[sneak]

One of my least favorite memes in western society is that individual people actually believe that the government has some say in defining your name or the boundaries of your family.

Everything from the idea of "legally changed his name" to "same-sex marriage" illustrates the problems of turning to city hall for approval or consent of individuals' and families' deeply personal and private matters.

I wish the US had two more constitutional amendments: our bodies are property belonging to us individually and we are free to do with them as we please (solves abortion debate, war on drugs, assisted suicide, et c) and that government has no authority to regulate private familial matters such as what terms we use to call ourselves, what terms we use to call our loved ones, or who is within or without our families and the terms we use to refer to them (solves the current state of marriage inequality for homosexual relationships and also the discrimination against families that practice nonmonogamy, as well as any other oppressive status-quo reinforcement these assholes may come up with in the future).

It takes a very special kind of oppressor to tell you what words you are allowed to use to call yourself, what things you are allowed to do to your own body, and who you are allowed to love and allow into your family.

[mhurron]

I'm going to take issue with just one statement here because I'm short on time -

> special kind of oppressor to tell you ... who you are allowed to love and allow into your family.

They don't. You can have a polygamous marriage all you want, you can have an open marriage, you can be as gay as you want.

However, husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter and what not also have legal ramifications, and that is where the law has domain. It has nothing to do with any morality associated with the relationships.

The gay marriage issues stem from a misunderstanding, willful or otherwise, of that. The marriage the state cares about is the contract between two adults, it doesn't give a damn about your morals or god.

[falcolas]

> You can have a polygamous marriage all you want

No, you can't. It's illegal in most states (see how the "Big Love" family had to move due to pending prosecution in Utah).

> you can be as gay as you want.

Not if you're male - sodomy is illegal in many states (despite a Supreme Court ruling that pretty much shuts them down) in the US, and many other countries entirely [1].

> [The law] has nothing to do with any morality associated with the relationships.

Laws are derived from the morality of their times. The laws against murder, and exceptions thereof, are based on what society believes is wrong and right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_law

[zymhan]

> Not if you're male - sodomy is illegal in many states (despite a Supreme Court ruling that pretty much shuts them down) in the US, and many other countries entirely [1].

Even if the law is on the books in some states, it cannot be enforced due to the ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas). Also, sodomy is not limited to gay men (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy).

> Laws are derived from the morality of their times. The laws against murder, and exceptions thereof, are based on what society believes is wrong and right.

Certainly there are laws based on morality, but it's absurd to claim that all laws are. Laws regarding the legal status of married people also help standardize common relationships. Can you imagine having to precisely define your non-married long-term relationship every time you fill out a form at the doctor's office or bank? The legal concept of marriage exists largely to codify the shared responsibility of each spouse when it comes to contracts, financial obligations, child care, etc.

[mhurron]

> You can have a polygamous marriage all you want

>No, you can't. It's illegal in most states (see how the "Big Love" family had to move due to pending prosecution in Utah).

Yes you can, you can not however have more than one legal wife. You can marry wife #1 (marriage certificate) and this person will be the only wife the law cares about. You can then have any religious or whatever ceremony to marry any number of other women and you can all live together any way you wish. You can do this because the state doesn't care about the religious ceremony. You can not legally marry more than one woman, the women must know they are taking part in a polyamorous relationship and they can not be coerced into it. Again, the legal definition of marriage and what you call being married do not have to match.

As a side not, it is basically impossible to find what you are referring to with 'the "Big Love" family' since it appears to be a TV show as well. So I can't say anything about it.

> Not if you're male - sodomy is illegal in many states (despite a Supreme Court ruling that pretty much shuts them down) in the US, and many other countries entirely.

This is the best example of how the law and individuals differ. Legally (in the US), sodomy is defined as any sexual contact other than vaginal intercourse. Ever had a blow job? Congratulations, you could be charged. It has noting to do with being male, lesbianism would be charged with sodomy as well.

In the US, you can be as gay as you want.

[dragonwriter]

> > > You can have a polygamous marriage all you want

> > No, you can't. It's illegal in most states (see how the "Big Love" family had to move due to pending prosecution in Utah).

> Yes you can, you can not however have more than one legal wife. You can marry wife #1 (marriage certificate) and this person will be the only wife the law cares about.

Whether this is true or not depends on the details of the state law, but its certainly not true in, e.g., Utah, where the relevant statute [1] looks at cohabitation as well:

(1) A person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person.

(2) Bigamy is a felony of the third degree.

(3) It shall be a defense to bigamy that the accused reasonably believed he and the other person were legally eligible to remarry.

[1] Utah Code, tit. 76, chap. 7, sec. 101; http://le.utah.gov/code/TITLE76/htm/76_07_010100.htm

[dragonwriter]

> see how the "Big Love" family had to move due to pending prosecution in Utah

Presumably -- and I am somewhat embarrassed to be able to catch this mistake -- you are referring to the actual family featured on the reality show "Sister Wives" [1], not the fictional family featured on the show "Big Love".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Wives

[falcolas]

You are quite correct. Can't edit anymore, but that is the correct title of the show I was referring to.

[Xeoncross]

> Laws are derived from the morality of their times.

Yes and no. Some laws are universal wrong - like murder. However, government laws like banning drugs are based on the feelings and opinions of the people at the time.

Both of these are evident from the history of civilizations. Murder has always been wrong - drugs not so.

[john_b]

Many of the "legal ramifications" are legal priveleges. Your spouse can visit you in the hospital and be listed on your insurance policy. If your spouse is not legally recognized as your spouse then those benefits will be prohibited to you. Many other favorable incentives such as tax benefits rest solely on what the state thinks of your relationships, and not what you think of them.

In some jurisdictions, the state can decide that you are formally and legally married even if you have never filed for a marriage license[1].

Like it or not, what the state thinks about your relationships can impact your life enormously.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage

[sneak]

These legal ramifications should be either abolished or applied to everyone who applies those titles equally. Anything else is state-sponsored discrimination and harassment, which is our current sad state of affairs.

[mhurron]

Your wife can mandate health care when you are otherwise incapable. You have 7 wives. Who has final say.

You get a divorce from one wife. What does she get?

These are just two things off the top of my head that throw a monkey wrench in things making the 'just abolish it' not quite as simple.

As for 'state-sponsored discrimination and harassment' just no. That is people and their attitudes, legality has nothing to do with it. Blacks weren't seen as equals and without harassment just because slavery became illegal and they could vote. Homosexuality is legal, but again, individuals don't harass based on legal status.

You are conflating legal issues with personal views of morality, they are not the same thing and have very little to do with each other.

[CamperBob2]

Your wife can mandate health care when you are otherwise incapable. You have 7 wives. Who has final say.

I do. In the contract.

You get a divorce from one wife. What does she get?

Whatever the contract says.

Any other questions?

[zymhan]

What contract? Are we going to have a standard contract specifying what you want to happen in every conceivable situation? Just imagine a some medical issues that could come up: kidney failure, liver failure, vegetative state, amputation, DNR, transplants, organ donation, etc.

Any number of unimaginable situations could come up, which wouldn't be covered by a contract, and which a human being has to make a decision that directly affects your life.

How do you handle loans? If I have 30k in debt, and I marry into a polygamous marriage, do the other spouses carry my debt? What if I die, then who owes the money? Not all tricky legal issues can be covered with a "well let's just make a contract."

[eevee]

Grep the US Code for "spouse", write a contract that covers those things?

> How do you handle loans? If I have 30k in debt, and I marry into a polygamous marriage, do the other spouses carry my debt?

I don't even know how this works with two people. I was under the impression that finances are separate unless you deliberately merge them, and that doing so is orthogonal to marriage.

[CamperBob2]

What contract?

Exactly. That's the problem I have with marriage. So much for the rule against perpetuities, among other things.

Not all tricky legal issues can be covered with a "well let's just make a contract."

Sure they can. If one Fortune 500 company merges with another, the resulting contracts are thick enough to fill multiple heavy leather-bound volumes the size of major metropolitan telephone books. The lawyers are paid to think of everything that could go wrong.

So it's not debatable that an adequate legal framework for simple domestic partnerships can exist, it's just that for some reason, people don't bother.

[john_b]

> "Blacks weren't seen as equals and without harassment just because slavery became illegal and they could vote. Homosexuality is legal, but again, individuals don't harass based on legal status."

When blacks became legal equals it went a long way towards their being considered cultural equals throughout society. The underlying motives for harassment may not be due to someone's legal status, but the legally endowing someone with less rights because of their race/sex/orientation/etc gives a lot of ammo to people who want to harass them.

> "Your wife can mandate health care when you are otherwise incapable. You have 7 wives. Who has final say."

Unless otherwise specified, the first wife could have final say. Or the last. Any consistent system would work here. Important decisions about your health and property should really be decided and specified in advance by the individual.

> "You get a divorce from one wife. What does she get?"

<value of assets subject to forfeiture due to divorce>/<number of wives pre-divorce> seems reasonable. These are not hard problems. Courts exist to settle exactly these issues.

The parent comment expressed a moral principle that it is wrong for any government to usurp your authority to form relationships according to your own desires or to legally recognize or withhold legal recognition (where necessary) from relationships in which it has no business. You are looking at implementation details and saying that because a change of this magnitude causes some practical problems (which would not be surprising) the moral premise is flawed.

[dragonwriter]

> Your wife can mandate health care when you are otherwise incapable. You have 7 wives. Who has final say.

Establishing a rule for priority in this situation is fairly straightforward. The most obvious rule is to support a pre-need declaration of priority if one exists, and otherwise default to an oldest-marriage priority.

> You get a divorce from one wife. What does she get?

This is essentially an identical issue to dissolution of a partnership with more than two partners, and as such is pretty well already solved by the legal system.

[probably_wrong]

I'd like to point out that your amendments do not solve the problems you mention, as they fail to include how your choices affect others. A variant of the two-body problem, if you will.

Let's pick drugs. Half of the drugs regulations deal with keeping you from killing yourself, which your approach would simplify (although sounds like a variant of "let's solve stupidity by removing warning labels and let the problem sort itself"). The other half, however, is how this change would affect society as a whole, and drug addicts are a burden on society (see: homelessness, hospital costs, correlation with violent crimes, impaired drivers hurting others, etc).

Of course, we know you would never become a dangerous addict lying in the streets arguing with yourself, but you can be damn right that I almost certainly would. And that's why, as I see it, Society (represented by the Government) jumps in and says "no drugs for either of you".

The other points follow a similar line of thinking.

[sneak]

"Some people are irresponsible" does not justify the universal deployment of terrible and profound oppression such as you describe.

Indeed, we have attempted it. Remember prohibition? We still have myriad addicts, have wasted unconscionable amounts of money, and senselessly ruined staggering amounts of lives attempting to pretend that society has claims to or on the physical body of an individual.

If the "burden on society" argument was in any way real, cigarettes and alcohol would be outlawed. It's simply a red herring.

[jkrems]

I'm not sure about the US, but in Germany at least heavy taxation of cigarettes and alcohol is justified by "burden on society". There are more than two options (not do anything vs. outlaw).

[enriquepablo]

> (see: homelessness, hospital costs, correlation with violent crimes, impaired drivers hurting others, etc)

Those are consecuences of being outlawed, not of consuming substances. Blame the prohibition and not the substances. The proof of this is simple: just compare. Compare people drinking coffee today and in 19th century Russia (where it was prohibited). Compare people drinking alcohol today and in early 20th century USA. Compare people using opiates today and in the roman empire...

[ChikkaChiChi]

Wouldn't solve the abortion debate. I used to say the same thing until someone explained to me that they are fighting for the same rights of the unborn children.

I'm not saying that position is right or wrong; I'm just saying that said position exists.

[_xeah]

A person holding to this position will have no problem with a woman wanting to cut off a finger or remove a toe, but as soon as you consider the unborn to be a person that has a body, every right given to someone with a body would be extended to the body in the womb.

Not trying to start any debate (I promise), but I would say it does solve the issue with abortion, because there is a human body in the womb, and would therefore have rights protecting it from being killed.

[gliese1337]

It does not, because the whole point of the abortion debate is that many people don't think that there is a human body with rights in the womb. The only thing that would 'solve' the abortion debate is clarifying the legal status of unborn fetuses as rights-bearing humans; clarifying the rights of humans without specifying who counts as human is pointless for this purpose.

[_xeah]

I didn't want to start or get into a debate, but I'll bite for a second :)

I have a really hard time understanding how some can claim that a body in one location is human, but that body in another location is non-human. How should it be classified? Is it even homo sapien or a different species (or no species)? Is a baby half delivered half human?

The argument is really whether or not women have the right to kill that human body, or whether or not that human body in her womb has any rights on its own to live.

edit: spelling

[erichocean]

That's why we use the term "fetus". It's not a baby, and it's also not not human. It's in an intermediate category, which is the whole reason there is a debate at all.

IMO, both positions—the fetus is "my body" and I can do what I want with it—and—the fetus is a full human being, a person, like everyone else—are disingenuous. It's okay that a fetus be neither, and that we have special rules governing that situation. A fetus doesn't have to fit into pre-existing categories.

[_xeah]

We are all humans in some intermediate category, and to say a human of some category (like a fetus) has no claim to its right to life is pulled out thin air.

This is all word play. If you look up the etymology of the word, fetus at one time even referred to the newborn. The only thing distinguishing a fetus from a human these days is a fancy, made-up definition.

Last though, if we change the definition of fetus to mean "full human being in the womb," would it then make it morally right? It's interesting that the morality of this issue hangs on what Merriam-Webster has to say.

[BHSPitMonkey]

> The only thing that would 'solve' the abortion debate is clarifying the legal status of unborn fetuses as rights-bearing humans

That is the debate. Your statement is tautological.

[darkarmani]

> and would therefore have rights protecting it from being killed.

So what about the rights of the mother to suicide? Don't those rights conflict?

[_xeah]

Though I'm not arguing for what the original commenter was arguing for, I don't think it would be a conflict in their line of thinking. I think the OP would argue for the right to suicide, but not for the right to commit suicide by head on collision with another car. It's the same idea.

Plus, we would want to be very careful with pregnant women wanting to commit suicide, because their body is going through so much stuff at the time. Those desires could very well be contrary to what the woman is really living for. A pregnant woman with suicidal desires (in OP's argument) should be seen as someone who needs assistance to live, not assistance to die.

Again, just stepping inside that thinking and not necessarily arguing for/against OP's argument.

[judk]

You are welcome to live in the wilderness and call yourself whatever you want. If you want to live in a society you have to abide by rules to facilitate living together.

Never has a legal name been an only name. Chinese names ,nicknames, Jewish names all exist.

[john_b]

The same argument applies equally to authoritarian regimes. Maybe sneak doesn't want to live in a society that enforces these rules, but simply has no other alternatives. Telling someone who criticizes their society to either take it or leave it is immature, and if such an attitude is widely adopted by the society as a whole it will simply cease to improve.

[zymhan]

When you live in a society of hundreds of millions of people, all with their own view of how society should be run, you have to accept a certain amount of "take it or leave it," otherwise it will quickly devolve into paralysis or anarchy.

[edgarvaldes]

If I have a contract with John Doe, I need to be aware of any name changes of him. How do you identify someone who changes names constantly?

[DanBC]

> I need to be aware of any name changes of him

You don't.

You have a contract with the person currently calling themselves John Doe. When they call themselves Jo Doe and then Jack Bob and then etc it's still the same person.

Currently in England you're allowed to call youself what you want, so long as you don't have the intention to deceive. In practice, 'deed poll' or marriage certificate are handy if you want people such as banks or doctors or airlines to actually use your new name.