Polygamous Montana Trio Applies For Wedding License

Let's see here -- we have some Middle eastern countries where the more powerful men have many wives, where men in general control the sexuality of women, where ancient patriarchal patterns prevail, and where the pent-up sexual frustration of the men without sexual outlet manifests itself in all sorts of truly delightful ways.


...... and we need to regress our society back to such a primitive state why, again?

finebead said:

That is because we move forward to more enlightened positions, and these tend to work better for EVERYONE. We move forward to morally superior positions. We have not moved backward, thanks to the supreme court.

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Since the concepts of moving forward or backwards, and more or less enlightened, as well as morally superior and inferior are purely subjective concepts you have no argument here. I agree that we have a majority in this country that would agree with you, but that makes the position no less or more subjective.

You have not even proffered an argument an argument why recognition of polygamy is a move forward for society so it does NOT follow than numerous wives should be covered by state and federal benefits, when the systems clearly were not designed to support that type of relationship. The statistics don't work is you radically change the underlying assumptions. So, why do you think they should all be covered when the systems were not designed to do that?

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It does follow, but you are clouded by certain assumptions. Assumption based, I readily admit, on the current structure, which would need to change in order for polygamy to work as a legal entity within the US. I do not deny that the systems were not designed for more than 2 individuals within a single marriage, but the country has adapted before. Our laws were not designed to handle all the new things that arose from the internet. Yet we adapted, such as with internet bully and stalking laws, as a minor example. We are constantly creating and changing and that which we had designed for before has to either be adapted or changed out for something new. Do you think that the original laws governing free speech and free press and such were designed with radio and television and internet in mind? we had to adapt and/or create new laws to account for these changes. Why do you think that we would no need to make changes?

The answer is obvious. You will not have children with your 9 children, but in most cases you will have children with your spouse or spouses. Therefore in most cases, a plural marriage would end with many more than nine people in it. That is why if you enter a plural marriage, you should pay a higher "family coverage" health insurance rate. Its the same reason that family coverage costs more than single, or employee + spouse coverage. More people potentially and generally spend more on health care, therefore the premium increases. That is the way insurance works.

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I don't necessarily disagree that if a family grows and continues to grow that they shouldn't have to pay more for various services. If a couple keeps pushing out kids, then yeah, the premiums should be allowed to go up. I only note that if we're basing such things on family size then it is on family size, regardless of who is in the family, kids or adults. A household of two adults and 8 kids, would be the same as 4 adults and 4 kids. Hell I would not have an issue if it were separated by adult and child, that when an child becomes an adult and remains living with the parents and still on their insurance, that the premiums shift from, say 2 adults and 1 child to 3 adults.

iguanaman said:

I find it quite amusing that homophobes seem to think the polygamy and SSM are related. The truth is that polgamy is only legal in muslim countries that deny gays even basic rights. So the truth is the legalization of SSM makes polygamy even less likely to accepted. None of the 21 countries that have endorsed SSM have allowed polygamy too. The idea that we will be the 1st is laughable.

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Whether you intended to or not, you just put forth a major correlation/causation fallacy. Polygamy is practiced in many countries where is it not legal, just without the legal paperwork thus making no conflict between the poly family and the government. In some places there were other laws that tried to cover that bypass, such as Utah's cohabitation laws, which were finally shot down.

You also have another major logic fail. We weren't the first country to allow interracial marriage. We weren't the first country to allow SSM. But we were fighting for those rights when other countries made them legal. Thus the fight goes on and whether the US is first or not remains to be seen. But the goal is not to be first with polygamy, but to get it passed.

finebead said:

The characteristic of being gay is possessed by a large percentage of the worlds population and it always has been. Estimates vary from 5 - 10% of the population, both male and female. That would make being gay a normally observed human variation in the population. Normal is not bad.

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Statistically speaking, which is what you are seeming to do, normal is neither good nor bad. Good or bad are subjective terms. In statistics, normal only refers to that which fall within a certain range. Depending on what you are looking at normal can indeed be bad.

From the point of view of the state, marriage is not about romantic love, it is about legal rights and responsibilities; rights that people get to enjoy because they chose to commit to a relationship for life, and responsibilities they must live up to within the marriage and afterward if the marriage does not survive.

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And this would differ between a 2 person marriage and a 4 person marriage how?

maquiscat said:

But the goal is not to be first with polygamy, but to get it passed.

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I wish you luck. There are lessons that you can learn from the SSM issue: 1) that it is possible to turn around a blanket rejection of your position to an acceptance with reason, struggle and hard work, and 2) that you've about 50 years of hard yakka ahead of you, since LGBT faced similar hostility to that you are confronting as recently as the 1960s.

CriticalThought said:

You assume that wealthy women have an interest in marrying many men. I see little evidence to support it. And really all I need it a rational state interest. A societal imbalance makes that cut easily.

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At the very least a compelling state interest and show that the current law is narrowly tailored (there goes the "we need to outlaw polygamy altogether because some men will take far too many wives" argument).

Then again, gay marriage was legalized without any consideration of state interests. The opinion ignored precedent on that. Not saying that would happen in a future case, just that it could.

Andalublue said:

I wish you luck. There are lessons that you can learn from the SSM issue: 1) that it is possible to turn around a blanket rejection of your position to an acceptance with reason, struggle and hard work, and 2) that you've about 50 years of hard yakka ahead of you, since LGBT faced similar hostility to that you are confronting as recently as the 1960s.

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Or, he could just move to Yemen, or Afghanistan, instead.

such progress!

Taylor said:

At the very least a compelling state interest and show that the current law is narrowly tailored (there goes the "we need to outlaw polygamy altogether because some men will take far too many wives argument).

Then again, gay marriage was legalized without any consideration of state interests. The opinion ignored precedent on that. Not saying that would happen in a future case, just that it could.

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It doesn't have to be a "compelling state interest". It only has to be a reasonably related state interest. The state interests argued in the cases were considered, and rightfully rejected because they either weren't real state interests or they weren't related in any way to allowing/denying same sex couples from getting married.

Caine said:

So... then when is the state going to force the unmarried to wed against their will?

I was referring to the fact that if someone cannot find a partner because polygamy has created a shortage of available women, oh god-damned well.

Did you even read the chain of posts I was commenting to before throwing this comment in there?

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I wasn't debating... it was just a flippant comment.

roguenuke said:

It doesn't have to be a "compelling state interest". It only has to be a reasonably related state interest. The state interests argued in the cases were considered, and rightfully rejected because they either weren't real state interests or they weren't related in any way to allowing/denying same sex couples from getting married.

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No, state interests were not mentioned, no test was applied.

I don't know where everyone is getting the idea that you need something less than a compelling state interest, did we recently negate decades of legal precedent?

finebead said:

Here is a typical polygamous family with Dad, 4 wives and 17 children (that's a total of 22 people in the family). If all the marriages were legal, I don't think an insurance company is going to want to cover them for the same premium that they cover the typical american family of 4.

The show follows the lives of advertising salesman Kody Brown (46), his wives Meri Barber (44), Janelle (45), Christine (42) and Robyn Sullivan (36) and their seventeen total children. In the first season the show televised Brown's courting and eventual marriage of his fourth wife, Robyn Sullivan, who herself had three children from a previous marriage.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Wives

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ROFLMFAO!!!! You're basing typical poly families off a TV reality show?!? Seriously? If anyone else tried that, say with Wives of Jersey Shore (or whatever the title of the show with Sookie in it) as to how New Jersey women behave, you and everyone on this site would have laughed them back to Essembly (dated reference for any who might get it.). You need to do a lot better to show the Brown family as the typical poly family.

So, you miss the point. The premium for family coverage can be capped at 4 people simply because that is on average how many people are in the typical american family, per the census data. If that were to swell substantially due to the introduction of polygamy, the health insurance policies would have to be rewritten to cover that with a new family class called "plural" or something, unless you want to pay for their expenses in your rate, and I do not.

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Now you need to show that poly families are of such a size as to raise this average substantially. As noted, I do not have an issue if a policy increases in the premiums if the family size goes above, say, 8, but that applies to 8, regardless of the combination of children/adults.

In fact the Dad may not be able to afford his plural family period. I posted above that 65% of plural families are on welfare, and there is a reason for that. The father cannot cover all the expenses for his large family without help from the state. That is another argument against polygamy as a viable institution, it is not generally economically viable.

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That is a skewed statistic based upon the FLDS where the women are typically not working. Using them as the example of polygamy is like using WBC as the example of Christianity. I have yet to see a study that went about finding the other poly families in the country today.

Andalublue said:

Only if you assume that there are far more of them than there are gay men, bi with other men, or just plain asexual. is there any evidence that this is the case?

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And thus makes my point. Talk about an imbalance rarely seems to take into account all these variations in sexuality and even those who, while sexually active, may never want to get married.

Gardener said:

Let's see here -- we have some Middle eastern countries where the more powerful men have many wives, where men in general control the sexuality of women, where ancient patriarchal patterns prevail, and where the pent-up sexual frustration of the men without sexual outlet manifests itself in all sorts of truly delightful ways.


...... and we need to regress our society back to such a primitive state why, again?

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False premise. Why ever would you assume that by making polygamy legal in this country that we would not allow women to have multiple husbands, or poly families where there are more than one husband AND more than one wife?

Andalublue said:

I wish you luck. There are lessons that you can learn from the SSM issue: 1) that it is possible to turn around a blanket rejection of your position to an acceptance with reason, struggle and hard work, and 2) that you've about 50 years of hard yakka ahead of you, since LGBT faced similar hostility to that you are confronting as recently as the 1960s.

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As did interracial couples. But most of the poly community, FLDS idiots aside, recognize that we need other changes to our laws before we can really go ahead and push for legal acceptance. The Utah cohabitation law is a prime example.

Taylor said:

Then again, gay marriage was legalized without any consideration of state interests. The opinion ignored precedent on that. Not saying that would happen in a future case, just that it could.

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As was interracial marriage. Your point?

Gardener said:

Or, he could just move to Yemen, or Afghanistan, instead.

such progress!

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Nope. In those countries, I couldn't have my husband as well as my two wives.

maquiscat said:

False premise. Why ever would you assume that by making polygamy legal in this country that we would not allow women to have multiple husbands, or poly families where there are more than one husband AND more than one wife?

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It isn't a matter of allowing or not allowing, but the reality of how it is actually practiced in the vast majority of cases.

Gardener said:

It isn't a matter of allowing or not allowing, but the reality of how it is actually practiced in the vast majority of cases.

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And in showing us what this supposed majority of cases is, are you going to simply include only the FLDS and the ME muslims, or are you going to actually include the rest of us polys?

maquiscat said:

You assume that wealthy men have an interest in marrying that many women. While I see evidence that many would keep a bunch around for their various "interest", why would they necessarily want to marry them, again FLDS aside.

That aside what about all the women unavailable now because they are lesbian, bi with other women, or just plain asexual? Is that not also creating an imbalance? I also note that you have not addressed the poly families like mine and others where there is a mix of men and women.

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History shows otherwise. You are being far from realistic about it. I provided a rationale for why polygamy should not be legalised, and it is a legitimate one, so if you want to legalize polygamy then that is irrelevant to the facts. I am not going to try to convince people that polygamy should not be legalised, only dismiss the baseless notion that it is the same as same-sex marriage.

Taylor said:

At the very least a compelling state interest and show that the current law is narrowly tailored (there goes the "we need to outlaw polygamy altogether because some men will take far too many wives" argument).

Then again, gay marriage was legalized without any consideration of state interests. The opinion ignored precedent on that. Not saying that would happen in a future case, just that it could.

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To the contrary, you clearly did not read the ruling.

CriticalThought said:

History shows otherwise. You are being far from realistic about it. I provided a rationale for why polygamy should not be legalised, and it is a legitimate one, so if you want to legalize polygamy then that is irrelevant to the facts. I am not going to try to convince people that polygamy should not be legalised, only dismiss the baseless notion that it is the same as same-sex marriage.

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History shows otherwise about slavery being immoral. Hell it still goes on today.

I do agree that polygamy is not the same as SSM and at no point have I tried to equate them. I only seek to counter bad arguments against poly.

maquiscat said:

As was interracial marriage. Your point?

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Not true, the Loving opinion deals with them explicitly and extensively.

maquiscat said:

It does follow, but you are clouded by certain assumptions. Assumption based, I readily admit, on the current structure, which would need to change in order for polygamy to work as a legal entity within the US. I do not deny that the systems were not designed for more than 2 individuals within a single marriage, but the country has adapted before. Our laws were not designed to handle all the new things that arose from the internet. Yet we adapted, such as with internet bully and stalking laws, as a minor example. We are constantly creating and changing and that which we had designed for before has to either be adapted or changed out for something new. Do you think that the original laws governing free speech and free press and such were designed with radio and television and internet in mind? we had to adapt and/or create new laws to account for these changes. Why do you think that we would no need to make changes?

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Thank you for rightly admitting that polygamy does not work economically the way the systems are currently designed.

As far as changing the system to accommodate polygamists, this is an entirely different kettle of fish than gay marriage. I have shown that gay people don't have a choice, this is NOT LEARNED BEHAVIOR. The mental health professionals have said we don't need to change the gay person (it is harmful to do so), we need to change society, in order to accommodate a normally occurring variation in a substantial portion of humanity across all societies and across all time.

Polygamy is a choice. It is learned behavior, taught in certain sects and those are the only places that it exists. Therefore there is no moral obligation to accommodate it, unless you can demonstrate one.

But remember this, the Mormon Faith long ago outlawed polygamy, so there is NO institutional support for polygamy in the US:

In 1890, church president Wilford Woodruff issued a Manifesto that officially terminated the practice of polygamy.[6] Although this Manifesto did not dissolve existing plural marriages, relations with the United States markedly improved after 1890, such that Utah was admitted as a U.S. state. After the Manifesto, some Mormons continued to enter into polygamous marriages, but these eventually stopped in 1904 when church president Joseph F. Smith disavowed polygamy before Congress and issued a "Second Manifesto", calling for all plural marriages in the church to cease. Several small "fundamentalist" groups seeking to continue the practice split from the LDS Church, including the Apostolic United Brethren and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS Church). Meanwhile, the LDS Church adopted a policy of excommunicating members found practicing polygamy, and today actively seeks to distance itself from fundamentalist groups that continue the practice.[7] On its web site, the church states that "the standard doctrine of the church is monogamy" and that polygamy was a temporary exception to the rule.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism_and_polygamy

So if the Mormons moved forward to monogamy long ago, what is the moral imperative to justify the learned behavior of polygamy? We have a set of laws, live within them.

CriticalThought said:

To the contrary, you clearly did not read the ruling.

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Feel free to quote the parts you think most support your claim.

maquiscat said:

ROFLMFAO!!!! You're basing typical poly families off a TV reality show?!? Seriously? If anyone else tried that, say with Wives of Jersey Shore (or whatever the title of the show with Sookie in it) as to how New Jersey women behave, you and everyone on this site would have laughed them back to Essembly (dated reference for any who might get it.). You need to do a lot better to show the Brown family as the typical poly family.

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It's one data point, in an area without a lot of data. Do you dispute that Mr. Brown's family has 22 people? I only used the show to demonstrate ONE thing, the SIZE of their family and if it is correct, then the show fulfills that specific mission PERFECTLY. Do you have reliable statistics to show how many polygamist families there are in the US, and what their average family size is. I notice you are not providing ANY data, while criticizing mine. I await your authoritative data.

maquiscat said:

Now you need to show that poly families are of such a size as to raise this average substantially. As noted, I do not have an issue if a policy increases in the premiums if the family size goes above, say, 8, but that applies to 8, regardless of the combination of children/adults.

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I don't have to shown anything, until you offer a coherent argument why the country should adopt plural marriage, when even the moron faith has outlawed the practice.

maquiscat said:

That is a skewed statistic based upon the FLDS where the women are typically not working. Using them as the example of polygamy is like using WBC as the example of Christianity. I have yet to see a study that went about finding the other poly families in the country today.

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Show me. You have no proof. And anyhow, where else would there be a large representation of polygamist families in the US, outside of the FLDS? It seems this is EXACTLY the sample you want to see.