[sjwright]

The broadest possible reading of the essence of marriage is a single relationship entered into exclusively, voluntarily and with full awareness.

An arranged marriage fails the voluntary test.

A union involving a young child fails the awareness test.

A unions that includes a non-human entity fails the voluntary and awareness tests.

A union of three or more entities fails the exclusivity test. (Between two people there is just one relationship. Between three people there are three relationships.) I have no problem with the idea in theory, but it will require a lot of structural change of law to implement and is therefore sufficiently different to warrant a different technical term in law.

[MarkPNeyer]

> Between two people there is just one relationship.

no there isn't.

my wife talks to my dad in a way i never have. they get each other. they understand one another, and she respects aspects of him that i didn't know existed until i saw that a lot of what i love about my wife is true of my dad.

my wife talks to my mom in a way i haven't understood until recently. my mom is very loving; i never knew how much more loving she was until recently, when my wife explained just how intense that is.

i have a relationship with mama, my catonese mother-in-law, who understood the importance of computers even when it was the early 90's and she'd never seen one, who grew up during the cultural revolution, who doesn't trust authority figures for the same reason i don't.

my wife is good friends with many of my siblings - that's 8 more relationships there; 13 when you include the in-laws. my brother matt is married to michelle, who's talked to my wife, christine, about a lot of topics, and the two of them have a relationship far more intense than many biological siblings.

no man is an island.

no man is an island.

no man is an island.

no man is an island.

please for the love of all that is good in the world, can we stop pretending otherwise?

[sjwright]

Your relationship between yourself and your father isn't marriage.

[serge2k]

woah, you said no man is an island 4 times.

It must be extra extra profound and smart sounding now.

[jbrown]

How is exclusivity crucial to marriage in the maximal broadness sense? It might be crucial in the current legal landscape, but that's not what we're talking about here. I tend to think that in the broadest possible sense marriage is just a contract and there's nothing preventing it from including more than two parties. Or, even if you do create a compelling argument for it being a contract between only two people, why should that preclude me from making another similar contract with a different party?

[sjwright]

We are absolutely talking about the current legal landscape. If you want to discuss polygamy in a spherical cow universe, that's fine, and I've already said I have no in-principle objection to formalizing polygamy.

However, a union between three or more people (or multiple concurrent marriages) is in an engineering sense a very different mechanism. It has more moving parts and more complicated parts. Most critically, its interfaces to the outside world are different.

It would require substantial root-and-branch changes to a massive amount of existing legislation in every country and state. Using a different word in law (while accepting colloquial use of the word marriage in everyday parlance) is a practical necessity.

[dragonwriter]

> However, a union between three or more people (or multiple concurrent marriages) is in an engineering sense a very different mechanism.

Forming, adding to, withdrawing from, dissolving, and otherwise handling unions of three or more people, including in dealing with how the members of the union deal with their rights and powers vis-a-vis the property and prerogatives of the union as such between each other and in interfacing with outside entities has been dealt with fairly extensively over the past several centuries in the evolution of partnership law. And most of it can be viewed as a fairly direct multiparty generalization of the two party way similar things are dealt with in existing marriage.

There's no real reason that a generalization of marriage law to handle multiparty relationships that reduced naturally to the same handling for two-party cases as status quo rules would deserve any different name.

[sjwright]

It is still a very different mechanism.

It is still a very different social construct.

Sorry, but polygamy doesn't get to ride the coattails of gay marriage for free. Despite the howls from conservatives, this slope isn't inherently slippery. You have to change minds before you can discuss changing laws. (And besides, I thought we all agreed the anthrozoologists were next in line? Then NAMBLA. Wait your turn.)

[avn2109]

I have always wondered why the government is involved with marriage at all. Seems like it would be simpler if we set it up like this:

Everyone pays the same taxes no matter what, and you better write an explicit will and testament to control who gets your stuff when you die/can pull the plug on your vegetative state. Ie. no special benefits/drawbacks for married people.

If you want to get married, great---go find a church or a mosque or a ship's captain; it's none of the state's business. The government doesn't recognize the institution of marriage as anything special. Marriage would be an entirely private association, like joining the Elks lodge or something.

[dragonwriter]

That's "simpler" in the "fewest number of base rules" sense, and more complex in the UX sense.

Given the frequency of the desire to enter into a partnership with something like the kind of mutual exchange of commitments and agency relationships packaged in civil marriage, it makes sense as a UX optimization for government in terms of providing sensible defaults for common needs (with the ability for users interested in different configurations to reconfigure the defaults to a certain degree.)

[nationcrafting]

Funnily enough, I too have often wondered about that.

I've also often wondered why your gender is the state's business at all. One way to make the whole gay marriage thing a non-issue would be to say it's nobody's business what you have between your legs, except your doctor and your partner.

There are a couple of scenarios where it would be an issue, like if you go to jail and there are no mixed gender jails, but it's likely that a little bit of imagination would fix that.