I think this is wrong. As Dan Savage pointed out, heterosexuals had ALREADY changed marriage long before the gays came along. Forgive the bluntness, but marriage used to basically be a property transaction where a woman was transferred from her family to her husband. Long ago, though, marriage in the US has legally been viewed as a merge of equals. In fact, ALL states AFAIK had already gotten rid of parts of their laws where husbands had different rights/responsibilities from wives. Allowing gay marriage was just replacing husband or wife with "spouse" in any legal document.
With 3 party marriage, the vast majority of laws related to financial transactions would fundamentally have to change. Some simple examples
1. Survivor benefits: If someone is in a >2 person marriage, does that mean all of their spouses can continue to collect survivor benefits until the last person dies?
2. Tax-free inheritance: Similar to the above, but does a >2 person marriage mean everyone gets tax free inheritance?
3. Healthcare benefits: Could you put 5 spouses on one employee-sponsored health plan?
4. Tax laws: Tax laws would need a total rewrite because all brackets/amounts just support a single person or a 2-person marriage.
>2 person marriage has huge legal and financial implications that gay marriage did not.
Perhaps simpler would be allowing one person to be in multiple 2 person marriages at once. Even if one of these must be set as the primary, for which all tax benefits, etc. apply to. So while a 3 person marriage would leave one person with no primary, a 4 person marriage would really be 6 marriages, only 2 of which are primary and which function mostly the same. Any special cases like power of attorney could work through the primary marriage unless a legal document was drafted that changed the functionality.
I'm sure a think tank can form a much better option than the one I crafted in under 5 minutes.
1. Survivor benefits: If someone is in a >2 person marriage, does that mean all of their spouses can continue to collect survivor benefits until the last person dies?
Survivor benefits continue as long as there is a surviving spouse. It doesn't matter if there are 1 or 3.
2. Tax-free inheritance: Similar to the above, but does a >2 person marriage mean everyone gets tax free inheritance?
Every surviving participant in the marriage inherits tax free. Just like now.
3. Healthcare benefits: Could you put 5 spouses on one employee-sponsored health plan?
Yes.
4. Tax laws: Tax laws would need a total rewrite because all brackets/amounts just support a single person or a 2-person marriage.
Married or Single are the current choices. That wouldn't be any different. It would actually incentivize multiple person marriage.
And your answers are fundamentally why >2 person marriage isn't coming anytime soon. All of these solutions are basically break the entire slew of existing financial setups around marriage. Do you think a company would be willing to put 5 married people on the same spousal health plan? Do you think Social Security is going to be OK with 1 person's benefits potentially outliving them for decades as they carry on to multiple spouses?
>2 person marriage is fundamentally different from existing marriage laws in a way gay marriage is not.
> It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done.
It actually hasn't; any two-party marriage uses the same infrastructure without problems, the differences are simply at the front door.
Multiparty marriages need ground up redesign of the rights and privileges, which are all based on exclusive dyadic relationships.
There's quite usable outlines of how the legal infrastructure might support many aspects of multiparty marriages (especially in terms of things like dissolution) in, e.g., the law of business partnerships, but the context and details of the rights and privileges tied to marriage are sufficiently different that there is a lot of work to do define even what a multiparty marriage would mean legally.
Its not a simple equality step that can be addressed largely at the front door like interracial or even same-sex marriage.
The fundamental change (ignoring issues with the religious) for same-sex marriage really was just the genders specified/described in most legislation and regulations related to marital rights, privileges, obligations.
For multi-party marriage one major issue will be based on this assumption: members can enter into and leave a marriage without dissolving the rest of the union. If 4 people are married and wish to add a fifth, and later one wants to leave, this should be feasible. How will the various assets be combined and removed from the other parties when people enter into and leave this plural marriage?
It's not as straightforward as the current two-person marriage. (Ha! It's not clean for two-party marriages either.) It'd be interesting to see, but it'll require a bit more structure to be set up, or at least more deliberation to ensure that it's not a complete clusterfuck the first time someone wants to divorce their two wives and husband (see also the issue with civil unions before same sex marriage was legalized and the issues faced when trying to dissolve those).
> "Equitable division of marital assets and liabilities."
> This doesn't require anything special.
Right, and how to mechanically achieve this in multiparty relationships on dissolution is what I referred to as having a particularly good model in partnership law, because its done there a lot, and the wrinkles in how it works out have been pretty heavily hammered on over several centuries.
The non-dissolution aspects of marital rights and privileges and how they would apply to multiparty relations (and whether existing explicit rules and legal presumptions built on the premise of a dyadic relationship work, or even make any sense, in multiparty relationships needs to be considered, area by area; for some aspects of this, again, partnership law probably has good models to follow as to how things might be generalized.)
E.g., there's lots of things where spouses have either decisive rights or are necessarily included parties that must each consent, written based on the dyadic nature of existing marriage structure. Whether these generalize to every spouse having the same powers and requirements as a single spouse does now, or whether those powers require a majority of the members of the multiparty relationship, or some other rule in a multiparty case probably needs separate analysis for each of the areas.
Something similar could've been said about both interracial and same-sex marriage.
If the relationship type (interracial, same-sex, poly) is considered in some manner deviant or otherwise unacceptable, the number of people openly engaging in it will be small. As race relations in the US improved, as attitudes on same-sex relationships improved, the number of people openly engaged in these relationship types increased.
As poly relationships become more acceptable, more people will admit to being in them. Then we can examine what percentage is impacted by not being able to marry.
The funny thing about human rights is that one can never justifying denying them because the minority who wants them is too small to count as important.
Indeed, the number of people being tortured at Guantanamo were a tiny, tiny portion of the global population - doesn't mean they should have been subjected to that, regardless of what they were accused of.
It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done.