Rauch on Polygamy
Jonathan Rowe on Mar 31st 2006
Jonathan Rauch gives what I think is the strongest case for being pro-gay marriage, but against polygamy. Now, this isn’t to say that government shouldn’t recognize polygamous marriages. Perhaps competing interests, like the freedom of adults to enter into whatever consensual contractual arrangements they wish, should trump the concerns that Rauch raises. (See my past post on the issue.)
However, Rauch’s argument does put to rest the claim advanced by Stanley Kurtz et al. that “if we recognize gay marriage, we have no logical grounds for saying no to polygamy.” Wrong, legalized polygamy raises a whole set of concerns not implicated by gay marriage.
Filed in The Boudoir, The Bureau
I have one thought on the whole “human nature” thing. That women often seem to have just as much of an infidelity problem as men in a monogamous culture would seem to indicate that women’s genes are also telling them to get busy with as many men as possible. Now, this urge was strongly controlled in pre-modern cultures, but in a world in which we have ready access to contraception and equal legal status for women, I think that you might wind up seeing quite a few polyandrous pairings.The problem, though, is that such couplings would be *highly* unstable. The sort of arrangement that is socially neutral when practiced by debauched twenty-somethings would be baneful when it comes to children, community, etc.
A lot of research seems to show that women have evolved to seek one partner for protection, procreation, and for the provision of food; however, this does not rule out the occasional fling with studier males. The products of such unions are then raised by the cuckold. This helps explain the evolution of male sexual jealousy; men have a genetic interest in raising their own descendants. A bit of polygamy is natural for both sexes; the nature of the polygamy, however, is usually one of discretion. Partnerships have usually been out in the open, and promiscuity discreet except in special cases of sex ratio imbalances and cultural quirks. And of course, all of this is anthropology is irrelevant to the question of which sexual arrangements are best.
My own observations of women are that yes, they will cheat, but it’s never for purely promiscuous reasons (like men and their need for “release”). It’s invariably connected with emotional reasons — their men aren’t meeting their emotional needs, so they look elsewhere. And they almost always have emotional attachments to those men with whom they cheat.
This is the strongest case? That says something, I suppose.
In your original post you stated that “group love” is legal; it’s not. At least not if just one member of the group is married. It is still possible to prosecute people for adultery in most states. Even if someone isn’t prosecuted, adultery can be brought up in custody disputes, and arguably as grounds for dismissing a teacher under a morals clause (yes, those still exist). This makes engaging in a group relationship a very risky practice for many people.
You also said that polygyny would be more common than polyandry, basing your statement on religious-based polygamy and evolution. Interestingly, most married couples who become polyamorous do so after the wife fell in love with someone else and suggested the arrangement. Maybe this proves nothing more than that men would rather cheat than engage in honest communication with their spouses, but I think it also shows that women are at least as likely to want multiple husbands as men are multiple wives — assuming, of course, that the relationship would rise to that level of commitment.
Even if Rauch’s initial premises were correct (that polygyny would be far more prevalent than polyandry), his argument — to me at least — reaches the wrong conclusion. Perhaps the result would be that men would have more reason to strive to become marriageable material. They’d see, from a young age, what it takes to have a mate — giving them a lot of years to become the kind of man a woman would want to marry. Heck, that anyone would want to marry, if gay marriage were also pemitted.
The irony is that there are a lot of legitimate issues with regard to polygamous marriage — issues that don’t involve assumptions about various aspects of human behaviour. For example, A is married to B and C; D is married to E and F. C and F subsequently fall in love and want to legally pledge their commitment to each other: can they do that without involving their other partners? More simply, can A be married to B and C, but B and C each be married only to A? The answers to these questions would, or at least could, depend on what legal rights are directly connected to marriage. Those are issues that go far beyond those raised by gay marriage — and are a heck of a lot more compelling than people’s fears of a shortage of sexual and marital partners.
Yes, Renee, I think you are right that there is one other good reason, besides the one I raise (which I still think is a good one) to oppose Polygamy which is the legal mess that it might create. See this post.
http://notfrisco2.com/leones/?p=1893
Now, if the government steps in and tries to regulate such effects, it could have very bad consequences. On a private listserv that I am on, a very distinguished scholar of Hayek mentioned that privatizing marriage, under which such “mutlti” arrangements would be permissible, would likely have a different effect than government created “right to polygamy” because of the way that spontaneous social orders generate through common law property and contract rights.