ADVENTURES OF ESPERANZA: Lynn Gazis-Sax

[I agree with this. (Despite serious qualms about the whole "growing up in a small, unusual 'fundamentalist' community means your choices are less free than others'" bit.) Especially like how Lynn points out the ways in which marriage is a cultural norm, not solely a legal status. A lot of this stuff has implications, as I mentioned, for marriage education and promotion. --Eve]

OK, thinking a little further about Esperanza.

2. "But if we let you all marry, how will we know who makes the decisions, really? ... it's a lot better than treating one of my life partners as if she's "real family" and one of my life partners as if he's a stranger... isn't it?"

Here Esperanza is responding, reasonably well, to a limited form of a larger anti-polygamy argument -- which is, since all of our rules about marriage are built around the assumption of just one partner apiece, if we had polygamy, we'd have to think up a lot of new rules. Do we limit people to four a customer, as Islam does with men, or allow as many as you like? Do people have to consent to their spouses taking new spouses, or not? If they disagree about something important, do we leave them to argue until they agree, or do they get, in some cases, to appeal to a court to use some sort of best interests standard to decide which spouse is better qualified to make medical decisions, or whatever. Can people form polygamous marriages at the same age as monogamous ones, or do we maybe want to require an older age, as protection against exploitive man-marries-lots-of-teenagers situations?

Esperanza is of course right that it's not a slam dunk argument for prohibiting polygamy -- but it is an argument for asking people to spell out how their legalized polygamy would work.

3. "Because I don't love Lisa but not Jack, or Jack but not Lisa. I don't love one less than the other. I love them differently, because they're different people."

Fine, she's explained why she'd prefer to marry two people. But this doesn't really explain to me why she's entitled to marry two people, why it's an injustice to tell her one to a customer. Any way you set up the rules of marriage, people don't get to do some things they'd like to do. What makes the same-sex marriage argument particularly compelling here is that the thing that people don't get to do -- ever marry anyone at all that they'd really like to have sex with -- is something few people would like to think of living without. Nearly everyone, on the other hand,
doesn't get to marry at least one person that he or she had fallen in love with. I guess I need to supply some other assumption, which Esperanza takes for granted, to make this work -- something like, it's really not anyone else's business to tell her how many people she can love. That marriage is, or should be, about celebrating whatever relationships people actually have, and not about favoring a particular sort of relationship.

"4. Marriage domesticates sexuality. I agree. It's astonishing to me that today, heterosexuals can practice what is essentially fake polygamy, forming halfhearted and traumatically shattered families one after the other, when I can't get legal recognition for the stable family of which I'm already a part."

It's hard to see how polygamy would reduce the number of divorces. [Eve notes: That isn't what I intended Esp. to be arguing here.] I suppose she's right, though, that some existing marriages are less stable and less desirable places to raise kids than her polyamorous one.

"5. If people can marry more than one person, doesn't that mean marriage no longer implies sexual fidelity? Oh, honey, that ship has sailed. Your wedding ring doesn't make you a no-fly zone anymore"

And here Esperanza totally blows it and makes an anti-fidelity argument which is really not much of an argument at all. But what does come through is that, for her, marriage isn't at all about setting other people's expectations of you, or about being bound by those expectations. Of course, in practice, anyone with a wedding ring knows that it does cut down heavily on people hitting on you.

7. "... Most of the problems with fundamentalist religious polygamous communities arise from three sources: in this order, violence against women; statutory rape; and welfare fraud. All of these acts are already illegal."

I doubt that a woman growing up in a fundamentalist religious polygamous community is all that free and independent when she's barely legal -- what, 18, or even 16 in some states? If we wanted to be serious about allowing nice, consensual polyamory and not winding up with the icky oppressive fundamentalist religious kind, I think we'd need some extra conditions for poly marriages. I could imagine a higher age
for poly marriages -- 25? -- or some welfare bureaucracy rooting out deadbeat poly spouses ... it also occurs to me that forming a youthful poly marriage would really suck if you lived in, say, New York, where you don't have easy no fault divorce.

In any case, I think she falls apart when she tries to respond to the sexual fidelity argument.

By the way, a fictionally polygamous society that I found intriguing was the one in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. This despite the fact that I find nothing particularly appealing about living in one of those group marriages he describes. What I liked was the way he used the group marriage set up to show up a flaw in the thinking of the visitor on Earth -- a man who felt that husband had rights over a wife's body, but a woman really didn't need to be taken seriously if she was single and saying no on her own behalf.
posted by Eve at 9:48 PM | link

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