Our home state of Massachusetts has been in the news recently for a positive decision on gay marriages. It would seem that the next natural step would be state recognition of other types of alternative unions. Apparently we don’t think heterosexuality is worthy of special legal treatment anymore. Why should duality be favored then over plurality? Why can’t a voluntarily polygamous family or polyandrous family apply for a marriage license? The cultural and cross-cultural precedent for polygamy is certainly much stronger than for gay marriage.
My friend Richard and I were flying to Bradley Field in Connecticut today (excellent airplane museum) and it occurred to us that this could solve America’s health insurance problem. Consider 50 uninsured people. They could all get married in one big union. One of the 50 could take a job with really good health benefits, e.g., for the government. The other 49 would then get spousal health benefits.
Then your wife couldn’t use the excuse “He’s married, of course there’s nothing going on” anymore!
OK, let us see. I have been married to a woman for seven years. How does gay marriage affect me?
* It does not make my marriage any stronger or weaker (my relationship with my spouse determines that)
* It does not increase any costs for my employer (most gay partners already get health benefits)
* It does not hurt me socially that gays are marrying
On the other hand, there are a lot more things that I worry about — gay marriage being the least of them. To wit:
* A lot of my tax dollars are going to fund an occupation of a country with a rationale built on lies, and which is going poorly
* A president that does not have the guts to accept that he had the “Mission Accomplished” sign put on that aircraft carrier. Tell the four hundred or so families without a husband or father that the mission (howsoever dubious) was accomplished
* The economy is supposedly going gangbusters, but tell that to my friends that have been out of a job for months. My own confidence is not high either
* Osama and Mullah Omar are doing fine in the warm and welcoming border regions of Pakistan
* The USA is doing very well in exporting one commodity — jobs. I worry because eventually lost jobs hit me economically (housing prices crash, decrease in standards, blight, etc)
Bottom line, there are much bigger issues to deal with than what two people are doing with their relationship.
The US spends about 13% of its GDP on health care, about half of it public expenditure, against 9% on average among OECD countries. Are we more healthy than other countries? Doubtful, considering France (9.5% of GDP), for example has universal health coverage and we don’t (and an increasingly large proportion of middle class Americans can’t afford health care, it’s not just a problem of the indigent any more). According to http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf a fifth to a quarter of the nation’s health care expenditures are spend on administrative costs, a much higher proportion than any other OECD country (anybody who had to wrestle with insurance paperwork here in the US knows what I am talking about). Put another way, healthcare administrative costs represent almost as much as the entire defense spending of the US, and bringing them in line with other OECD countries would generate more than enough savings to fund universal basic health coverage.
Of course, “administrative costs” is a mighty convenient budget line item to put executive golf courses, political contributions and ther forms of corporate kleptocratic embezzlement.
And while we are at it lets legalize “church professional/little boy” type marriages.
There are really more important things than gay marriages. Bush is the “Great Polarizer”, see the article on Time:
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101031201/story.html
Why is he adored by half of the population? Bush is an embodiment of half America … which is really unforunate, especially the anti-intellectual.
Why are people puzzled at the failing math, science, engineering education? With Bush and his neo-con logic, it is not difficult to imagine why American kids are falling behind, since lies, wishful thinking, self-fullfilling prophesies have no place in these areas.
Sounds like you had a fun trip 🙂 Thanks for the positive post.
You’d pay a higher price for insuring 49 spouses than for insuring 1 spouse.
Society should be promoting marriage and stable relationships, even if the couple is of the same sex.
Government insurance seems to have lower adiministrative costs than private insurance. Government is better able to negotiate with health care providers, pharmaceutical companies, etc. than private companies, because it’s bigger, so it can get lower prices. Note that the new medicare bill will eliminate much of medicare’s ability to negotiate low drug prices.
The best measures of health are life spans, infant mortality rates, etc. rather than percent covered by insurance. Europe is much healthier than the US by almost any measure.
I don’t see any real evidence of worsening education. Average SAT scores, or the like, sometimes go down, but the main reason is that more people are taking the test. The real problem with the American education system, IMO, is funding by local property taxes, rather than at the state or federal level.
This comment thread seems to have gotten off track.
Why business does government have regulating marriage, anyway? Under our current system, marriage is a three (or four) way contract. Spouse #1 + Spouse #2 + the State (+ God).
If we privatized marriage, we could either replace the State with a private entity (either a church or business) or just remove one of the parties from the contract. Then, it would be the parties involved that would determine whether or not they would enter any specific types of marriage contracts.
Those in favor of homosexual, line or clan marriage could enter into any agreement they liked without affecting the contracts of those who want a conventional man, woman and God marriage.
This comment thread seems to have gotten off track.
Why business does government have regulating marriage, anyway? Under our current system, marriage is a three (or four) way contract. Spouse #1 + Spouse #2 + the State (+ God).
If we privatized marriage, we could either replace the State with a private entity (either a church or business) or just remove one of the parties from the contract. Then, it would be the parties involved that would determine whether or not they would enter any specific types of marriage contracts.
Those in favor of homosexual, line or clan marriage could enter into any agreement they liked without affecting the contracts of those who want a conventional man, woman and God marriage.
>>Why business does government have regulating marriage, anyway>>
There are a lot of laws which depend on whether couples are married. Federal taxes and social security benefits, for example. The gov’t cares because it affects gov’t economics.
The basic issue is economic discrimination.
And indeed, both in the Commonwealth and in Vermont, that’s been the major attack point: it’s the economy, stupid.
Well, and health policy access.
So, we should support 49 children with one working parent, but not 49 wives?
I doubt that allowing group marriage would have a marked effect on most of the country.
Peronally, I’d like to see the government out of the marriage business entirely, but I’m not waiting up.
With regard to Fazal’s comments: you’re missing an important reason why US citizens pay more for health care than other countries. The answer is: the other countries limit pricing! As the (say) pharma companies make decent margins still, those margins come more from US sales than sales in other countries, in effect, the US is subsidizing health care in non-US countries.
That won’t last. US imports of drugs shipped to Canada have reached such volumes that the US Congress is (wrongly) trying to block that importation, and drug companies are starting to limit total shipments into Canada.
I look forward to watching what happens when Canada has pharma shortages.
While everyone should be free to live their live with whatever configuration of partner(s) seems appropriate to all parties involved, I think there’s a good reason for limiting the benefits traditionally associated with marriage to a union of 2 (or any other fixed number of) persons. It limits the potential cost basis of employers, and allowing unlimited benefits might lead to situations where sham marriages are arranged for the sole purpose of health or tax benefits, just as used to happen when housing allocations were more strongly tied to marital status, or still happens for the purpose of obtaining greencards and citizenship.
Whether that number should be 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 or whatever is of lesser importance, but exactly the scenario Philip points out – let’s get married so you’ll have health benefits – and I (or the union of me, you and …) will be able to claim even more deductions – sounds like a good enough reason not to set it at infinity. The Christian right may be foaming at the mouth over gay unions and the sanctity of marriage, but I’d fully expect them to be the first to exploit such tax loopholes to the fullest extend possible.
Dane,
To misquote Tina Turner: “What’s God got to do, got to do with it?” 🙂
As for the healthcare issue, I think the biggest problem is that the US government is much more heavily influenced by corporate campaign spending than many other western governments, which inhibits their ability to take any measures that would decrease the cost of healthcare and thus decrease the income for the companies they get so much money from. It has been rumored that this is called corruption in certain other parts of the world.
As far as the marriage thing goes, it’s a questionable thing whether a government should sanction and promote specific forms of human relationships at all. Some say that by imposing heterosexual monogamous marriage as a standard, more stable situations for raising children ensue, but that position is hardly tenable with the current 50% divorce rate (and the hetero part of it is quite obviously a bogus requirement). One could even argue that if there were less of a pre-imposed standard on the way people organize relationships, and people would thus be forced to think about how they should shape theirs (monogamous? open? communal?), children would be better off. That does, however, presuppose that people are able to think about such issues rationally; if they aren’t, maybe strong societal expectations and government incentives to go with them are benificial after all.
Some of the people above have argued that government should be out of the marriage business completely — that everything should be contractual agreements between two (or N parties). That’s a really difficult thing to do. Civil marriage involves an enormous number of rights and responsibilities. (The GAO found 1049 federal statutes affected by marital status, see http://www.gao.gov/archive/1997/og97016.pdf. States generally have a few hundred laws affected by marital status.)
It’s not just the volume of laws that makes it tricky. It’s relatively easy to get someone to accept an individual *right* currently associated with civil marriage. (Want my Social Security benefits after I die? Sure you do.) However, it’s much harder to get someone to accept the *responsibilities* associated with civil marriage (Want the legal responsibility for my debts? For taking care of me in my old age? Didn’t think so.) By bundling all the rights and responsibilities into one package, it’s more tractable.
If you truly wanted to “privatize” marriage, I think you’d need to bundle each right with a responsibilitiy. (For example, you can have my Social Security benefits if and only if you also promise to take care of me in my old age.) That would be a real mess.
There are also a whole class of laws that I’m not sure I want to be split out individually. I don’t see an easy way to deal with spousal immigration, for example. (Do I get one “immigration right” in my lifetime that I can use for anybody? Can I sell it if I fall in love with another American?) Spousal immunity from testifying is also something that I’d be leery of allowing people to swap around with ease with just anybody.
Okay, back to Philip’s main point about extending marriage rights to poly arrangements…
The poly flag has been raised just about EVERY time there has been a change in marriage rights — especially with Loving vs. Virginia in 1967, where the Supreme Court said it was okay for interracial couples to marry. And yet, even with all the changes in marriage over the centuries, extending the number of people married has never been a real issue.
The poly argument makes the assumption that the limits on spousal *gender* are somehow linked to the limits on spoual *number*. They are not. Just as removing the restriction on race didn’t change the consanguinity or age restrictions, there’s no reason to believe that remove the restriction on gender will change the number restriction.
Also, if you look at the history of the changes in marriage, marriage has become progressively more and more equitable in terms of gender. This includes things like how married women were given the right to own property in their own name (1839, Louisiana Territory) all the way through divorced and widowed women being allowed to keep their credit rating (1979). In the entire history of the United States, there have been *no* changes in marriage related to the number of spouses except to *decrease* the number of allowed wives (Utah, 1890).
There are also some practical reasons why it’s not likely.
First, it’s hard enough to write laws that are fair and equitable when two people are concerned; it would be a nightmare to try and write laws that worked for multiple spouses. Health insurance is only the tiniest little piece of it. I don’t see an way to write child custody laws or alimony laws in a multiway relationship that is even mostly fair to all the participants in even most situations.
Second, our society just isn’t very poly. Societies with polygymous marriage are uniformly pretty rigidly patriarchical: one husband, lots of wives who are subserviant to him. It seems to me that as women get more rights and more power, they basically just don’t settle for that kind of relationship any more (in general).
Third, our society is less willing to make commitments in general than many others. I suspect that this has to do in part with the increase in lifespan. If you figured you and your spouse were likely to die before 40, then you only had to worry about whether you could put up with him/her for 20 years, not 80. While I am very happily married now, it was extremely difficult for me to muster up the courage to make a lifetime committment to ONE man — I can’t begin to imagine finding the courage to make lifetime committments to a whole bunch of people. I really doubt that there would be many people who would do that.
So, in short, it would take an enormous amount of pain to rewrite the numerous marriage laws to accomodate a very very small minority.
“Increasingly large proportion of middle class Americans can’t afford health care, it’s not just a problem of the indigent any more”…
Why checks and balances do not work in this case to fix the situation? Why so many people are not happy with it, but there is no action taken?