It's interesting that there has been so much acrimony in the ummah (the Muslim world) about the legalization of same-sex marriage in the US. After all, they have long had plural marriage and we have long forbidden it. But isn't that the next logical step? And who would be more comfortable in plural marriage than bisexuals? Not that I am necessarily advocating anything, I am simply pointing out logical contradictions rooted in culture and posing questions. As I see it, marriage is a religious sacrament, a declaration of union in love before the Almighty. Logically, therefore, where the state holds itself to be separate from any establishment of religion, the state must give full faith and credit to any marriage performed by any ordained religious authority.
Will Utah lead the charge? I see that a trio in Montana has already applied for a second marriage license. On further consideration, it makes sense that a mountain state other than Utah might be the first to budge on plural marriage. Those Mormons who practice plural marriage have been used to doing so on the sly for more than a century. Due to the history of persecution that came before that, I wonder how keen the LDS Church is to change its official position on the issue. In general, religious institutions tend to be conservative and slow to change. The LDS Church has gone to great pains to shape its image as a mainstream religion, to the point that Mitt Romney's faith was far less of a political issue than was John Kennedy's. On the other hand, Warren Jeffs wouldn't get many votes outside of his own family... with good reason. With respect to plural marriage, the path back to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young might be longer than the journey from New York to Utah.
It should also be considered that the Muslim population of the United States is increasing. Their political problem is that 200 million ignorant bubbas equate their religion with terrorism, so how anxious are they going to be to push plural marriage as a political agenda?
I have known a threesome in Palo Alto and another in Sausalito. Both were polyandrous (one woman, two men), as opposed to polygynous. The members of both groups were white, secular, upscale, and tech-savvy. Intelligent, well-educated, and witty, they were busily about making good lives for themselves, not about making their domestic arrangements a political issue. One suspects that de facto plural marriage is more commonly practiced in the US than is generally understood.
Both of the aforementioned groups were childless, but suppose a group marriage produced children? In a polyandrous marriage, paternity would have been in doubt in an age before DNA testing; this would appear to be less of a concern nowadays, unless brothers married the same woman. In any case, right or wrong, one of them would be named as the father on the birth certificate.
What are the state’s compelling interests in regulating marriage? The time was when many states maintained that they had an interest in prohibiting the intermarriage of religions and/or races; this is no longer the case. Also a thing of the past is the state promotion of high birth rates. A longstanding state interest has been in controlling the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, thus premarital blood testing; however, three people can be tested as well as two, so the argument of compelling state interest gets no traction on this issue.
For the most part, family law concerns the disposition of property and the assignment of child custody and visitation rights in the event of the dissolution of a marriage. One can foresee that that plural marriage might make divorces even messier than they already tend to be. As a law student, it’s difficult for me not to come out in favor of this; I’m going to need to find work after graduation. But seriously, I don’t see that there is a state interest in limiting the messiness of divorces that outweighs an individual’s right to love, cohabit, and intermingle property as one chooses. What is the state’s compelling interest in abridging certain pursuits of happiness out of concern that they may have a lower probability of stability or may lead to misery? This is a private matter that is best left to individual judgment. The pursuit of happiness, being an inalienable right, includes pursuits that may fail; indeed, the pursuit of misery is arguably an inalienable right.
It is now possible to treat mitochondrial diseases by destroying the defective mitochondrion of one woman’s egg and replacing it with the healthy mitochondrion of a second woman. Thus the child inherits the nuclear DNA of the father and the first woman as well as the mitochondrial DNA of the second woman. Genetically, the child has two mothers, and may pass on to the next generation the genes of all three parents. Suppose the three parents wanted to be married? Is there a compelling state interest in discriminating against one of the child’s mothers? Such a case might be the best legal test, as there would be a strong bioethical argument in favor of plural marriage. But, if such a legal case were successful, the state could not then limit plural marriage to mitochondrial therapy cases, for doing so would elevate the rights of childbearing unions over childless unions, and thereby violate “equal protection of the laws.”
Thomas Gangale's Lies and Politics
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