this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Why is polygamy even illegal in the first place?
Because gender bounded polygamy causes serious social issues. Look at the FLDS for examples of it in modern day. My stance is to remove the gender bounding and enforce strict minimum age to marry laws. But yeah, 18th century USA wasn’t going to let women have multiple husbands much less let men have multiple husbands and women have multiple wives.
Yup, I think we should change the whole notion of marriage. Basically, the government would provide sets of contracts that grant certain privileges for certain responsibilities, like tax benefits for sharing financial responsibility. People can pick and choose among the various contracts, and there could be a "marriage" bundle that roughly corresponds to today's notion of marriage. Marriage than becomes a religious ceremony that people are free to define themselves, separately from any legal commitments.
This way you don't need prenups or whatever, you only sign the documents each party is comfortable with. If you're in a polyamorous relationship, you might combine finances with half of your partners, share hospital visitation rights with a separate half, etc, and you could marry all or some of them. Custody of children would be between biological parents or, if waived, assigned legal parents/guardians based on the contracts signed.
That's a bit complicated, but it would make things a lot more flexible. Individual contracts could be limited in number of people involved, but you could choose to sign different contracts with different people.
I like the way the Denobulans in Star Trek handle marriage. Every woman has up to three husbands and every man has up to three wives. I wouldn't like to live under strict marriage rules of any kind, but that seems far better than Earth's rules.
Polygamy =/= Polyamoury. Polygamy involves one person (almost always a man) having multiple spouses, often economically and legally dependent on him, which tends to result in abuse (quite surprisingly), as well as a surplus of people who remain single, which has its own set of problems. You probably have a good idea of what polyamoury is. Because historically we've mostly seen the former (in the case of the US, with the Mormons and its branching sects), but not the later, laws have been written to deal with the issues provoked by the former, but admittedly it's about time to allow polyamoury to have its own legal framing.
Tax reasons. You can have as many partners living with you as you want, but once past one "official" partner, it would get super complicated. Plus one wife would be able to hire the other partners as a way to disguise income and keep everyone just under the personal....wait. you can do that anyways.
You could set rules specifically for polyamourous marriage when it comes to taxes. I don't really see anything ethically wrong with the practice in and of itself when it's consensual to all and not just a scheme for bullshit like tax breaks/evasion or human trafficking.
I think official marriage is weird anyway. It's just a ritual stemming from religion that has been co-opted by governments to deal with stuff that doesn't matter to people who just wanna be together. 🤷🏻♂️
So many people divorce within a few years too, and (in most places, maybe not all) divorce is a long tedious drawn out process - so a lot of folks spend more time getting divorced than they do getting married.
Idk why people bother anymore, the tax bennies aren't even all that good for most people.I was with my ex for a decade, raising her kid, and breaking up with no muss no fuss here's your 30 day good luck in your future endeavors. Meanwhile it took her like 3 years to divorce her ex before me.
Insurance benefits, ability to make medical decisions for your spouse and visit them in the hospital, access to your spouse's accounts if they die or become incapacitated. Lots of legal benefits you wouldn't think about until you need them.
In Australia we have ‘de facto’ relationship laws so if you’re living together for a certain amount of time you have all the rights that a married couple do, including around property rights and separation. But we also have far less litigious divorces and nothing like alimony here.
Average lemmy take
I think you mean, "most conservative Lemmy marriage take"
Nah, Lemmy isn't usually this cool
I’m sorry, do you seriously think that recognition of polyamorous unions would make the tax system even 0.1% more complex than it already is?