Legalize polygamy

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Ok, I'll list four.

a) Polygamy is the practice of one man having many wives. If we legalise it, we will then have to legalise the practice of one woman having many husbands, which I think is called 'polyandry'. After all, it would only be fair, would it not?
b) Marriage is, or at least was so far as the West goes, a binding contract that had possession at its core. That is, the wife was the property of the husband. I believe in some parts of the Near East this is still how it is viewed. Shouldn't we be pushing for the abolition of marriage as a (rather outdated) concept instead of going in the other direction and just making things worse?
c) Good reasons for allowing it are completely non-existent. Societies that do allow it (ex. the Mormons) are not the kind of societies we should be attempting to emulate. Cults often encourage this practice precisely because it allows the founder of the cult to indulge himself with the daughters of his membership. Such societies are almost always grossly unequal.
d) One needs to seriously question the mindset of a man who actually thinks it would be a dandy idea to have access to more than one wife. Such people usually turn out to be complete sleazebags (and misogynistic douchbags as well).

~Why does the world need more citizens of the western world? The world is grossly overpopulated today and thus we have been forced to create additional food using science that is being tested on us (gmo's - genetically modified organisms). Take a peek at this link showing population growth...http://www.census.gov/popclock/
~I feel insulted by your reference to sweeping lesbianism under the rug as if a woman is a lesbian because there are not enough men to go around. This is incorrect.
~There is nothing inherently stable about people sharing partners. Go out and recruit multiple wives and have at it if you have the means and the mentality. It exists in every society legally or illegally already. Some people require monogamy and some people want more. If you're honest, open, and accept that a woman may want multiple partners also, I don't find anything wrong with poly-any.

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Not sure.

But polygamy, or polygeny (whichever word means 'mulitple wives in a heterosexual marriage'), would HAVE to go along with legalized polyandry (wives with multiple husbands) before I would even consider thinking about tolerating it.

Its not just fairness between the sexes (allowing sauce for both the goose and the gander), but also fairness within each gender. Because of the issue of the limited supply of spouses (the sex ratio being roughly equal) you have the problem of supply if one gender is allowed multiple spouses. So you have to allow both genders to have multiple spouses to even it out.

But then if you allowed both polygamy and polyandry then a wife in a polygamous marriage could take on second husband- so then you have a 'group marriage' of both brother husbands and sister wives. So you would have to allow that too. Gets complicated.

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I don't see they need. It is not for government to define relationships. They should abolish legal marriage.

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If you believe in religious and cultural freedom it makes sense to get rid of legal marriage. The conflation of the legal marriage and religious and cultural marriage is what is causing the issue you talk about.

I support churches making their own definition of marriage for their followers. If people don't like it they can form or join a different one. I consider churches interest groups anyway.

There reason why there are so many issue is churches feel their religious practice is under threat becuase of this connection between legal marriage and religious marriage, which is not supposed to be there.

You could rename legal marriage to civil partnership, but I recommend severing the connection.

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My immediate instincts toward these kinds of things tend to be libertarian, so it's worth taking account who is actually pushing for this, and whether those are the kinds of groups which tend to grant grant women autonomy from their husbands. We might be talking about is whether we want to import another patriarchal system of bondage from the third world.

I don't think that we should be instituting policies that are inhume just so we can lower the birth rate. Nor is it a brilliant idea to buy into a paradigm that conceptualises humanity as something like a burdensome herd that needs to be culled.

Malthus was a sociopath, and he was dead wrong in his assumptions. The reason for poverty in his day were institutional. They were not a result of overpopulation. Likewise, the problems we see now with resource depletion and environmental destruction has more to do with geopolitical brinksmanship than it does in serving the actual needs of the humans on this planet.

Gosh!

A lot of issues here-enough to overwhelm anyone. You might need counseling (both legal, and psychological) to get through this.

This thread should be in the "Haven", and not in the PPR, because its a personal, and not an academic issue.

My impulse is to say that "if there is that much smoke around your wife then there must be some fire", but actually mass hysteria among parents about their children does happen, and malicious accusation does happen, so it could be that there is no fire. Hard to say. But if that "biting" incident was proven then- thats a little bit of fire right there (and it might indicate there is more). But I'm no expert-get professional help IRL (dont rely on strangers on a social website) about this.