*tossing trackbacks at Jeff*
I could just email Jeff this, but I’m in a ranty mood tonight, so I’m going to post about it. Jeff cites a columnist who cites a Canadian study which found that Canada can’t really ban polygamy while also permitting same-sex marriage. Therefore, he argues:
If we can take the exact same arguments people use in support of same-sex marriage — that heterosexual marriage only is discriminatory, that we shouldn’t legislate morality, that marriage is a personal matter and not a civil one — and use them to support something as obviously disturbing and depraved as polygamy, doesn’t that mean those arguments are nonsense?
Well, no that’s not what that means, and for one very significant reason.
Government is a simple creature.
Think of it this way. As a practical matter, one’s marital status only matters to government for a few very finite purposes. There’s taxation, inheritance, next-of-kin stuff like who gets to decide when to unplug the ventilator, child custody issues, and as anyone who has ever watched Law & Order knows, the rights of spouses to not incriminate one another in a criminal proceeding. There might be a couple of others, but it all comes down basically to a question of who-gets-what.
For those civil purposes, it does not particularly matter whether there is a man and a woman or two men or two women or whatever. The point is, there are two. And in a relationship of two, it’s very easy for Mungo government to decide that both partners are equal owners of community property, they can claim each other as dependents for tax purposes, they can each make medical decisions for the other, etc. And really, it’s not even that easy- Terri and Michael Schiavo taught us that government doesn’t have that solid of a grasp on the rights of spouses to make medical decisions for each other, and don’t we all know someone with some horror story about child custody arrangements that don’t work for anyone?
There’s no fundamental legal reason why a person with a vagina is better suited for making care decisions for a person with a penis than another person with a penis is. There’s no magical combination of heterogenous genitalia that makes community property work. It’s still a fairly standard set of rights, in a civil sense, as long as it’s two people. There just aren’t that many possible permutations of how taxes and property and power of attorney should work.
Polygamists, on the other hand, are far more complicated. Even with just three people in a relationship, how is government supposed to figure things out? Are A, B, and C all equally partners? Or does A have two partners, B and C, who aren’t particularly into each other? What if A is incapacitated and B and C don’t agree on treatment decisions? Are A, B, and C really financially interdependent or are they just trying to get out of taxes?
Mungo can’t sort out that many choices in a practical manner, because as soon as a legal relationship is more than two people, the question of who-gets-what become far more complex. Marriage between two people, from a legal standpoint, is a fairly one-size-fits-all proposition. Not so with polygamy. What polygamists need is not marriage, it’s articles of incorporation.