The same day I write a piece about polyamory for this blog, there's a big post about it on the Wild Hunt. While my post was about the definition of polyamory and how I look at it, The Wild Hunt looks at it from a legal perspective. There are cases currently winding their ways through US and Canadian courts dealing with the subject of consensual polygamy.
While I'm in favor of polyamory, and even polygamy if that's how people choose to live their lives, I do have some concerns, and they tend to be financial. If you could engage in a plural marriage, and you were without health insurance, wouldn't you do it? The amount of abuse that could go on in a situation where a person has several legal partners boggles the mind. That's before we even get to the issue of divorce and child custody.
I've got no problem with a Mormon man having ten wives, if those wives came to him willingly and of adult age, which is not always the case in some fundamentalist LDS sects, but how would issues like health insurance work out? What credit reports are run when renting an apartment or buying a car?* People should be free to live their lives however they choose, without it being a crime, but I'm kind of in favor of limiting the financial benefits of marriage to just two people.
Of course as I write those words I also feel like a hypocrite, because I'll always believe that "marriage" is an institution that the state and religions shouldn't define. What truly constitutes a marriage is up to the individuals involved.
*Sounds silly, but I can just picture a different person in a relationship of ten filling out the credit app each time the group applies for something and then the group running away. It's sad that I'm so cynical sometimes.
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