[Disclaimer, none of the following is legal advice. Please seek legal counsel licensed to practice in your jurisdiction if you require assistance]
Oh I didn't mean to underestimate those issues, just was saying that they wouldn't be hugely different from how they are now. Kids would be the huge nightmare. If one parent decides to separate from the others, do they get their biological children? The ones they feel most attached to? Yikes.
I respectfully submit you have underestimated them especially the new "spouse to spouse" or "parent to parent" issues. As I said before:
Also seriously consider this from an administrative view: divorce, benefits, tax code, down the rabbit hole we go.... Do you divorce just one of your spouses or all of them? Who would pay child/spousal support and to whom? Are they all liable for each other's debts and tax obligations through marriage? Are they liable if they divorce some of their spouses but not all? Can you have interlocking poli marriages where two different poli groups have certain members married to one another but not others? This part is a very complex and legit concern whether you are for or against.
Murphy's law will come into play as it always does. Nothing, nothing in law is simple.
Spousal support alone will be a nightmare. Who pays what and in what portion, for how long. Whose wages/bank accounts can be garnished and for what portion of the spousal support due? How do you apportion criminal liability for unpaid spousal support if a state statute makes skipping out on that a crime?
Creditors: If someone owes you money can you go after their spouse? Can you go after their poly spouse? Can you go after their poly spouse if they divorced them, or only part of the group marriage? Can you only go after those remaining in the marriage for debt or should you have to attempt to collect the debt from them first and then go after spouses who have left via divorce? Should you just be able to straight up collect. Are the spouses "Jointly and Severally Liable" whereby you can sue any and every one of them individually for the whole amount and then its their problem to deal with who is responsible for the bill among their spouses later? Or can you only sue a spouse for their proportional share of the liability (if they are one of 7 spouses can you only sue them for 1/7 of the debt?). I'm not even going to touch bankruptcy considerations....
Then of course there are
medical decisions. What if you have 3 people in a marriage and a medical decision needs to be made for an unconscious spouse in the hospital AND THEY DISAGREE? One spouse wants one choice made for their unconscious spouse while the other wants a different choice made for the unconscious spouse. And that's just with 3 people, try 5, 7, 9.... Do they vote? To they submit evidence of your wishes and who understands them best and what if your wishes have changed and only a small portion of them know of this update? Do they have a hearing and if so what happens if they don't have time for this. The doctor needs to cut or not, immediately....
Choose.... Now.... Your loved one's time is running out and the 7 of you can't decide <---- Problem. One spouse, one decision made now.... It can be wrong, but it is timely and presumably, the spouse is the person closest to the unconscious patent. They SHOULD know best....
This is a fundamental rule of governance, the executive function is one person making the snap decision where a legislative decision made by a counsel would take too long. The executive has the most freedom where they act in accordance with the legislature and the least while acting against it.
Capacity to contract: As above with the medical decisions but other decisions involving legal contract obligations binding spouses to debt and benefits from those agreements.
Childcare decisions both during and after marriage: It is fair to say that if it is often hard to get 2 people to agree on things for their children then the more actors making the decision will mean harder choice making. How should the kids be raised? What school should they attend? Should they all attend the same schools? Summer camps? after school functions? Should the parents together as a group have a say over all the children from that group marriage? Should they only have a say over their own biological children? Over all children born of issue of the marriage?
Wills Estates and Trusts:There is a reason we have a whole separate court for wills and such: probate court. It is complex shit the likes of which can blow up badly with little effort. You will see families who "love each other" rip each other to bloody shreds over who gets what from the dead person. It is incredibly difficult to deal with step parents and former spouses* in the current system, and increasing the number of spouses can only, by definition, increase the complexity of this. Then when you are making a will, is one spouse allowed to favor one child over the other or one spouse over the other when they are all currently related?
All of these are entirely legit concerns for policy that must be addressed....
*I do not mean to imply there is anything wrong with mixed families or step family. I only state the fact that this is a red flag for potential complexity to an estate planning scenario foreshadowing possible litigation.Should I really keep going?
I assume that will be the case because when it comes to gender differences, I feel you need to prove there's a difference rather than prove there's a similarity. I do not feel there's sufficient evidence to assume that men are more inclined than women to love more than one person and not want to choose between them.
Of course there are still plenty of social issues in play. However, I feel that any double standards that will arise in a polygamous marriage already arise in monogamous ones. Women feeling pressured to marry, domestic abuse, all those things already happen, and I don't feel they will be any worse in a polygamous family than a monogamous one. Of course we'd be sailing into unknown waters, but any potential new or worsened social issues are still solvable.
Again, we've said historically this has been the case. It's the only precedent we have on point. The only evidence available isn't sufficient to prove a difference?
You feel it won't be more likely to cause problems; I feel it will. I could point again to history, but there really isn't a point to that is there? You think things have changed enough to invalidate the historical precedent--that those circumstances can be distinguished to the point of inapplicability. I don't.
Who is right? I Have no damn Idea. I actually hope you are. I hope the world is better. I want to believe that; but I don't.... I can't. The world is an ugly as hell place....
It's fair to be skeptical, but don't let the fear of the unknown hold you back.
Just the concerns I know about [and there are many more I don't know about] would, without the slightest exaggeration fill volumes. No one has answers to these concerns and there needs to be for the practice to be viable.
Simply, I submit we cannot responsibly proceed with changes of this magnitude without serious further consideration, the likes of which would take quite some time to apply and reach viable results. I do not state it would be impossible, only it should not be, until and unless we consider these and reach reasonable solutions. There is a difference between "not letting fear of the unknown hold you back," and knowing of problems but failing to plan for them. Then there is the fact that those unknown problems could be discovered if more time and thought was applied to the issue. Thus I do not believe it would be responsible to proceed at present with polygamy.
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