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

[jenett]

And there's other ways around that (allow benefits to transfer to one designated long-term relationship, but you've got to pick one, with some limitations on when you can change that, pretty much the way health care through employers often works in the US, at least for spouses (and those places sensible enough to recognise domestic partnerships).

I can understand the cost argument, and most poly folk I've talked to have too - but that doesn't mean you couldn't do some sort of reasonable compromise.