Posted: Apr 01, 2010 9:24 pm
xrayzed wrote:I don’t think the argument against polygamy/polyandry on legal grounds holds up.
The issue of inheritance for multiple spouses isn’t any more complex than the issue of inheritance for multiple children. The basic principle in the absence of a will would be an equal division of property between the surviving spouses.
What if a man has four wives, and each of those wives has additional spouses? That’s irrelevant – they don’t have a legal claim on the inheritance because their legal relationship based on marriage is with the surviving wives, not the deceased husband.
The issue of who raises the children would default to the surviving parent. Certainly this could be challenged by other members of extended family, but this is not novel. It occurs today, for example with grandparents who seek custody where the parents are unfit to raise the children.
The “circular relationship” problem doesn’t pose any additional problems, Suppose two wives share two husbands, and one of the wives dies. Her surviving husbands have an equal share of the inheritance, and the surviving wife has none, because she does not have a legal relationship based on marriage with her.
There may be compelling reasons for opposing polygamy/polyandry, but legal complexities isn't one of them.
You say those things so matter-of-factually but they are really assumptions of how such a system could work. For example you make the assumption that two wives sharing two husbands would mean only the men are married to the women and vice versa. But would the women be married to each other by proxy and thus would the surviving wife also have claim to 1/3 of the inheritance. You could have a compelling argument either way. Many states have legal statutes of community property in a marriage. Ignoring gender lets say you have spouse Z who is married to X and Y, but X and Y are not married. Z has community property with both but do X and Y also share in the portion of each others community property with Z. If so what percentage? Is everything equal 1/3rds or does X only get 1/4 of Y's property? Or does X get none of Y's? These are all things that would have to be defined within the law.
You'd also have to take into consideration how 1:1 marriage protects to some degree against abuses of the institute of marriage; i.e. people getting married for tax, insurance, immigration, etc purposes. Currently with 1:1 marriage a person is limited to how much they could abuse such a system. In fact the limitation is such that it's not really even an abuse because they are using something which is in limited quantity (the ability to marry) to gain from it. But with many:many marriage what's to stop a group of 20 people from all marrying each other to get a single family rate for insurance? Or 1 US citizen marrying an indefinite number of immigrants to get them legal status in the country. Once again these are things that would have to be considered.