If you don’t like plural marriage, don’t get plural married

Aug 21, 2017 by

by Michael Cook, MercatorNet:

Will LGBT bigotry be the biggest obstacle to legalising polygamy?

While there might not be a huge unmet demand for polygamy, there are an estimated 50,000 polygamous families in the United States at the moment – mostly fundamentalist Mormons, Muslims, African-American Black Muslims and Hmongs from Vietnam and Laos. About 500,000 people live in situations which are described as “ethical non-monogamy”, a coy euphemism for polyamory.

There are certainly enough of them around to sue for legal recognition of their stigmatised status. And according to Mark Goldfeder, a legal academic at Emory Law School in Georgia, they can make a solid case. He has sketched out a map for legalisation in his recent book Legalizing Plural Marriage: the Next Frontier in Family Law.

It’s essential reading for all Australians in the upcoming plebiscite on same-sex marriage.

The all-but-universal cry from the same-sex marriage camp is that “the polygamy argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny”, in the words of American gay journalist Jonathan Rauch. Polygamy harms women, harms children and harms young men excluded from the marriage market. Because polygamy is poison for voters, supporters of gay marriage do their best to dismiss it. But is this consistent? The argument for polygamy is remarkably similar to the argument for marriage for gays and lesbians, except that it is the gays and lesbians who seem to be its bitterest opponents.

But Goldfeder believes when the US Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage in the United States in Obergefell v. Hodges, it became obvious that the time for legalised polygamy could not be far away. He writes:

Read here

 

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