Open thread

... I was reminded of a conversation I had with an American military intelligence officer who was having a supper of Jack Daniel's and Coca Cola at a Kigali bar.

"I heard you're interested in genocide," the American said. "Do you know what genocide is?"

I asked him to tell me.

"A cheese sandwich," he said. "Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich."

I asked him how he figured that.

"What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich?" he said. "Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanity. Where's humanity? Who's humanity? You? Me? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear about the Genocide Convention?"

I said I had.

"That convention," the American at the bar said, "makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich."

From We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch.

Comments

[josh]

Um, I agree, genocide is bad, and should be stopped, but there aren't really any easy answers. What else can be said?

[Brel]

I don't get it.

[Yatima]

Those lines have haunted me for ten years.

[Robb]

I firmly believe that cheese sandwiches are best made with sliced "american" cheese.

/glib

[not_scottbot]

Islands in the Clickstream is no longer really a part of the web, sadly. It would be a fine source for anecdotes from those torturing in our names.

[Tlonista]

[/delurk]

Relevant: an independent tribunal headed by six First Nations chiefs has been formed to investigate mass graves found at former sites of residential schools across Canada. The residential schools -- run by the Canadian government and the Catholic, United and Anglican churches -- operated since the earliest settled European presence in Canada, pretty much, and were explicitly designed to destroy Native culture. Children were often coerced, deprived, abused, and -- now, it seems -- worse. Does my average fellow Canadian give a damn? Do they even know this happened -- cultural genocide right in their own backyards? Probably not. But when you've got ash in your feather dusters, you've got to say something.

Cheese sandwiches, exactly.

[mcc]

News from the Utah 3rd district Republican primary:

Controversy surrounding the massive raid on a polygamous enclave in Texas spilled over into Utah politics Friday during one of the first candidate debates in the 3rd Congressional District race.

Rep. Chris Cannon said the government should not be going after polygamists solely because they practice plural marriage, relying on a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling that protects homosexual relationships.

But his fellow Republican challenger, David Leavitt, who as a county attorney filed bigamy charges against polygamist Tom Green in 2000, said that polygamists should be prosecuted, or it will pave the road to same-sex marriage.

"What's at issue is the redefinition of marriage," Leavitt said during a broadcast debate on KNRS radio. "If we allow two consenting women and a consenting man to redefine what our society says is marriage, then we have opened the door for the redefinition of marriage for same-gender marriage. This is a broader scope than just polygamy."

[Sniffnoy]

Wow, so they've gone from "gay marriage will lead to polygamy" to "polygamy will lead to gay marriage". Amazing.

[Linkmeister]

I read that book about five years ago, and I confess I don't remember the dialogue quoted. But it was a horrific and worthwhile read nonetheless.

[Froborr]

Genocide, like cancer, cannot be cured.

And now you're all saying, "Wait, what? What do you mean cancer can't be cured?"

I mean that cancer can't be cured. Any cell division has a non-zero chance of producing a cancerous cell. The only way to stop that would be to stop mutation, and that would guarantee our extinction sooner, rather than later. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of cancerous cells are neatly and quickly eliminated by our immune systems without us even noticing. Odds are, it's happening inside your body right now.

However, there is a nonzero chance that any given cancerous cell will be beyond your immune system's capacity. That's when cancer happens. Medical science can deal with a lot of these cancers, and is devising better and better treatments every day. Problem is, cancer is a product of mutation, which means that there is no limit to the number of new, never-before-seen cancers that can occur, and no treatment could ever anticipate all the infinitude of possible future cancers.

So, you can reduce the chance that cells will become cancerous by reducing your exposure to carcinogens, but you can never make it zero. You can reduce the chance that your immune system will be unable to handle a cancerous cell by eating a good diet, exercising, and so on, but you can never make it zero. You can reduce the chance that a cancer is untreatable by funding medical research, but you can never make it zero.

The conclusion is inevitable: if you live long enough, you will die of cancer. Depending on how well you take care of yourself and how advanced medicine becomes, "long enough" could be a hundred years or fifty thousand, but nonetheless the point stands: cancer, as a whole, even if we cure every known type of cancer, can never be cured.

Genocide is much the same. It is physically possible for human beings to commit genocide; therefore, somebody, somewhere, is going to try it. You can never eliminate it entirely. It will happen, and if history is any guide, it will happen again, and again, and again, and again.

All you can do is, like cancer, try to reduce the odds of it happening (by reducing the conditions of poverty and dispossession that breed hatred, by severely punishing those who instigate and support genocide, by staying passionately and actively involved in what happens to Those People Over There), and try to fight it when it does happen (with words, with weapons, with money -- with whatever you have on hand). It's not a war you can win, but that doesn't mean you can't win the battle, and it doesn't mean the battle isn't worth fighting.

[Keith]

Wow, so they've gone from "gay marriage will lead to polygamy" to "polygamy will lead to gay marriage". Amazing.

The secret to understanding these sorts of arguments is that they are written on the back of mobius strip.

[Lee Ratner]

As I understand it, the FDLS people legally do not commit bigamy because FDLS have only one legal marriage and their other wives are technically live in "girlfriends." This is extremely unusual but its not actually illegal. They would be violating the law if they had multiple legal marriages at the same time.

This does not mean the raid was wrong. Most of those places seem to be hot bets of child abuse and the state should intervine to prevent such practices. It is the state acting as it should. Just cause they did not legally commit bigamy does not mean they did not commit other crimes.

written on the back of mobius strip

But...but...which side is the back? Brain asplode!

[realityfighter]

That was me at 5:00

[Froborr]

Lee Ratner: I agree wholeheartedly. Which is why I don't see why bigamy is a crime. All the evils bigamy supposedly leads to -- child abuse, spousal abuse, neglect -- are already illegal. If someone can maintain a poly relationship without comitting any of those crimes, and everyone involved is a willing participant, what's the problem?

[Cowboy Diva]

"...everyone involved is a willing participant, what's the problem?"

A: Dogs and cats living together

or

B: Jungle animal instinct; massteria!

but with B everybody gets band uniforms.

[magistra]

If someone can maintain a poly relationship without comitting any of those crimes, and everyone involved is a willing participant, what's the problem?

A lot of feminists (like myself) are against polygamy (multiple wives) because it's so often (historically and currently) linked to oppression of women. It increases the likelihood a husband will neglect his wife, encourages the wives to compete against each other etc. That may not technically be criminal, if it's just low-level behaviour, but it certainly leads to a lot of misery (see numerous Bible stories). And the fact that women may voluntarily get into unequal relationships doesn't stop them being nasty.

[Cat]

Spanish--the site of one of the mass graves--is near my hometown. And some my high school classmates' parents had been in residential schools. It's something I actually care very much about.

It appears that they figure some graves were the results of outbreaks of childhood diseases. Not that it changes that those kids should never have been there in the first place, and weren't even considered human enough to get decent burials.

There is a sort of...something similar in the Manitoulin Island community of M'Chigeeng, formerly West Bay, just outside the First Nations Catholic Church: I remember it as a mound, or a hill of cement or something, composition unremembered because every available inch of surface was covered with gravestones. Entire families seemed to be in there. Though the dates of death all seemed to be around the turn of the century, I don't think they were all in the very same year. But while the other members of my party and I stood marvelling at it, we did raise the possibility of some sort of epidemic. Perhaps those stones were raised retroactively; they all looked to be of about the same design, if I recall correctly. I guess the church might have known, but it was late afternoon and nothing was staffed.

[Jon]

The thing I don't get about bigamy as a crime is that I don't see how it can be a crime that you can actually commit. If you're already legally married, doesn't that automatically invalidate any subsequent marriages? If you can only be legally married to one person at a time, you can't actually violate the law by getting married to a second person, as there is no legally-recognized second marriage. Really, the only crime you can actually commit is attempted bigamy.
Well, I suppose you would also be guilty of some form of fraud as well, but my point is that it's not legally possible to be married to more than one person at a time, therefore being married to more than one person at a time is a crime that is impossible to actually commit.
(Not really making any judgments about bigamy/polygamy, by the way. I have sort of mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, what difference does it make? How is anyone who consents (ah, consent; the all-important qualifier) to be in such a relationship actually harmed? How is society harmed? On the other hand that's sort of a hypothetical assessment, and in the real world it generally does lead to the sort of problems pointed out by magistra.)

[Monin]

"And the fact that women may voluntarily get into unequal relationships doesn't stop them being nasty."

What's the word "women" doing in that sentence where "people" belongs? And further to the same point, people do this without marriage. Marriage is just paperwork. Since polygamy is illegal in many places, what happens is that instead you have 3 (or more) people living together without any paperwork. So now they have all the disadvantages they had with polygamy (one partner gets abused by the others, feels they can't escape etc.) but little of the legal protection.

Obviously a lot of countries have been trying to grant marriage-like protection to other relationships that just look like marriage. There are lots of people out there whose name doesn't appear on their home's deeds, who are not formally identified as the parent or guardian of kids they look after day & night, who rely on someone they have no legal relationship with to provide their groceries, pay the rent and so on. Some of those people are in a relationship with more than one other partner. Typically, "marriage-like" protections extend only to those who could marry, or (in a few cases) some other special classes (e.g. "gay marraige" legal partnerships) and so these larger relationships aren't protected. That's a problem, and not one that will go away by banning the relationships or putting our fingers in our ears.

Now, when a man falls in love with a goat, or a celebrity he has never met, we can persuade ourselves that we serve a genuine public interest in forbidding his relationship. But when everyone involved is a consenting adult, it's hard to justify a blanket prohibition, especially based on concerns that "in some cases" it could lead to abuse, while in the distance we hear the sounds of breaking crockery from another marriage on the rocks. I think the US ban on polygamy can and should go the same way as bans on cousin marriage. Cousin marriage isn't a great idea, but it's not stupid enough or dangerous enough to be worth banning outright, and increasingly the law is agreeing.

[damnedyankee]

As I understand it, the FDLS people legally do not commit bigamy because FDLS have only one legal marriage and their other wives are technically live in "girlfriends."

The term they use is "spiritual marriage", wherein the Prophet (or, after the jailing of Warren Jeffs, his duly appointed representative) essentially "gives" a girl to a follower. It's a dodge to attempt to obey the letter of the law while still creating the conditions of multiple marriage for the community. While there's no paper on file in the local courthouse, in the eyes of the Prophet (and therefore God) they are married.

The FLDS got a lot of coverage by the local free paper when I lived in Phoenix, mainly because nobody was willing to do anything about them despite claims of numerous acts of public fraud and civil rights violations while they lived in Colorado City. It helped that most of the police force in that town were FLDS members.

[Jesurgislac]

Jon: The thing I don't get about bigamy as a crime is that I don't see how it can be a crime that you can actually commit. If you're already legally married, doesn't that automatically invalidate any subsequent marriages?

FWIW, the crime of bigamy in the UK is actually considered to be a double crime: the crime of providing false information to the registrar (in order to get a marriage licence, you must tell the registrar you have either never been married, or are divorced, or widowed) and - if this can be proved - the crime of deceiving and injuring the person who thought they were entering into a legal marriage with you. (Financial injury, usually.)

[Jesurgislac]

Monin: Obviously a lot of countries have been trying to grant marriage-like protection to other relationships that just look like marriage. There are lots of people out there whose name doesn't appear on their home's deeds, who are not formally identified as the parent or guardian of kids they look after day & night, who rely on someone they have no legal relationship with to provide their groceries, pay the rent and so on. Some of those people are in a relationship with more than one other partner. Typically, "marriage-like" protections extend only to those who could marry, or (in a few cases) some other special classes (e.g. "gay marraige" legal partnerships) and so these larger relationships aren't protected. That's a problem, and not one that will go away by banning the relationships or putting our fingers in our ears.

Extending monogamous marriage to apply to same-sex couples as well as mixed-sex couples is a simple provision that doesn't change marriage for anyone.

The provision of "civil unions" - usually for same-sex couples only, sometimes for both same-sex and mixed-sex couples, occasionally for two people who are not a "couple", as with the PACS in France - is usually devised as a defense against religious assholes who think that only a mixed-sex couple who get married should be "allowed" to call their relationship marriage. But this too does not change marriage for anyone else.

Changing marriage for all by reworking marriage legislation fundamentally to make it applicable to three or more people, does change marriage for everyone. This is a case where, if legal protection for multi-way relationships is needed, it makes sense to have a separate institution which will not be called marriage. Marriage is for monogamous couples: poly relationships shall be called Bleargh and no one married shall be able to register a bleargh and no one in a blearg shall be able to get married without first legally dissolving their tie with the bleargh.

Everyone who wants to have a bleargh may now sit down and discuss thoroughly what rights and obligations they want from a bleargh, how they intend to begin and end bleargh, whether a new bleargh is begun with each new member and dissolved when a member leaves, and how all of this is going to be worked out legislatively.

[Lee Ratner]

LDS got a lot of coverage by the local free paper when I lived in Phoenix, mainly because nobody was willing to do anything about them despite claims of numerous acts of public fraud and civil rights violations while they lived in Colorado City. It helped that most of the police force in that town were FLDS members.

The above is a good reason to have police organized at a level above the local community. If the police are locality at the local community level, then crimes committed in the name of the standards of communities like the FLDS flourish because the police share the same standards. If the police are organized at a higher live, than you are more likely to get police outside the community in an area and a more vigorous enforcement of the laws.

[Karen]

On polygamy: There is a perfectly adequate legal vehicle for the polyamorous to delineate their rights and responsibilities: it's called a corporation. In Texas, and I presume most other states, two or more people can form a corporation for "any legal purpose," which could include owning residential property, caring for children, even having sex with each other, although I probably would advise against including that part in the documents filed with the government. New participants could buy shares, and those who want out could sell theirs back. There is some reason to believe that shareholders in a corporation have more legal rights than spouses in a marriage, at least with respect to corporate property.

Forcing polyamorous couples to go the corporation route instead of bleargh (I really like that, by the way) will pretty much eliminate the problem of unwilling or underage participants, since all participants would have to be legally competent to sign a contract. No problem with The Prophet deciding to barter 13-year-olds, since they're not old enough to sign a contract. (Kids who for some reason, such as being in movies, usually have a person called a guardian ad litem appointed for the proceeding.) The fact that no known polygamous sects have made use of this process indicates to me that they don't have any interest in protecting the participants.

[Michelle]

Wow, so they've gone from "gay marriage will lead to polygamy" to "polygamy will lead to gay marriage".

Certainly someone hear has heard the old joke that [insert conservative denomination here]s are opposed to sex because it might lead to dancing?

[aunursa]

Snifnoy: Wow, so they've gone from "gay marriage will lead to polygamy" to "polygamy will lead to gay marriage". Amazing.

Yes, that's bizarre. Is there a society in which the legalization of polygamy preceded the legalization of same-sex marriage?

Jesurgislac: Changing marriage for all by reworking marriage legislation fundamentally to make it applicable to three or more people, does change marriage for everyone.

Howso? I mean, I understand that marriage involving multiple partners may involve more complicated legal aspects than marriage between just two, but how does that change marriage between two people? And if polygamous unions need separate laws or definitions to account for the complexities, why can't they still be recognized as marriages? They may be more complicated to legislate, but they aren't that different ... are they?

Marriage is for monogamous couples

According to whom?

[not_scottbot]

'Marriage is for monogamous couples

According to whom?'

Well, at least in Virginia, according to the law, as adultery is a crime. No Supreme Court decisions on that one, yet.

However, I don't think 'monogamous' was meant quite as strictly as to imply that married individuals could not have sexual relations with anyone apart from their spouse. Unless they want to burn in hell, of course.

[Ryan]

Yeah, Jesurgislac! If you don't like polygamous unions, then don't have one!

[Annonymous]

The real problem is, that most polygamist groups encourage illegal "marriage" for the sole reason that it goes off the record. Many FLDS groups genuinely hate the US government (considering it evil and oppressive) and refer to any attempts to defraud it as "bleeding the beast" and by not legally marrying all of these women these men are cashing in on welfare. Every unmarried woman with a child is technically a "single mother" and is therefore entitled to welfare checks from the government. Many of these checks are cashed and then pumped back into the communities' resources. Other types of fraud are common in these groups and many of the towns receive a disproportionate amount of tax-payer dollars. Source of this information: Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven. Its a good book. Read it and learn.

[Paula]

I saw this comment
http://www.amazon.com/review/R200JVGYAC9O52/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
when checking the review history of 'Bible Reader' on a different book and immediately thought of Left Behind Fridays:

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Books 0ne to five are really good but after that VERY SLOW!, March 26, 2002
By Bible reader "Bible reader"
I started this series because the first book was great. Unfortunately doesn't get any better. The writing is poor and choppy........It is a really easy read but it lacks excitment. I find it hard to read it because the story line is very slow.Got through the series reading only the last two chapter of each remaining book(emphasis mine). Give The Christ Clone trilogy a try first.

[Jesurgislac]

I understand that marriage involving multiple partners may involve more complicated legal aspects than marriage between just two, but how does that change marriage between two people?

Because the marriage between two people ceases to be a unit to which no more spouses can be added, and becomes a unit which can be expanded to infinity.

All marriage legislation in the US and in the UK and indeed in most countries round the world, is written on the principle that a marriage is of two people. This principle affects the rights, responsibilities, and obligations of marriage to a degree I can't begin to outline in a blogpost. Numbers, it turns out, are far more important than gender.

[ajay]

I remember an anecdote from a woman who was watching the news with her husband and (very young) daughter. There had been a flood in Bangladesh that had killed 170,000 people, and the woman made some remark along the lines of "How awful. You can't even imagine 170,000 people dying."
"Of course you can, Mummy," said the daughter. "They're just lots of dots in blue water."

[magistra]

Is there a society in which the legalization of polygamy preceded the legalization of same-sex marriage?

There have been an awful lot of societies historically and currently in which polygamy was legal and same-sex marriage wasn't (or indeed in which same-sex activity was punished (e.g. Old Testament Israel). There have been very few societies in which same-sex marriage has been legal and this a very recent development. (Though there have also been societies without legal systems in which 'marriage' was allowed for same-sex couples in some circumstances: I believe some Native American tribes had such arrangements).

The biggest argument against polygamy is the number of countries today in which it is still standard practice (not just in the Muslim world, it's also many non-Muslim African countries, like Kenya). These are not societies which are positive towards women or where women have equal status. Nor are US sects which have practised polygamy noticeable for their equality. If an institution has been repeatedly shown as harmful for women over millennia, it seems to be somewhat naive just to think that a few extra rules will make it OK.

There are lots of actions that can never be entirely stopped, such as underage drinking, people driving too fast, employers exploiting their workers. That doesn't mean to say that they should therefore be made legal.

[Chris]

The Bangladesh flood anecdote reminds me of the couple of posters in an earlier thread who, if sent back in time to Christmas 2004, wouldn't have particularly cared about warning about the Boxing Day Tsunami. But if those had been 13,000 American dots jumping out of a burning building, now...

[Karen]

After some thought, I believe the most powerful group opposed to polygamy would be the real estate lobby. In most states in the US, a spouse has some legal interest in any property acquired during the marriage. In Texas, spouses automatically own half of it, without a single piece of paper being filed anywhere. Thus, due diligence requires a title search and a search for any spouses or children from that marriage that might have an interest in a piece of property. This isn't all that easy in the current society, especially in states that allow common-law marriage. It would be a nightmare with legal polygamy, because the title search couldn't stop once it found the first marriage and no divorce records.

Again, for the polyamorous who want legal status to their relationship, form a corporation.

[Amaryllis]

There have been an awful lot of societies historically and currently in which polygamy was legal ...

"polygamy" being interpreted as its most common form, "polygyny," or one man with multiple wives. Whereas "polyandry," one woman with multiple husbands, is very rarely encountered, most famously in historic Tibet. In fact, I believe that even societies where polygyny is legal, such as those under Muslim law, explicitly prohibit polyandry. Perhaps because it acts as a de facto method of population limitation, where most pre-industrial societies preferred to encourage a high birth rate. Perhaps because many societies have more "extra" women than extra men. Perhaps because living with one man is hard enough - what woman in her right mind would try it with several?
Not to insult the men, the converse is true too :) Multiple relationships always strike me as very difficult to sustain for everybody involved.
And I don't know of any society where multiple-male/mulitple-female bondings are legal. "Bleargh" would truly be a new thing.

[Froborr]

@magistra: The institution of monogamous marriage has also been used for millennia in countless societies to oppress women. Should we ban monogamous marriage? If women are educated and given the tools to protect themselves, and their potential oppressors are aware of very real consequences for abusing them, if all parties to the marriage enter with full knowledge and a relatively simple, no-fault mechanism exists to dissolve the marriage or allow any members to leave... where's the problem?

Besides, even if 99% of polygamous marriages are harmful to the women in them, preventing that remaining 1% from living their harmless lifestyle is an injustice. Better to improve our mechanisms for protecting women and enabling them to protect themselves, especially since we have to do that anyway.

@Jesu: We've been over this before. You create a legal entity called a "marriage" that consists of at least two people. Once an individual enters a marriage, it is no longer possible to marry that individual; you have to marry the entire marriage, and that requires the informed consent of everyone in the marriage. When you leave a marriage, you get 1/n of its property, where n is the number of individuals in the marriage at the time you leave, unless an agreement exists superseding that (including implicit agreements like "you quit your job and take care of the kids, and I'll support you financially").

You have yet to make a single coherent objection not solved by that proposal, and the only response I've heard from you on it is "it would take too much effort to change the law." That's the most pathetic excuse to permit an injustice to stand I've ever heard.

[Karen]

Froborr, why wouldn't some kind of existing contractual relationship work for polyamorous groups? I've already mentioned corporations, but there are a number of arrangements for multiple person businesses that allow that unit to, frex, own property as a unit. I just don't see any point in creating a bleagh when there are perfectly good systems that can be applied to this purpose.

[Froborr]

And I don't know of any society where multiple-male/mulitple-female bondings are legal.

They are legal and exist in modern-day America, within the "poly" subculture. You don't get the legal rights-and-responsibilities (no visitation rights, no alimony payments, no automatic property-sharing), but the social aspects of marriage are all present.

Also, the majority of people in modern Western society engage in a series of monogamous relationships of varying duration. Serial polygamy is the dominant relational mode today, and many children have multiple legal parents of each gender.

[Froborr]

Karen: main issue I see with a corporation is that Bob can sell his shares in BobSusanMary's MarriageCorp to Steve, and now Susan and Mary are married to Steve without their consent. I don't know of any existing contractual relationship that requires the unanimous consent of all parties before shares can be sold, and that's exactly what's needed in a marriage.

[Karen]

"Consent to sell" agreements are often included in family-owned corporations, where all shareholders have to vote to permit one to sell out. Of course, a violation of such clause would lead to the worst lawsuit in the history of courts, but it's still possible.

I lean toward the contractual model mostly because it embeds that competency requirement. No one under 18 can, in normal cases, sign an enforceable contract. Ergo, there would be no Warren Jeffs with legally-enforceable powers of coercion. I understand, however, that Mr. Jeffs lorded it over his little fiefdom quite thoroughly for a long time flouting the law, so I'm probably unwise to put so much faith in contract law.

[Jesurgislac]

Froborr: @Jesu: We've been over this before.

Yes, we have, but so what? I was right, you were wrong, and you are still wrong. It's Friday! It's too late to start a flamewar over your wrongness when Left Behind will appear in a few hours.

Besides, I am (temporarily) filled with the milk of human kindness and the balm of glorious triumph, because I got a cellphone company to cancel my contract for free like the fine print said they should after they'd been trying to get me to pay them a couple of hundred pounds. There is nothing like kicking a cellphone company's ass to give one kind warm feelings towards the rest of humanity, which I suppose includes you. *makes you a cup of tea and offers you a chocolate biscuit*

You're still wrong. Obviously.

[Karen]

Jesu, I once actually won an argument with fundie over marriage based on cell phone contracts. In the states, many fundies argue that the contractual model of marriage is somehow less stringent than their "covenant" model. I asked if he'd ever tried to get out of his cell phone or gym contract, and he fell silent.

[Jesurgislac]

Karen: Jesu, I once actually won an argument with fundie over marriage based on cell phone contracts. In the states, many fundies argue that the contractual model of marriage is somehow less stringent than their "covenant" model. I asked if he'd ever tried to get out of his cell phone or gym contract, and he fell silent.

Nice one! *offers you a cup of tea and a biscuit* They're oat-and-chocolate-chip.

PS: The last argument that we had on Slacktivist about blearg: King and Huck. Scroll down to foot of first page and click Preview to read the whole thing.

[balt]

Corporations (or other legal entities - an LLC actually probably makes more sense in most states for Karen's legal entity) with restrictions on selling shares are more common than restrictions without. They are usually in the form of shareholder agreements in the case of corporations and operating agreements in the case of LLCs, and they are quite powerful documents provided that they don't leave a shareholder with no way out (what you would do instead is give other shareholders the right of first refusal to buy the shares attempting to be sold, and then fix the price at some rediculously low (but non-zero) amount - So if Bob tried to sell to Steve, Sue and Mary would have the right to buy Bob's shares for the price Bob was deemed to pay for them originally, which was probably set at something like $100 at the begining of the corporation).

The problem with corporations and LLCs is that while they deal with property issues well, they *only* deal with property issues. They can't really resolve the question of who gets to decide whether, when Bob is in a car accident, Sue or Mary or Steve or Bob's mother who never approved of Bob's polyamorous lifestyle gets to decide whether to keep him on a ventilator.

[Cary Bleasdale]

Returning to the subject of Fred's post (if the polygamy discussing was a de-railing, then is this a re-railing?)the quotes he had reminded me of the scene in Hotel Rwanda, with Paul and Colonel Oliver at the bar.

Colonel Oliver: You should spit in my face.
Paul: Excuse me, Colonel?
Colonel Oliver: You’re dirt. We think you’re dirt, Paul.
Paul: Who is we?
Colonel Oliver: The West. All the super powers. Everything you believe in, Paul. They think you’re dirt. They think you’re dumb. You’re worthless.
Paul: I am afraid I don't understand what you are saying, sir.
Colonel Oliver: Oh, come on, Paul, you're the smartest man here. You got 'em all eating out of your hands. You could own this frigging hotel, except for one thing. You're black. You're not even a nigger. You're an African. They’re not going to stay, Paul. They’re not going to stop this slaughter.

[balt]

Also, the direction of this thread = QED for the American military intelligence officer.

OTOH, if I was going to pick the place one was most likely to find a mass grave in the United States, it would be Eldorado.

[magistra]

Besides, even if 99% of polygamous marriages are harmful to the women in them, preventing that remaining 1% from living their harmless lifestyle is an injustice..

No-one is talking about stopping people living in polygamous relationships: what they are talking about is whether people should get special legal privileges/protection if they do so. (Just as civil partnerships are important to gays/lesbians not only for their symbolism, but for their practical benefits (pensions, decisions about what happens to a partner if they need medical treatment and are unable to consent. (Now that's a train-crash waiting to happen for legal polygamy)).

What polygamy conceptually violates is the principle of mutuality in marriage (and civil partnerships, this isn't about sexual orientation). It is the ideal (a fairly recent one historically) that both partners owe the same kind of responsibilities/care to each other. Do two wives of the same husband owe the same kind of care/love to each other as to their husband?

If polygamists want society to accept their relationships as equivalent, I think the onus is on them to demonstrate in their own lives that that kind of mutual/common concern is there, before demanding legal benefits. (Just as once homosexuality was legalised in the UK, gays were able to show publicly that loving, long-term gay relationships were common, which made a big difference to social attitudes).

[charlequin]

@Froborr: the difference here is that altering the definition of marriage to include same-sex pairings alters how the institution interacts with people who have yet to enter it (a single man and a single woman both have the set of all unmarried persons of legal age to choose a marriage partner from, instead of non-overlapping gender limited sets) but it has no effect on those who are already married. Altering marriage into a polygamous unit changes the nature of the institution for people who are already participating -- if you're already married under the assumption that your relationship is bound to be just you and your spouse, legally, in all cases shy of divorce, the legal option to expand it drastically changes the nature (and power balance) of the relationship you've entered into.

The concept also just raises so many logistical questions that I don't think it's sensible policy to compare it to the same-sex marriage issue. How do you deal legally with polyamorous arrangements in which not every participating individual is married to every other -- hub and spoke, hourglass, etc.? (If the answer is just "we only have one model," then you are still opening yourself up to problems down the line when a hub dies and his three spouses who had nothing else to do with one another now find themselves legally wed.) What do you do about situations in which a man uses his power in a marriage to force his wife to "consent" to additional marriages, and then later sues for divorce? How do you deal with situations which currently use "spouse" to limit something to only an individual's single closest "relation" when they're part of a nine-piece? Can you even imagine what the tax forms would look like?

The very idea of creating a legal solution for this involves, one way or another, tearing the guts out of the marriage system that exists and replacing them with something new. That's why this is a much bigger deal than simply extending the available partner options in the existing marriage system.