If most men had many wives, there must have been a lot less men than women, and/or a lot of men with no wife at all. Or perhaps wife sharing would account for it.
Or, like a lot of books, most of the stories were about rich men who had things others didn't. That part isn't glossed over at all. But that's just about the Bible stories. If you're talking about my comments on early humans, I think it's likely that sharing partners was more common.
You're not supposed to refuse to do business with someone on the basis of your religion (or theirs). However, even though it's illegal, but plenty of people get away with it - "We don't like yer kind in here!"
Getting out of the draft is different, you aren't offering a business to the government.
There was a study in Italy of a patient who was cured of a severe form of bipolar called rapid cycling bipolar with "darkness therapy". They locked him in a dark room for 14 hours a night and after a couple months his sleep and his mood stabilized. No medication.
> You're right, it's not a slippery slope. It's a gate we've opened and said that whatever your [thoughts, feelings and behaviors about X are], no one else has a right to tell you that it's wrong. That is a very dangerous gate to open and you don't get to close it after [X] is approved - others will want the freedom as well.
This isn't an insult, but you're a nitwit? The argument you're making is the prototypical "slippery slope" fallacy.
I'd advise you to actually read the article you are linking to.
> in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any rational argument or demonstrable mechanism for the inevitability of the event in question.
His argument is not a fallacious one. The reasoning used to justify applies to other scenarios. Polygamy is the main one brought up on this thread: Why are we telling adults who and how many people they can marry?
If you legalize [x] because [y] and [y] also applies to [z] then [x] and [z] are equivalent for reasons [y]; therefore [z] should be legalized if [x] is legalized unless [x] and [z] are demonstrably not equivalent for reasons [y].
I'd also like to note that the cutoff for being an adult should be 25, not 18. Therefore people shouldn't be able to be married until they are 25. The age of 18 is arbitrary and in many places that age is 16. In some places that age is 14. When exactly is the cutoff? Well it's based on an individuals mental maturity, which is not equivalent to their age. I've met 12 year olds who are more rational and mature than 30 year olds.
Furthermore:
Hebephilia and pedophilia are often merged concepts when people speak. For the people speaking on this subject, can you clarify which you're talking about? It's difficult to tell which people mean, but it usually gets clarified to the 13-16 year old ranges. At that age, I'd argue most children understand marriage, can be educated on the government-related issues to marriage, and understand sexual relations and pregnancy. The idea that they can consent to sexual relations of other minors, but not of adults, is some form of double-think. Note that in this context it doesn't seem marriage is what is being brought into question: just sexuality.
Note that I'm not defending it: I think people shouldn't be able to have sex or get married until at least age 25 unless they can demonstrate the ability to proper care and provide for a child with a stable income.
Can you name one other kind of marriage that will necessarily get legalized because we legalized same-sex marriage?
Can you name one other kind of marriage that is demonstrably more likely to get legalized because we legalized same-sex marriage?
If there's any kind of slippery slope, it's the slippery slope from man-woman marriage to adult-adult marriage. Well, we've slid down it, and now we're at the bottom.
We haven't slid to "adult-adult marriage" yet until the above are legalized across the board. So please don't misrepresent man-man and woman-woman as being adult-adult (or adult - n adult)
Since marriage does not imply reproduction, an incestual couple can refrain from having kids, adopt, use a surrogate/donor, etc. so there is no "but imbreeding" argument. Which is an argument about genetics... Isn't choosing who can reproduce a form of eugenics? We don't stop people with known hereditary complications from choosing to have kids, why should we stop siblings? If they choose to accept the risks, why should society have any say in the matter?
It's a social taboo and imbreeding are the only given reasons of why it is "bad".
Some could argue a failed relationship can lead to issues in a family household but I don't think that has any real merit. Dating a family member's best friend and it going sour can have similar consequences.
The legal ramifications are the same as well: Property rights under the union, taxation, child guardianship, visitation, protection upon dissolution, and wills.
So the child of a divorce has to move between more than 2 homes now? A wealthy man can split his income with more than 1 wife that doesn't work?
It's not the same, it's qualitatively and quantitatively different. Is there a limit to the number of members? Can you join a union halfway through? Can you leave a union without dissolving it? Those questions don't come up under 2-person unions.
I'm not sure why you keep harping on the specifics of the rules. Any different arrangement will always have different specifics, even if the fundamentals remain the same (which they do in this case).
What is the difference between specifics and fundamentals? Aren't the legal ramifications the fundamentals? I mean, it is a legal institution that we are talking about, right?
I'm not saying you can't have a loving and intimate relationship between 3 or more people, I'm just saying same-sex marriage is much closer to heterosexual marriage in terms of legal ramifications because it's only 2 people. Lines and triangles are both geometric figures, but that doesn't make them fundamentally the same.
You said the difference is academic. No, it requires significant changes to the legal framework of marriage.
Consider the following programs:
1) A program that allows a PC to talk to a Mac
2) A program that allows a PC to talk to a PC.
3) A program that allows a Mac to talk to a Mac.
4) A program that allows any number of Macs and PCs to talk to each other all at once.
The point is that given 1, it's pretty straightforward to write 2 and 3. 4 is a just a lot harder to get right. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the difference in the patches required to support 2, 3, and 4 is not academic.
Laws are pretty similar to programs, and there's a big jump in complexity going from 2 of something to 3 of something. Anyone that was actually poly would know this from all the honesty, negotiation, and ground rules that are required to make it work.
if you have to make a dozen of grep to exclude trivial results, it might be a hint there's something wrong with the pertinence of your output or the customizability of your tool
The track record is not encouraging.
Perhaps some pair of standard keep backward compatibility, but I've already read reports of programs that don't compile anymore with gcc 5.0.
Is the conflict you read about a bug in the compiler or a bug in the standard? A bug in the standard is much worse, whereas implementation bugs can be fixed. Maybe you read about undefined behavior? Implementations are free to change how they handle it.
