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About Me
- Cathy Young
- Writer and journalist, author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (1989) and Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (1999). Columnist for Reason (monthly) and, from 2000 to January 2007, for The Boston Globe (weekly). Born in Moscow, Russia in 1963; came to the United States in 1980. Rutgers University graduate.
Comments policy
All commenters are welcome, as long as they abide by a few simple rules.
1. Please maintain a civil and respectful tone toward other posters (including, of course, the blog owner). Heated arguments are fine, but it should be possible to argue your point of view passionately without insulting other people or their views. Specifically:
* Absolutely no name-calling.
* No profanity (except when quoting from another text).
* No accusations of lying or twisting facts (unless you have proof to back up such an accusation), deliberately avoiding the truth, or other forms of dishonesty.
* No bigoted remarks about any group.
* No unfounded accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, or other forms of bigotry.
2. Please do not post comments irrelevant to the thread topic.
3. No anonymous comments, please. If you are not using a Blogger or Google account or Open ID, please use a name or nickname when posting a comment.
Website and email
Blog Archive
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2005
(133)
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▼
October
(36)
- The McMartin postscript
- Iraq: Silver lining? Rose-colored glasses?
- Joan Kennedy Taylor, R.I.P.
- It's not racist (or sexist) if they're Republicans
- Rosa Parks, American hero
- Some closing thoughts on the same-sex marriage debate
- Same-sex marriage and polygamy
- Marriage, sexual complementarity and difference
- The same-sex marriage discussion at the Volokh Con...
- Witch-hunts: hysteria then and now
- The last word on Katrina media coverage
- Science, right and left
- Judicial nominations and ideology
- Academic bias: in the eye of the beholder
- The blogs and media ethics
- Russia, rebels, and Islamic terrorism
- Miers update
- Iraq: A time for cautious optimism?
- Female autonomy or new "separate spheres"?
- Same-sex marriage, civil unions and polygamy: Taci...
- Vitriol envy?
- Feminism, men and the "authority of experience"
- Feminism, multiculturalism and domestic violence
- In praise of mediocrity?
- Speaking of Lenin...
- The Bennett bash, cont'd
- Bush on terrorism
- A vote for decency in the Senate
- Miers: The Gender Card
- Miers: The faith card
- The Miers nomination
- Decline and fall in the Netherlands?
- More on the anti-feminist left
- New column on church/state issues
- Here comes the morals police
- The anti-feminist left
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▼
October
(36)
Some good blogs
- Instapundit
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Volokh Conspiracy
- Ann Althouse
- Asymmetrical Information
- Hit & Run (Reason)
- Vodkapundit
- Neo-Neocon
- John Cole
- Patterico
- Eric Muller
- Robert George
- Pejmanesque
- Jeff Jarvis
- Protein Wisdom
- James Lileks
- Virginia Postrel
- Kevin Drum
- Kausfiles
- Daniel Drezner
- One Hand Clapping
- Transterrestrial Musings
- Mossback Culture (Richard Bennett)
- Tapped
- Alas, a Blog
- Walter Olson's Overlawyered
- Mark Kleiman
- Just One Minute
- Dean's World
- The Moderate Voice
- Dr. Helen
- Echidne of the Snakes
10 comments:
You seem to be suggesting, in your article, that legalized polygamy would give "binary" married couples the right to marry additional people without their partner's permission.
Is that necessarily the case? If I enter into an equal business partnership with another person, neither of us is legally allowed to add extra partners to the arrangement without the permission of the other.
revenant: of course no one could marry an additional person without their partner's permission. I'm thinking about situations in which one spouse in a binary couple tells the other that he or she wants to take a second spouse, and the other spouse is facing the choice of either acquiescing or being divorced.
That doesn't sound all that different from what's possible today, though -- e.g., a husband tells his wife to either divorce him or accept that he's keeping a mistress.
True, of course. But presumably, if polygamous marriage were legalized, the husband could do that without facing a social stigma.
Of course, that may be an iffy presumption. I think one of the underlying assumptions of the marriage debate is that legalization has to translate into social approval. And that's not necessarily so. Today, for instance, it's perfectly legal for an 80-year-old man to marry an 18-year-old woman or vice versa, but I daresay social support for such marriages (especially ones where the woman is older) is almost nil.
I personally suspect that if polygamy were to be legalized, its practice would be limited to people who already practice polygamous or polyamorous lifestyles -- i.e., (1) members of traditional religions that sanction polygamy and (2) weirdos.
Holy Robert A. Heinlein, Batman! (*GRIN*)
"Because I say so!" Sometimes... that's the answer. So it seems to me to be the case with polygamy and various off-shoots. The answer is "No!" because the vast, vast, vast majority of Americans find the idea abhorrent. Period.
Now... one might make the same argument concerning gay marriage... but the degree of public opposition to gay marriage isn't nearly as overwhelming as it would be to seriously considering legalizing polygamy.
While it might be intellectually stimulating to debate whether polygamy is a healthy social expression of love and committment and argue that the logic of legalizing polygamy follows the logic of legalizing gay marriage... there's really no point. Regarding polygamy... the answer is "No!" (*GRIN*)
I'm a straight, conservative Republican who leans libertarian. In a perfect world I'd be all for gay marriage. (Hell... I'd even consider polygamy!) In the world we live in... I'd be happy with gay civil unions. (*SMILE*)
The "vast," majority says no, is not a sufficient argument or reason. The point of the republic/democratic set up in the states is to avoid the trampling of minority views by the majority.
Meanwhile, optimally, As a free adult, you have a right to say no, within your relationships, and have that be sancrosact. But other free adults should also have the right to form their relationships however they form them and have that be just as sancrosact.
Otherwise one is just using the government to gets one's way based on a mere bias (which happens appallingly often these days).
Cathy,
"I personally suspect that if polygamy were to be legalized, its practice would be limited to people who already practice polygamous or polyamorous lifestyles -- i.e., (1) members of traditional religions that sanction polygamy and (2) weirdos."
1. As the London bombings show, the assimilation of western-born Muslims is an urgent priority. Legal polygamy would make it easier for polygamous Muslims to function here, instead of giving up the lifestyle to emigrate or staying home, and that would be a major impediment to assimilation. The prospect of trying to assimilate American-born Muslims who grow up in poloygamous families does not thrill me.
2. My admittedly limited obervation suggests that "weirdos" who engage in polygamy-type relationships are very often mentally ill. The hair-raising dysfunction one reads about in polygamous unions are a cause and effect of their members' instability. Legalizing ploygamy, and tarring criticism of it as bigotry, will probably do little to help them get the treatment they need.
This is not to say that all polygamous/polyamorous people are mentally ill or that mentally ill people can never make competent decisions. But I don't think that the benefits legalized polygamy will give to its more competent practitioners would outweigh the problems I suspect it would cause the the less rational actors
But presumably, if polygamous marriage were legalized, the husband could do that without facing a social stigma
I think he'd face the same stigma we place, today, on a man who dumps his wife just so he can marry somebody he likes more.
Wouldn't it be possible to set up marriage contracts so that certain marriages were polygamous (or had the potential for polygamy) from the start, while others were strictly monogamous? I am not particularly invested either way in these types of relationships, but see no real moral reason why polygamy shouldn't be legal (though I can see a whole host of practical reasons, not least that religious cults that practice polygamy have been notorious for incest and sexual abuse due to power inequalities in their structure.)
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