It strikes me that there’s a fundamental difference between a relationship that’s intended and understood as being exclusive, and one that lacks that understanding. In my experience, my husband’s first commitment is to me, and vice-versa. If I had another wife, and the two of us both needed him as badly, who would he help first? Obviously if we have kids that would change, but the parent-child relationship is different in nature again to the spousal one (and I note that stepparents often find their spouse’s fundamental loyalty to the children a source of conflict).

A polygamous marriage doesn’t have the same meaning as a monogamous marriage, and I think it’s a shame that we apply the same word to both setups. Same-sex marriage doesn’t change the meaning of marriage the same way, because obviously two men or two women can be committed to each other first in a way that three people can’t be.

Please switch genders around as desired.

BTW I don’t get why fringe Mormons don’t just have a religious ceremony performed? Or if they must use contracts to cover as much of the same legal ground as marriage does.

I think part of the issue is that reproductive marriage, means at least for women putting some of their eggs in the same basket as the man. A well functioning married couple is a strong form of organization (albeit temporary, especially the well functioning bit).

Also, group competition comes into play I think. If we let them marry more than one women they go after OUR women and WE can’t let THOSE guys have them.

In some hunter gatherer societies homicide is quite likley to be the no. 1 cause of male death. Perhaps some of those societies are more consistent in their treatment of homosexuality as a sexual release valve.

Bigamy laws exist, of course, but probably most polyamorists are content to have relationships without legal recognition of these marriages. (And when I say “most polyamorists,” I of course mean the free-love philosophy, not Mormon-style polygynists.) And my impression was that at the time the laws were written, the lawmakers were worried about a man who would have two wives and fraudulently let each of them think they’re the only one. It’s not clear whether legal marriage is a useful or neccessary means, in the present-day society, to men’s age-old end of impregnating as many women as possible, but there you have it.

In fact, I looked up “bigamy” on Wikipedia, and I found it was worse than that. The United States law distinguishes between bigamy for deceptive purposes like helping someone immigrate to the US, and plural marriages that are for the purpose of openly practicing polygamy or polyamory. And the latter (named the offense of polygamy rather than bigamy) is the worse offense, a felony rather than a misdemeanor. In other words, the law has made multiple marriages a worse offense if the polygamist is openly practicing a certain sexual philosophy, rather than just trying to deceive someone. In other words, this legal distinction is just as much a thoughtcrime as the much-criticized legal distinction between “racially motivated hate crimes” and violent attacks perpetrated for any other motive. Quite an outrage, really.