[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.

[dragonwriter]

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

Since a marriage is always complete within the lifetime of a person living at the time it is formed, it has no problem with the rule against perpetuities.

[CamperBob2]

Really? So I can sign a contract to work for you for the rest of my life, and no judge will blink at it?

To the best of my knowledge, only the institution of marriage and the Church of Scientology offer a deal like that.

[dragonwriter]

> Really? So I can sign a contract to work for you for the rest of my life, and no judge will blink at it?

A judge might blink at it, but not because of the Rule Against Perpetuities, which, generally, requires that a valid interest must vest within 21 years after the death of some person alive at the time the interest was formed.

A contract in which all obligations are complete at the end of any life in existence at the time the contract is formed may be invalid for any of a variety of reasons, but the Rule Against Perpetuities isn't one of them.

> To the best of my knowledge, only the institution of marriage and the Church of Scientology offer a deal like that.

Contracts granting life interests in real estate, which are also valid under the rule against perpetuities and were quite common when the rule first came into existence also involve commitments of similar duration. Commitments that last the length of a particular life (of a long fixed period of time, like 99 years) are not at all uncommon in contracts.

[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.