Comment of the Day

In an attempt to explain why poly-amorous individuals should be denied their equal rights to marriage, Dr. Science says: "In law, there are about 1400 legal benefits to marriage, and the vast majority of those rights presume that the marriage is between two (2) persons only."

This argument from Dr. Science is saying that the status quo of "two" must be maintained simply because the presumption of *two* has been around a while. We note that this is the same argument heteros have use to defend traditional marriage being between male and female partners. (And note that gays never accept the "it's-always-been-that-way" defense.)

The good Doctor continues this line of reasoning when he says, "Our current marriage law is *barely* able to deal with the complexities that arise when a marriage has only two partners...multipartner marriages simply do not fit into the legal structures we have."

Here Dr. Science reasons that the bureaucratic red tape involved in managing more than two partners is a strain on the system, and for this reason three lovers should be denied equal rights to marriage. Yet it's apparent that many contracts in modern society already involve many partners (think business contracts and partnerships), and so the legal system can certainly handle it. I conclude that SSM advocates must not seek to deprive the rights of those who want "three" or "four" parters merely because recent society has a bias in favor of "two."

Next, in responding to my point that marriage law has always linked with sex because that act for heterosexuals launches the legally binding long-term project of raising families (the enterprise being contracted), Dr. Science says, "Most mammals do not have any arrangement like marriage, and yet they manage to have sex and rear offspring perfectly well." The obvious reply is that humans by nature have more intensive and long-term child-rearing commitments than other mammals. Due to the physiological and educational needs of human infants, marriage has always been constructed as a long-term and legally binding society. Moreover, since society implicitly holds the biological parents responsible for providing that long-term care, marriage law stipulates that hetero adult partners can't produce babies and subsequently place them on the next door neighbor's doorstep and walk away. There again we see the explicit legal stipulations of marriage linked to implicit realities.

Finally, Dr. Science says that same-sex couples are fighting for the right to have equal access to 1400 real, legal rights of marriage. Of course gays want this, but they want this despite the fact that those rights relate to the fact that nature has tasked heterosexuals with the legal responsibilities related to producing and caring for the next billion citizens of the state.

In other words, the real legal implications that exist for heterosexual marriage partners do so because marriage is a mini-society of infants, dependents and spouses that have grave economic risk if one partner breaches the contract via desertion.