I obviously can't summarize the all changes to family law and I'm not a lawyer, but here are a few ideas:
- When 2 or more people get married, a new legal entity of the marriage is created. It has members, property and an estate. It pays taxes
- Divorce is from the perspective of a person leaving the marriage and leaves with 1/n of the marital property
- Reform child legitimacy laws (legitimacy doesn't matter, the state advocates for the well-being of the child)
- Rights normally reserved for a spouse are extended to all spouses (such as hospital visitation)
- Mandate that policies that extend to a spouse (such as life insurance) get changed to cover all spouses
And a bunch more stuff I'm sure I haven't thought about. Here's the thing though; I know I'm so incredibly unlikely to see it happen in my lifetime that it feels like a waste of time to get into the details of changing the law. Instead I spend my time on is making my relationships work and giving support to others about how to have happy and healthy non-monogamous relationships.
Right, what I'm asking for is an existing proposal with broad support in the poly community that could plausibly be implemented given public support. If no such thing exists, then I don't think you can really claim just now that anyone's fundamental rights are being violated. You have to at least be clear about what you are asking for. If the poly community can put forward a concrete proposal and get some kind of a consensus behind it then great - you have my support.
Well, yeah, kinda? Otherwise what are we supposed to do to fix it? Indeed, it took the gay rights movement some time to converge on gay marriage as a goal. (Although they don't see it this way, gay marriage is actually a huge policy win for social conservatives! The traditional nuclear family survives with a minor modification.)
I'm not saying all this just to be difficult. There are genuinely so many ways poly relationships could be legally recognized. For example, would merely removing the prohibition on bigamy be sufficient? Or do we need group marriages rather than some combination of pairwise marriages between members of the group? How does divorce work? If A, B, C and D are in a poly marriage and A and B want to remove C, but D doesn't, how is that resolved?
I'm not in any way saying that there could not be answers to these questions, or that no-one has yet suggested answers. I just expect any serious advocacy for poly marriage to demonstrate a consensus across a wide range of the community on what the correct answers are. In the case of gay marriage this was much easier to achieve. Once gay rights advocates agreed on gay marriage as a goal, it was almost immediately clear how gay marriage would work. This simply isn't the case for poly marriage.
Given polygamous marriages have existed for thousands of years, and remain legally recognised in over 50 countries today – mostly Muslim majority states, although some countries without a Muslim majority legally recognise it for their Muslim minority only, e.g. India and Singapore, and some African countries, e.g. South Africa, allow it for people of any religion (although South Africa limits it only to members of indigenous ethnic groups which have a cultural tradition of polygamy) – I don't see what's so hard about legalising polygamy in Western countries. This is not some radical new idea, it is something very common in human history, and even legally allowed in roughly a quarter of the countries in the world today.
Western countries would want to make the institution non-discriminatory, which would mean: (1) allow women to have multiple husbands, as well as allowing men to have multiple wives; (2) allow same-sex polygamy, so a woman could have multiple wives or a man multiple husbands; (3) require knowledge and consent, so a person cannot marry a new spouse without consent of their existing spouse(s), and the new spouse must be aware of those existing spouse(s); (4) open to people of all religions and none, instead of being for Muslims only, or being for members of certain ethnic groups only
(3) actually already exists in some countries – for example, Singapore requires consent of existing spouse to contract a valid polygamous marriage – so that element isn't new. (Although some other countries allow a husband to take a second wife without the first wife's consent.)
(4) isn't historically novel either – although in recent times, Islam has been the only major religion to commonly allow polygamy, it has been widespread in human history and has never been unique to Islam. Indeed, polygamy for non-Muslims is legal in a number of African countries, for example South Africa – former South African President Jacob Zuma legally has four wives, and he isn't Muslim, he follows Pentecostal Christianity
Nor is (1) historically novel – a number of traditional cultures have polyandry, although in the contemporary world no country legally recognises it. (Well, apparently, polyandry is theoretically legal in Gabon, but unknown in practice.)
The only element of the above that's truly historically novel is (2), allowing same-sex polygamy. But, I don't see how that historical novelty is an issue. There's nothing special about same-sex polygamy which makes it somehow more complex than opposite-sex polygamy is.
> For example, would merely removing the prohibition on bigamy be sufficient? Or do we need group marriages rather than some combination of pairwise marriages between members of the group?
Compared to multiple concurrent two-person marriages, group marriage is historically very rare, and isn't legally recognised in any country today. Given that, I think it would be most logical to start with pairwise marriage only. If people really want group marriage, they can campaign for that separately. Given a group marriage can be simulated by a collection of pairwise marriages between the group members, does the lack of group marriage – in a society which allows polygamous pairwise marriage – really pose any issue?
> Once gay rights advocates agreed on gay marriage as a goal, it was almost immediately clear how gay marriage would work. This simply isn't the case for poly marriage.
That really isn't true. Given over 50 countries worldwide already have poly marriage, we can just do what they do, minus the discriminatory parts, none of which are essential to the concept.
