Fluffy

I wouldn't mind having multiple husbands. Is it such a bad thing for society?

ohwilleke

It actually is amazing what judges will do. The same Georgia court that said the consentual sodomy law in Georgia was illegal and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, reversed itself a few years later. Adultery was a crime everywhere in the 1950s, and is now not punishable in almost any state as a crime (and of doubtful constitutionality and not used for that reason elsewhere). Laws preventing unmarried people from accessing contraception have been upheld. The Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (which is the law in Colorado) contemplates what can be a form of plural marriage in the form of a putative marriage (i.e. it says that if a person has multiple people who believe that they are that person's spouse and didn't know that there was an impediment to the marriage at the time the marriage was entered into that the judge shall equitably apportion marital rights among them). Similarly, on rare occassions the United States Social Security Administration has allowed more than one woman to get social security benefits from a man despite the fact that unbeknownst to either, he was probably married to both at the same time.

Our courts routinely deal with people who have multiple children from multiple people, often in overlapping non-marital relationships. No ER doctor in an urban hospital in the U.S. worth his salt would presume that because he knows who the mother of a child is, that her spouse is the parent. The law is quite clear that having sex with multiple partners in a short time period is not unlawful, so long as the sex is consentual. Having multiple women live with a man at the same residence is the stuff of sitcoms and occurs regularly in roommate situations (not necessarily with a sexual aspect).

The rights of the Amish to live in separate communities rejecting all technology and letting their kids drop out of school early ha been upheld.

Polygamy simply doesn't seem as strange now, in our more modern sexuality, as it did at in 1868, when in many states the only way to get a divorce was to have the State Legislature declare you and your spouse divorced, when adultery and virtually all forms of non-marital sex were illegal (a notion often honored in the breach), and where stories of polygamy were restricted to the Bible as opposed to places every American has seen on TV and many ordinary Americans have visited in the course of military service or work for an oil company or as tourists.