Quote:
What research have you done to determine their negative effect on society?

This, for starters. The key graph:

''It's a mathematical thing. If you are marrying all these girls to one man, what do you do with all the boys?" said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who has had boys in his office crying to see their mothers. ''People have said to me: 'Why don't you prosecute the parents?' But the kids don't want their parents prosecuted; they want us to get the number one bad guy -- Warren Jeffs. He is chiefly responsible for kicking out these boys."

Aside from the "mathematical thing" where men cannot marry because there are no available wives, polygyny elevates the role of one of the married individuals (the man) and diminishes the role of the rest of them (the women.) The man is ALWAYS the center of the family unit and the final decision-maker, the wives are just accessories. In documentaries I've watched on polygamy among Mormons, I've never seen it exist without some obvious form of misogyny. (Fundamentalist Islam, which allows 4 wives per husband IIRC, is full of misogyny, and presumably suffers from the same "mathematical problem.")

Same-sex relationships involving two individuals suffer from neither the "mathematical problem" of skewing the marriage number, nor the problem where a subset of the individuals is relegated to second-class citizen status because of their gender.

You can argue that the factors I've mentinoed are all "implementation details" specific to one type of polygamist, and I'll grant you that maybe it's wrong of me to conclude that "polygamy is bad for society" based on this one example. But in American society, in 2006, I don't think there's any appreciable trend towards either polyandry or group marriage, so it's silly to talk about those, IMHO.

I hope I've explained both the source of my aversion to polygamy, and why holding that view is not inconsistent with my support of rights for same-sex couples. (A point which was made simply to debunk the "slippery slope" argument that gay marriage will lead to polygamy will lead to men marrying sheep.) If not, let me know what's unclear and I'll try to clarify.
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- Tony C
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