I metioned below that "Marriage, as it is currently legally defined, does not translate well to groups larger than two." This could probably stand some elaboration.
There's a good list of the benefits awarded married couples here. I don't doubt for a second that certain groups of three or more could live within the framework of marriage fairly comfortably. Most of the problems arise in dealing with death or divorce. One thing that leaps to my attention is "Making, revoking, and objecting to anatomical gifts." Say, for example, four widow(er)s disagree over the disposition of their deceased spouse's organs. Who decides? Majority rule? Jury-like, berating each other until they reach unanimity? What about the remains? If two want a burial in the ancestral cemetary, and the other two favor cremation, what happens if there's no guidance in a will? Will all of these cases wind up in court?
I'm not saying that these questions can't be answered, but that the answers would require a fundamental revision of the legal identity of the "spouse." Currently, the spouse is an equal partner in a legally defined entity. When there are decisions to be made about an incapaciated spouse, the other spouse speaks for them both. But once multiple spouses can disagree, this doctrine falls apart. Ultimately, participants become more like shareholders in a corporation than individuals subsumed by a singular legal identity.
The other potential pitfall is abuse of the benefits of marriage. When you can only be married to one person and divorce is, at the very least, a headache, there are some institutional limits on marriage for the sake of benefits. But, when unlimited numbers can enter into marriage, there is less to stop somene from adding all her unemployed friends to her health coverage through marriage. Now, I'm not sure there's anything wrong with people doing that, and it's certainly not the best argument against why truly committed polyamorous groups shouldn't have the right to marry, but again, the ultimate result would be bad for marriage as an institution. In this case, health insurers would simply stop extending benefits to spouses, or do so at exorbitant cost. Again, I'm not sure what's right or wrong here, but it would require a fundamental shift in our understanding of what marriage is. I don't think we, as a society, are ready for that. And I don't see the need to implement it at any cost, as I do in the case of gay marriage.
Posted by withers at February 26, 2004 02:07 PMYou say, "I don't see the need to implement it at any cost, as I do in the case of gay marriage." And I wonder, what makes one relationship more worthy of privilege than the other? What makes one practice less disciminatory than the other?
Specifically, when Kevin and I were involved with Karina, who lived in Australia, she would come over here for months at a time and then go back to Australia -- we did that for years, and that stop-and-go long-distance undoubtedly contributed to the ending of the relationship. If we had had the option of getting married, and all living in the same country, then things might have ended up very differently. Heterosexual couples have that privilege now; homosexual couples may soon have it. How is it in any way fair to deny that option to us?
You also refer to the "abuse of the benefits of marriage" -- speaking as someone who can name a dozen green card marriages off the top of her head, I can only think it naive if you don't believe that marriage is being used solely for its legal benefits a great deal of the time -- and that's without even considering all the women who do still marry for economic support. Given the immense social pressures against poly relationships, I hardly think you'd see a lot of roommates just running out to join a group marriage -- not when even being in such a relationship now brings public scorn, anger, and the risk of your children being taken away from you.
Your legal assessment is interesting, but to a layman, it seems like a fairly simple accommodation could be made by separating out some elements of the marriage as being appropriate to such a legal unity (and that in cases of conflict between spouses, appropriate paperwork addressing such issues would be required to be filed in advance -- i.e., that if you wanted to join a group marriage, you would first be required to file a Living Will). That's just one example, but given that I do know poly families who have gone to the trouble to create such legal documents for themselves, it seems like it wouldn't be difficult at all to standardize them in an appropriate manner.
Even with the health insurance issue, it would be easy to standardize at something like: first spouse gets equivalent health benefits (a leftover, by the way, of a marriage structure in which women didn't work and didn't have health benefits of their own, and which really should only apply logically to non-working, child-raising partners). In a three-person relationship, all parties have their benefits cut by something like one-third, since presumably, there are more incomes at play, and need would be lesser. And so on.
Sure, all of this involves a fundamental redefinition of what marriage is, but we're already doing that, and we'll need to do it even more for homosexual marriages to become legalized. Frankly, I think what your argument comes down to is a) some of this would be hard, and b) I don't care about multi-person relationships the way I do about homosexual relationships.
Neither of which seem like good reasons to me to avoid the issue.
Posted by: Mary Anne at February 26, 2004 03:16 PMI want to clarify that I'm not arguing that we should be fighting for all of these changes to marriage right now -- questions of effective political/legal action are complex, and frankly beyond my ability to judge. It may well not be the right time -- the right time might not come for decades, if at all.
But that doesn't mean that people of good conscience shouldn't at least try to figure out for themselves what the correct moral actions should ideally be -- what shape non-discriminatory, socially-effective, love-affirming marriages might look like. You need to know what you're fighting towards, if you're going to fight effectively at all.
Posted by: Mary Anne at February 26, 2004 03:32 PMMary Anne--I don't quite know how respond to your larger point, partly because your disagreement is with what Matt said and Matt and I aren't in quite the same place on this, but mostly because I completely disagree with your assertion that we're currently in the business of trying to fundamentally redefine marriage.
Mostly what I'm wondering in response to your comment here, though, is what actual relevance your personal experience with Kevin and Karina has to the larger discussion. Marriage would have been on the table for the three of you in a way that it hasn't been for just the two of you? Marriage was the only way to bring yourselves to commit to living in the same place? Marriage would have done something to your relationship that y'all couldn't do without it? Long-distance relationships are always difficult, and international ones doubly so, but I'm not sure what point you're making.
Posted by: Susan at February 26, 2004 04:37 PMAll I meant was that we (Kevin and Karina and I) didn't have the *option* of getting married and thus easily getting to live in the same country, as so many heterosexual couples (such as Karen and Par) do, and as homosexual couples may soon be able to. I'm not saying we would have necessarily chosen to marry, but in any moral sense, we should have had that option -- if marriage is actually going to be about love and commitment, as people generally seem to want it to be.
I don't really know how to answer your other point -- I don't see how you can argue that this ongoing discussion of gay marriage isn't a fundamental redefinition of the standard cultural concept of marriage. I think it's a good redefinition, and I'm all in favor of broadening the concept, but when you have to change the language of the vows themselves from husband and wife to spouse and spouse, then I think it's pretty clear that you're redefining something that has had huge cultural and historical weight, an assumption of heterosexuality so basic that one didn't even *have* to define marriage as between a man and a woman -- that was the default, and the only religious, legal, or socially ceremonial way a marriage happened.
Unless, of course, you're in countries where heterosexual monogamy is not the default definition for marriage, in which case it would often be between a man and many women, or occasionally (as with Nepal, where the practice is fairly common), between a woman and multiple men. Models do exist for polygamous structures, and while I wouldn't necessarily choose any of those models for the U.S., it's certainly feasible for us to create our own.
Perhaps my perspective on all this is colored by the fact that my own parents had an arranged marriage; they met for the first time not long before the wedding. In Sri Lanka, it was certainly clear to them that marriage was about partnership and financial stability and child-rearing -- and if you were very lucky, occasionally, "love will come", as the aunties say. Do my parents love each other, or did they ever? Why is that anyone else's business but theirs?
It's a funny concept overall, to be honest -- this linking of sexual legality with love and partnership, etc. and so on. I know of at least two marriages among friends of mine that have become essentially sexless; in some sense, they're just roommates living together now, who may or may not love each other, and who happen to have the privileges of marriage. I know other marriages that will likely never lead to children. In other times and places, those woudn't be marriages. A barren wife would be cast off, and the marriage annulled.
I admit to a tremendous personal fondness for the idea of linking marriage and love; it's a beautiful dream, a lovely fairy tale, which occasionally even comes true. But I do think there's a huge American cultural blind spot about this issue, a willful desire to believe in the fairy tale story, to the exclusion of all other possibilities. There's so much emotional weight to this topic, that even when we all try to be logical and rational about it, it's immensely difficult to carry off. So much of personal response to the idea of marriage isn't rational -- it's purely and emphatically emotional.
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