personally, a marriage-relationship with more than one person just seems like asking for a headache.



What is your own view - who could marry?

Three is the smallest group dynamic that can produce an outcast.

I was, sort of. The actual examples of people wanting some kind of plural marriage was is the back of my mind. It was just the addition of ‘fantasy’ in front of the term ‘thought experiment’ that made it seem like you were trying to deny anyone would seriously want such an arrangement. Maybe I read too much into it.



People can also be coerced into traditional two-party marriage (and often have been). The problem (coercion) and the arrangement (that of two-party marriage) are seen as almost entirely separate. No one’s suggesting banning regular two-party marriage. The instances of communities that exploit women seem to do so regardless of the law.



Yeah, but that’s a high standard. “If one of us three should die, the inheritance will be split evenly between the other two”, is a long way short of “inherently unfair or unjust”.



Sure, I don't mean to imply that someone in favour of same sex marriage must also be in favour of plural marriage or they're a rank hypocrite. I think there are sufficient differences that each argument has to be had separately.

Double post.

Good points, Stephen. I hadn't seriously considered the possibility of a same-sex multiple marriage like that until you mentioned it, so I've had to think about it a bit more.

Some of those thoughts:

While "split the inheritance equally" sounds fair on its face, consider some possible scenarios.

A, B, and C are married. They all share a house. C dies. Now if C and B alone had been married, B would now have full ownership of the house, which she could sell if she wanted to, or continue to live in, or whatever. Instead, A and B have to agree on what to do with the house. That's not a problem if they're still in love with one another and want to keep living together, but if differences arise, they both have more limited freedom than if they had been in paired marriages. So that's one difference, maybe not a huge one, maybe solvable, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Next issue, would inheritance laws and estate taxes need to be changed? My understanding is that currently a surviving spouse does not have to pay estate taxes on the shared marital property, while taxes are due on anything left to children or others. Would society be willing to expand the circle of persons exempt from estate taxes? Or would that be too big a loophole, too easily subject to abuse? So would one spouse get to inherit everything, while other spouses got less or nothing?

Likewise, with retirement benefits, will employers be required to pay to all surviving spouses? Would they just split up the amount that would otherwise be paid to a single spouse? Is it realistic to expect multiple spouses to survive on reduced payments like that? I guess they all might have their own retirement benefits from their own careers, so it might work out. But the added paperwork and complexity does have its own potential costs.

Next issue, never mind inheritance, but if A, B, and C are married, does C get to also marry D, or do A and B get a veto? If A and B do not get a veto, does D get entitled to any part of the property of A and B? Or does a multiple marriage only get sanctioned once, and any time another person is added or subtracted, then the whole marriage contract has to be renegotiated for everyone?

What if disputes go to court? At what point does the legal system say, this is a waste of our time, trying to settle situations this complex? Better just to toss out the multiple marriage contracts entirely and say, no, these contracts are invalid and you have no rights of redress based on them.

Where do you draw the line? Currently we draw the line at one spouse for each person. Maybe an argument can be made that it would not be too costly if we extended the line to two or three or four spouses, but the potential downsides seem pretty big to me.

I assume that this family of three women are sincere in their love for one another, whereas I'm not convinced of the sincerity of more "traditional" polygamous unions, such as practiced by some Mormons or Muslims. But I'm not sure that their arrangement really fits into what we call marriage. Maybe the solution would be to create some kind of corporation or commune and spell out all the rights and responsibilities that way, although that might not be ideal either.

Since most experiments of this nature have eventually crashed and burned, to my knowledge, maybe they need to prove to the rest of society that they can make a go of it, without the support of the rest of society, before trying to change the laws to be more accepting. That's basically what gay couples did over the past half-century, and if polygamy is really viable, maybe it will be accepted eventually. I have to admit that I'm not really hoping for that outcome at this point, though.

Lots of good points you’ve raised there. The last time I saw this discussed, one of the people pro-plural marriage was a lawyer. If that discussion thread (on another site) was not so old, I’d put some of those points to him.

For some of your points, we either have a different understanding of the laws involved, or the legal/policy situation is just quite different in the US from NZ. I’m not sure about the retirement benefits you mention, for example. I assume that’s how retirement pensions are funded in the US? In New Zealand, our state pension (NZ Superannuation) is entirely separate from employers or contributions. Employers aren’t obligated to offer private pension schemes, and if they choose to, well, they choose to, and it’s a private negotiation. They do have to provide for “KiwiSaver” but that’s at an individual level only – it makes no difference to my employer whether I have one partner or 21.



I don’t see the problem. A and B are left in exactly the same position as a married couple. We’re already okay with married couples. What do A and B have to face that a conventional married couple doesn’t have to?



The addition of a new spouse would have to be mutually agreed upon (and divorce is an option just as in traditional marriage). If someone doesn’t like the idea of such a restriction, they can always not enter into the arrangement in the first place, just as some people don’t like some of the restrictions/obligations that marriage to one person entails, and so choose not to marry.

I’d add, as a general point, that a marriage-like arrangement isn’t quite the same as insisting on a simple extension. I suspect plural marriage supporters might accept that particular issues may have legal, technical or administrative difficulties that were not surmountable. In other words, the rights and protections of plural marriage wouldn’t have to be exactly the same as current two-party marriage.

Fair enough. If all partners have equal sharing, then I agree.



Sorry to disappoint, but I didn't have any definite idea in mind. It seems to me that quite a few marriages occur just because that's what people do at a certain age.