Family Matters

[beetiger]

There's been a bunch of discussion floating around my friends' page concerning this article, relating multiparent custody cases, gay marriage, and polyfidelity (group marriage), and how this will be horrible for children.

It's amazing that I didn't really make the gay marriage -> poly marriage connection myself earlier. He may be right -- once we stop supporting boy-girl monogamy as the only appropriate family model, it opens us up to think more generally about why legal marriage even exists. Of course, I think that's a good thing.

I didn't get married for a long time after it was pretty clear that sythyry and I would be spending our lives together, in part because I felt that the fact that we happened to be more-or-less opposite-gender was as much luck as anything else.

I really don't see how supporting people by recognizing their lifetime commitments can be bad for kids. Giving people cultural support for the lives they are living anyway will make them more likely to stay in a stable situation. For kids, stability is the key thing. Kurtz feels that it is "the ethos of monogamy that keeps families together"; but given how many American divorces occur over minor infidelities, this is not a sensible postion.

But, more than anything else, I'm amused that an article in the National Review is telling people to go Google polyamory. Almost motivates me to put a page up or something.

Comments

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Arrrrrrr.

The thing these people keep throwing around that drives me nuts is "It's the end of marriage!"

What the hell? Why? Marriage, in its historical, cross-cultural context, has been an almost purely economic contract between two or more people into a social unit called a family. This may or may not include child-rearing, but always includes some kind of economic arrangement in terms of resource sharing and control. Across cultures, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of different kinds of traditional marriages.

As an economic contract, society can only win by recognizing gay marriage or poly-marriage. The more people able to pool their resources and therefore contribute to the local and national economy, the better, right? And many gay marriages do not include children, which means that those marriages have more disposable income with which to bolster businesses and raise consumer indices and whatnot.

The "ethos of monogamy [...] keeps families together"? My gi-normously fat ass. Monogamy isolates and silences the nuclear family, which makes abuse and other such dysfunction much more available to someone who wants to deal it out. How many marriage arguments and stressors involve money? How many family financial issues today would be solved by adding a third contributing adult?

I can't even conceive of raising children as a two-parent family.