My fellow SINner recently made the argument for legalizing plural marriage:
…the reasons between a man and a woman, or the reasons between a same-sex couple for getting married shouldn’t get a different legal status than the reasons between three men, or those between three women and two men or any other kind of configuration you can think of.
I’m going to disagree here, not because of the reasons that motivate people to get married, but rather because of the inherent unfairness that would arise from multiple marriage as a matter of civil law.
To take perhaps the most obvious example, certain monetary benefits legally accrue to a surviving spouse. Recall that Edie Windsor, lead plaintiff in the case against DOMA, was suing for the right to invoke an unlimited spousal tax exemption to federal estate taxes. Plural marriage would allow for an unlimited number of spouses to invoke this tax exemption, legally splitting the estate and thereby decreasing the probability of future estate taxes ever being applied.
At the other end of the income scale, surviving spouses may be entitled to Social Security death benefits which vary based on how much the decedent paid into the system. Five surviving spouses means five times the payout, unless the law is rewritten to include a multiple partner formula, and an analogous problem will crop up wherever a legal right to payment is modified by spousal status.
Apart from tax breaks and public payouts, there are plenty of other legal privileges which we reserve solely to spouses. Right now there is only one person in the world who can refuse to testify against me in court by invoking spousal immunity. As a polygamist, however, I could criminally conspire with all of my wives, safe in the knowledge that none of them could be compelled to testify against me or one another.
To take one final example (more or less at random) from U.S. law, those wishing to obtain permanent residency in the United States are treated differently if they are married to an American citizen. Under the reforms proposed by my esteemed colleague, I could marry any number of Middle Eastern freethought bloggers solely for the purpose of getting them legally into the United States. Probably this would be for the best, in my case, but putting that amount of immigration authority into private hands would surely be worrisome to our xenophobic electorate, not to mention the folks at Homeland Security. More to the point, though, it would be fundamentally unequal, unfairly privileging multiple marriage.
It doesn’t matter where you look in the United States Code, basically every spousal privilege and exemption is written with two people in mind. Many of them are explicitly symmetrical bilateral relationships. Most of them would have to be rewritten to accommodate multiple marriage, and many would unfairly privilege or penalize either couples or multiples no matter how hard you try to reform them.
Even if we conclude that plural marriage should be legalized, let us not pretend that the process will be anywhere so simple as that of recognizing the equality of same-sex and opposite-sex couples, which required only striking down state bans, along with archaic gender-specific laws such as coverture.
Finally, given that the primary beneficiaries of plural marriage reform in the United States would probably be openly patriarchal religious fundamentalists (such as the FLDS) I think it is appropriate to ask whether such reforms would do more harm than good.
Your thoughts?
