I’m glad you highlighted this comment. I took note of it a few days ago and thought it was particularly succinct and well argued. In fact, I am interested to explore this concept further. Polygamy, in fact, is not explicitly banned for all believers (only the elders) and Old Testament men with multiple wives were not chided by God. I think there were reasons for this within Hebrew culture, just as there are reasons now that polygamy does not benefit women or offer them equality in the kingdom of God. One may argue that the opposition to SSM is purely “biblical,” however, the fear of progress and the gradual but inevitable crumbling of the heterosexual white male’s pedestal seem to be more pressing for those who feel they have something to lose.
ps: tony, posting comments on here is a nightmare!

Good comment. This quote — “People who bring up Man+Dog are revealing that to them marriage isn’t a contract, it’s a sex license” — made me remember something I’ve thought for a while: once you’ve given up the idea (as most Christians have) that marriage is strictly for pro-creative sex, you’ve given up 75% of your arguments against homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

This is an excellent comment; glad you highlighted it. His point about marriage as a sex license is bolstered by the fact that it was only recently (Maryland and North Carolina were the last states to do so, and not until the mid 1990′s) in the USA that states removed their marriage exceptions to rape laws (i.e., provisions in rape laws that stipulated that a man cannot be charged with rape if the victim is his wife). Many states still have laws that treat spousal rape less seriously than non-spousal rape. Not exactly a marriage of equal partners.

Bigotry is the only reason for keeping gay marriage exclusively for gays or for two individuals. Who cares if two is not equal to three? If two is good, three is even better, and anyone who says otherwise needs to prove why not. (And a bisexual definitely requires two spouses.)
To suggest, as Dr. Science does, that marriage “cannot be readily translated to sets of 3, 4, or more” is just pure nonsense without any justification. Remember, the basis of gay marriage is that it’s a temporal romance or cohabitation contract. So, any people who wish to cohabitate or have a romance should be able to enter a “marriage” sanctioned by the State.
Other of Dr. Science’s points need to be answered as well. Traditional marriage was a permanent family contract arising from the fact that heterosexual sex acts place women and children at long range economic risk. Contracts have to do with situations where partnerships between individuals carry grave economic consequences. And so traditional marriage ensured that women and children would be protected from desertion and economic destitution. This is just as necessary today, as single parenting continues to place both parent and children at grave economic risk.
Marriage has always been tied to sex because the act of sex for heterosexuals is what launches the long-term project of raising families—the enterprise being contracted. Even gays understand that they are seeking a license that sanctions their sexual romances.
If marriage is extended to gays, I can see no reason why it can’t be extended to everyone who wants it. Why would we discriminate against all the other people and groups?

First off, I agree that practically speaking, legalized SSM will not anytime soon lead to legalized polygamy. However, Dr. Science does not make clear, to me at any rate, exactly why contracts between legally equal partners could not extend to three or more people. Just because there is no legal precedent currently for answering some of the legal questions that he poses in the final paragraph, does not mean that it would be impossible to create such, if the cultural environment in the future became more accepting of such groupings. Simply asserting that “2 is not equal to 3″ does not strike me as a much more deeply argued proposition than “man and man is not the same as man and wife”.
Likewise, it is true that historically polygamy has occurred in a patriarchal context. But that is not the same as insisting that it always necessarily must be so. (bringing the possibility of polyandry into the question as well)
It seems that the argument boils down to “currently in our day and culture polygamy is not gaining acceptance in the way that SSM is, so it won’t happen.” I actually agree with that on a practical level–but it doesn’t really answer the philisophical questions.

Wow, I just checked back to see if the old thread had died, and what do I find! Thank you, Tony. BTW, the pronoun used for me is “she”, not “he”.
“A Walker” — Who cares if two is not equal to three? — The law. 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. As I have argued elsewhere, our current marriage law is *barely* able to deal with the complexities that arise when a marriage has only two partners, and that despite hundreds of years of experience dealing with traditional (inegalitarian) two-partner marriages. Egalitarian multipartner marriages simply do not fit into the legal structures we have, so there is no practical basis for making them legal as yet. I guess there would have to be at least 50-100 years’ experience with custom-made polyamorous contracts before legal mavens could even think of making a standard poly marriage contract — there simply isn’t enough experience with how these things tend to work out. So no, “Your Name”, I don’t think there’s anything wrong *in principle* with poly marriages — but law is all about practice, practicality, and precedent, and that doesn’t exist yet and might not for centuries.
Marriage has always been tied to sex because the act of sex for heterosexuals is what launches the long-term project of raising families—the enterprise being contracted.
Here is where I put on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat and disagree. Most mammals do not have any arrangment like marriage, and yet they manage to have sex and rear offspring perfectly well.
Consider the case of Jacob, in the Book of Genesis. Jacob loves only one woman, is married to two women, and has legitimate children with four women.
What makes his relationships with Leah and Rachel “marriage”? It’s not love, and it’s not having sex or children. What sets marriage apart is *in-laws*, and this IMScientificO is one of the things that makes human marriage unique. Indeed, if you look at what happens to Jacob, it seems that his first marriage is really a contract with Laban, who is able to swap Leah for Rachel and hold Jacob to it.
Marriage is a social and economic arrangment which usually incorporates sex and reproduction, but which is clearly necessary for neither. For societies with property, marriage is crucial for determining inheritance, and if you look at that list of “marriage rights” you’ll see that most of them are about economic or medical decisions. “Being able to have licit sex” is *not* on that list, however psychologically or religiously important it seems. And the same-sex couples and their allies (like me) aren’t fighting for the right to an imaginary sex license, but for equal access to those 1400 real, legal rights of marriage.

A version of this comment with embedded links seems to be in moderation, so at the risk of double-posting:
Wow, I just checked back to see if the old thread had died, and what do I find! Thank you, Tony. BTW, the pronoun used for me is “she”, not “he”.
“A Walker” — Who cares if two is not equal to three? — The law. 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. As I “>have argued elsewhere (link above), our current marriage law is *barely* able to deal with the complexities that arise when a marriage has only two partners, and that despite hundreds of years of experience dealing with traditional (inegalitarian) two-partner marriages. Egalitarian multipartner marriages simply do not fit into the legal structures we have, so there is no practical basis for making them legal as yet. I guess there would have to be at least 50-100 years’ experience with custom-made polyamorous contracts before legal mavens could even think of making a standard poly marriage contract — there simply isn’t enough experience with how these things tend to work out. So no, “Your Name”, I don’t think there’s anything wrong *in principle* with poly marriages — but law is all about practice, practicality, and precedent, and that doesn’t exist yet and might not for centuries.
Marriage has always been tied to sex because the act of sex for heterosexuals is what launches the long-term project of raising families—the enterprise being contracted.
Here is where I put on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat and disagree. Most mammals do not have any arrangment like marriage, and yet they manage to have sex and rear offspring perfectly well.
Consider the case of Jacob, in the Book of Genesis. Jacob loves only one woman, is married to two women, and has legitimate children with four women.
What makes his relationships with Leah and Rachel “marriage”? It’s not love, and it’s not having sex or children. What sets marriage apart is *in-laws*, and this IMScientificO is one of the things that makes human marriage unique. Indeed, if you look at what happens to Jacob, it seems that his first marriage is really a contract with Laban, who is able to swap Leah for Rachel and hold Jacob to it.
Marriage is a social and economic arrangment which usually incorporates sex and reproduction, but which is clearly necessary for neither. For societies with property, marriage is crucial for determining inheritance, and if you look at that list of “marriage rights” you’ll see that most of them are about economic or medical decisions. “Being able to have licit sex” is *not* on that list, however psychologically or religiously important it seems. And the same-sex couples and their allies (like me) aren’t fighting for the right to an imaginary sex license, but for equal access to those 1400 real, legal rights of marriage.

Dr. Science: 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
A Walker: But who cares to defend laws based on nothing more than sheer bias and bigotry?
Dr. Science: 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
A Walker: I will label this the bureaucracy trumps equal rights argument. Can you imagine gays accepting an argument that they shouldn’t be allowed to marry simply because of red tape?
Dr. Science: Most mammals do not have any arrangment like marriage, and yet they manage to have sex and rear offspring perfectly well.
A Walker: Humans have different child-rearing situations than other mammals. The project of child-rearing for humans is long-term and legally binding due to the necessary care of both physiological and educational needs.
Dr. Science: Marriage is a social and economic arrangment which usually incorporates sex and reproduction, but which is clearly necessary for neither.
A Walker: The social and economic duties and rights derive from the sexual reproductive act, for that act produces children to whom the parents are responsible in the eyes of society. The real legal rights that exist for marriage do so because marriage is a mini-society of infants, dependents and spouses that have grave economic risk when one partner breaches the contract.

Dr. Science,
Apologies for making the (admittedly patriarchal) jump and referring to you as ‘he’.
And apologies that my previous post came in as ‘Your Name’–I did try to enter my name, but it didn’t take on the website for some reason.
I do still question whether the ‘real’ reason for opposing SSM boils down to feeling threatened by equal-partner marriage (I still suspect it has more to do with discomfort with homosexuality, and an honest belief that Scripture forbids it), but I find your perspective to be food for a lot of thought, so thanks.

Lets be honest here the only reason we do not have polygamy today is a religious arguement. But what is that arguement based on?
In the old testment and new testament polygamy was a common practice so what happend to it?
Roman law dictated that a man could only take one wife. This was in large part to protect the official family line and see to the functionablity of inheritence.
Where possible the Christian church would not conflict with Roman law except on core beliefs. Lets not forget that Paul was a Roman citizen who had personal belifes in not even getting married.
I think the main problem with polygamy today is all the nut jobs running around forcing kids into it. People forget about the consenting adults side.