Gay vs Straight Marriage - Yes or No Poll

[psychic_serpent]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, Jennifer Boggess Ramon 
<boggles at e...> wrote:
> At 7:28 PM +0000 8/9/03, psychic_serpent wrote:
> >
> >For all marriage laws to merely require that the two people be
> >single (not already married to other people),
> 
> The polyamorous bisexual decides, unwisely, to stir the pot:
> 
> Why?
> 
> If everyone involved in the marriage is informed and consenting, 
> and they all want to be married to each other, why prevent a 
> marriage of more than two people?
> 
> (Note that this question includes the gay marriage question as a 
> prerequisite, as in a union of three people at least two must be 
> the same sex.)
 
Yes and no.  When the government determined, over a hundred years 
ago, that Utah could be admitted as a state as long as the folks 
there adhered to the one-man-one-woman model for marriage, the 
existing Mormon marriages in that territory that did not adhere to 
this model involved a husband with multiple wives with no assumption 
of any interaction between the wives sexually.  I believe that this 
is also the model for Moslem marriages in which the husband has more 
than one wife.  (An argument COULD be made that it is unfair for 
these religious marriages not to be recognized by the government.)

At this time marriage laws link two people together--for there to be 
absolutely no specifics in the law about the two people's genders 
would mean the least amount of change to the law at this time.  
Plus, there would be numerous legal complications in partnerships of 
more than two people concerning insurance, child custody, wills (or 
lack thereof, if someone in the partnership were to die without a 
will), etc.  We don't have an existing set of laws for dealing with 
these kinds of complications.  I would expect another change in the 
law, to account for polyamorous relationships, to be FAR in the 
future (at least another century) if it were ever to occur at all.

--Barb