A recent episode of "Hidden Brain" [1] on NPR covered the massive reduction in anti-gay bias over the last few decades in the US. A quote from the summary of episode at the link I gave:
> "This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion," says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. "There's more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in the past thirty years in the United States than there ever has been in recorded attitudes in the United States on any issue."
In the episode itself, they compare how fast attitudes are changing toward various biases. If anti-gay bias continues shrinking at the rate it is currently shrinking, it will be under a decade for them to be pretty much gone.
Biases about black people, on the other hand, would take about 60 years to mostly go away. Biases about skin tone...about 140 years. Biases based on ago...over 150 years.
(NOTE: those are not predictions. They are simply illustrations of how rapidly or slowly those biases are changing right now. It is extremely unlikely that any particular bias is going to diminish at a constant rate from now until it is virtually gone).
If you consider system oppression to be a form of validation for bigots, then it follows that removing that validation would result in reduced bigotry.
Typically polygamy has been asymmetrical and part of an undeniable patriarchal power structure (one man, as many wives as he can afford).
But if we're talking about symmetrical polygamy (multiple husband's and multiple wives), I see no reason why a modern secular society should care. Of course if everyone is married to everyone, is anyone married to anyone?
I vaguely recall a species in startrek that was like this.
Agreed that some religions use marriage as a power structure, poly or not - but that was the case even for many secular monogamous marriages in the US until relatively recently. Marital rape is legal on the books of many states!
There was a poly society in season 1 of TNG. I think it was episode 2 or something like that?
It is the episode where Natasha has to fight another woman for her life.
It's not just a legal contract between the participants, it confers certain legal privileges (you could say the government is also a party in the contract).
A lot of people would be unhappy with InfoSys's CEO marrying all of its H1B applicants, or a pro-immigration activist marrying hundreds of refugees.
This is not to say that polygamous marriage couldn't work, or that nobody abuses monogamous marriages for tax or immigration purposes. But if only a tiny proportion of people want to see their real loving polygamous family relationships approved by the state, the downsides could outweigh the positives.
> It's not just a legal contract between the participants, it confers certain legal privileges (you could say the government is also a party in the contract).
This is the part that needs to change imho. Marriage should have zero legal meaning outside of some sort of contract all parties sign at the time of marriage. You are essentially cofounding a business and that’s what it should stay at.
The government doesn’t make special amends (afaik) if two random people say “We are business partners” so why do it if two random people say “We are married”. Who cares, you do you.
This isn't a completely ridiculous or inconsistent viewpoint, but it's not a popular one. Most people favour at least some of the benefits of marriage (whether it's in immigration, tax, inheritance, healthcare, parental rights...) so the government really should keep them around.
Historically speaking, slavery and civilization go hand in hand. Undermining the former might undermine the latter.
That's not to say that not having access to legal polygamous marriage and owning people are equal but to show that the argument doesn't really stand on it's own. The correlation between monogamy and civilization isn't necessarily causitative.
Also I'm not sure that monogamy is as paired up with civilization as you claim. Haven't Kings and leaders for large portions of history been known for their harems?
Not just harems, but also marriages between high-born men and women made for political reasons, with the both of them having their own lovers on the side.
Do we actually know this for certain?
We have a very curated view of many past civilizations and in many (most?) cases it is a very heteronormative view.
I have seen plenty of arguments that monogamy did not become "normal" until religion entered the picture and the idea of woman as property became a thing (ironically the fact that some religions reinforce this by a man having multiple wives).
There is absolutely no reason to believe monody and civilization matters in the slightest. At best you could argue (and I would agree) years ago needing to be concerned about a woman getting pregnant, but that does not hold any weight in a modern society.
That had more to do with "who owns what, and who gets what when they die" than anything else. (Citation needed...)
In a modern society with strong property rights and gender equality monogamy would be unnecessary from a purely "maintaining civilization as we know it" point of view.
...No comment on an emotional / psychological point of view.
Historically speaking horse was the only mean of transportation, hygiene was nonexistent, disease spread quickly and killed millions, warlords owned nearly everything for most of the recorded history, people used to believe in gods... (all these factors could contribute to monogamy)
That something was valuable and important in the history doesn't mean is it today. Do you seriously think our world is in any way similar to the world even just 100 years ago?
By guaranteeing that just about every man is matched with a woman, monogamy brings harmony and social order. Having millions of single men with no prospect of marriage would lead to more crime, resentment, strife, and so forth.
> By guaranteeing that just about every man is matched with a woman, monogamy brings harmony and social order.
Without a patriarchal women-as-property model, monogamy demonstrably does not actually do that[0][1]; in a non-patriarchal, egalitarian system, removing the monogamy restriction might do that better than having it, even though monogamy is clearly better at that among strongly patriarchal women-as-property systems, where removing the restriction just means adopting polygyny where the more wealthy men have more women just like they have more of any other property.
[0] In the US only a little over 55% of adults are married, and by race only whites and Asians are over 50%, blacks at less than 30%.
[1] In fact, if women opt out of marriage in any significant numbers, and (given same sex marriage as an option) male and female homosexual preference is equally distributed (or female homosexual preference more common), polyandry is necessary to achieve almost-all-men-get-partners.
The historical model in which monogamy achieves the goal claimed of guaranteeing virtually all men a partner (and where polygamy, which on such cases is universally exclusive polygyny, does not do so) is a patriarchal, women-as-property model—this is a historically common model but generally not seen in the modern developed world, and in the modern developed world monogamy generally does not have (and generalized polygamy is not opposed to) that effect.
Moral and legal obligations that restrict your choices don’t make you “property”. Property itself isn’t a single, neat concept, but refers to bundles of rights and obligations. By using the word “property”, you’re invoking the mental image of some of the rights associated with physical property, like the near absolute right to destroy and use for your own purposes.
Marriage is no such a thing at all. It’s a kind of relationship with its own peculiar set of moral rights and obligations, like e.g. contracts or torts.
Being required to exercise care so as to not be liable in tort doesn’t make you anyone’s “property”, and neither does a contract to sell them goods.
Monogamous marriage is no doubt a restriction of freedom, just like all of the other rules that govern our society. The argument is whether such restrictions are justified, not making poorly-founded analogies to “property”.
> Moral and legal obligations that restrict your choices don’t make you “property”.
You know, we could debate the appropriateness of the word "property" in the description all day (and I'll get back to that later in this post), but it is, in any case, tangential to the point which is that the utility of exclusive legal monogamy as opposed to tolerance of polygamy in assuring men with partners is demonstrably, empirically only present when comparing systems in which women have a legally inferior, subordinate position, and that whatever social utility can be said to derive from that effect is not achieved by choosing exclusive legal monogamy in systems with more gender-equal ranges of social and economic freedoms and choices.
> By using the word “property”, you’re invoking the mental image of some of the rights associated with physical property
Yes, deliberately so.
> like the near absolute right to destroy and use for your own purposes.
Yes, and in the systems in which monogamy has the effect of providing near-universal guarantee that men get stable partners, that is a very close approximation of the case. Women are disposed of to men by the men in the family they are born or raised in, often in explicit or implicit exchange for other property, and once so transferred the receiving man has relatively impunity to use them at will, including often the right to impose corporal punishment and the right to free sexual use at his whim without regard to her preferences; they universally include widespread legal discrimination against women in economic activity, and often include outright legal bars on women engaging in wide fields of endeavor, and often restrictions on women even owning property.
> Marriage is not such a thing at all.
I didn't ever say marriage, in general, was a relationship in which women were property, I said that the social contexts in which monogamy as the sole legal form of marriage actually produced the outcome that virtually every man was able to have and keep a partner are ones in which women (not just in marriage) are treated more as valuable property than as coequal members of society.
Interesting that you say it's about obligations to each other yet your original comment focused on making sure "every man is matched with a woman" and lamenting the social hazards that could result from "millions of single men with no prospect of marriage."
You don't seem to have considered the social benefits/costs of monogamy to women. It's almost as though women are an afterthought...
Aimless men turning to antisocial behavior and violence is the biggest threat to society as a whole, but women suffer too in a non-monogamous world. They suffer from being perceived as always available for sex (see the grievances driving #metoo), from their reproductive years being much shorter than men’s, and the results of that. Lifetime monogamy, for example, protects women from being left at 40 when their husband finds a younger girl.
Maybe you think absolute freedom in these affairs is worth it nonetheless, but people before us had good reasons for how they organized their world, and we shouldn’t be so quick to discount it as just flowing from prejudice, ignorance, or evil.
The benefit of monogamy to women is... not being abandoned by their husbands when they get older? Yikes.
Also, your understanding of the #MeToo movement is... misguided. Sexual harassment and sexual assault have nothing to do with how many sexual partners a woman has or whether or not a woman is married. #MeToo is about shedding light on sexual harassment and assault when it has historically been a “taboo” subject to speak about publicly. It’s about letting women who have been harassed or assaulted know they aren’t alone and helping others realize how prevalent the issue is. For example, in this recent thread[1] about a survey of YC female founders you can see how shocked many people were by how common it was.
For the record, nothing I said is incompatible with what you’re saying. Something can both be the result of a wrongdoer’s blameworthy choice and the consequence of social structure. People don’t have a problem understanding crime in general that way, but for some reason the suggestion that sexual misconduct might have to do with changes in sexual norms is met is treated differently. E.g., there are ways of organizing our society that would make murders much more common. Suggesting that we not organize our society like that does that does not entail the suggestion that the murderers, who wouldn’t murder if the society were organized differently, wouldn’t be responsible for their actions.
And yes, the world is full of people who have been left by a partner for no good reason other than the grass being greener on the other side, including, as just one example, women being left for younger women. There are some well-known instances of this in public life right now. When there is a stronger norm of lifelong monogamy, I think people are more likely to internalize their commitment and stick it out, just like they internalize other norms of rightful conduct. There are, allegedly, fairy tale marriages out there, but most of the older folks I know who have had successful, lifelong marriages will tell you that it wasn’t always easy or what they desired at every moment, but that at various points they stuck it out for the kids, out of obligation, out of love (the commitment, not the feeling).
Tolerance of polygamy seems to correspond to regions with a history of tremendous strife where men go off to war and get killed at high rates. It ensures that women can reproduce even if there aren't enough men to go around, thereby helping protect the future of the nation.
One man with four wives can produce four babies in a year and everyone will know the parentage of all children. One woman with four husbands can produce one child and no one will ever be certain who the daddy really is.
Even if you invent effective inheritance laws to cope with that, it still has potential to cause problems. Inbreeding is known to foster genetic issues. Avoiding that outcome seems to be one of the cornerstones of a lot of human sexual morality policies.
Yes, that is a very pragmatic thing. But it is not the case now, where the sentiment seems to just be “freedom”, the kind of freedom you can only ever truly have in the jungle. I think we forget that the fruits of society have a cost, and it’s not just to the pocketbook of the wealthy man.
Thanks to dating sites and hookup apps, there is plenty of data on how men and women choose partners when there is no restraint other than the willingness of the other. It’s not symmetric at all.
Implementing a legalised form of polygamous marriage won't change nor exacerbate that. The number of people who have concurrent relationships with more than one partner won't change by denying a formal form of that type of partnership, although it could mean some won't have to be as secretive about it.
That is, whether or not the distribution of romantic partners is symmetric or not is completely irrelevant to this topic. Incels have always existed, and will always exist, under varying names (in all genders).
You’re right that if the only aspect of the prohibition left standing is the law, the issue is probably lost. But morality and law feed each other, so I disagree that it’s totally irrelevant.
While it may have initially been under duress, the LDS Church seems to have long been fully invested in monogamy; associating the current Church with polygamy is more an example of anti-mormon bigotry than any current law against polygamy is.
To be fair, they only ceased practicing polygamy because it was an untenable position in their quest for statehood. Just like they stopped keeping black people from the temple or the priesthood in 1978 because it was no longer an acceptable practice.
Sure, but in both cases they backed the pragmatic policy change with the full weight of the doctrinal power of the Church institutions, which over time (and the monogamy thing has had lots of time, the full admission of blacks less so yet) turns it into a lot more than a position of political convenience.
No reason to tie poly to either of those religions, since at least in some cases for those religions it comes from a very misogynistic mindset instead of any of the positive in any "real" poly community.
Instead of legalizing poly, how about we just get the government out of marriage in the first place.
(Incase it isn't clear, I am advocating for poly acceptance. Just not that it needs to be "legal")
Marriage bestows a number of desirable benefits to spouses, in terms of property, taxes, and kinship (having the ability to speak for your spouse in case of severe illness and sudden hospitalisation is definitely something married couples tend to want). It is reasonable for governments to award such constructs, as they are the one type of institution that can grant them.
Opening up this civil marriage construct to polyamorous lovers is probably fine, as long as there are safeguards to prevent abuse of that construct. Like a maximum of n people perhaps (but I'm no expert on this topic).
This is of course separate from any religious marriage which a secular government already stays well away from.
I think there should be an alternative too married when it comes to the government. (As in, the government is not involved in marriage at all. not "Separate but equal")
What we consider "marriage" should not be a thing the government should be involved in.
I think questioning why the government should view 2 (or more) people together should change how taxes work. Instead of just having each person file taxes separately.
At one point we needed tax incentives for procreation, but I don't think that is necessary anymore.
Property is an interesting one, but break this assumption that just because you are with someone that you should immediately all own everything.
Kinship is valid, but we need alternatives too that anyways for anyone that chooses never to marry. No reason 2 best friends cannot enter that specific agreement for each other and have it legally recognized.
I just think there are better ways to handle these issues than tying them all to a marriage.
Allow 2 people to still get married obviously... but the government does not care anymore, but these other benefits grant in other more meaningful ways.
Fixing all that would be laudable of course, but how do you solve the problem of foreign governments respecting those? If you go abroad on holiday, you would want the right to speak for your partner in a hospital as well!
Also, what's wrong with calling the set of those rights marriage? Two best friends can already get married in a lot of countries if they wish.
As a gay man many foreign governments won't respect my current marriage so I fail to see the issue.
Every foreign government does not already recognize it. Hell we had enough issues in the US alone of every state recognizing every marriage (Common Law is not recognized in most states).
I don't have an issue with the word. But they should not be grouped together and have any restrictions on it being 2 people.
2 best friends may want to setup the kinship agreement but why does that mean they get tax benefits or any other benefit traditionally associated with marriage.
> Could a Family Limited Partnership accomplish much of the same goals?
Since a marriage is effectively a general partnership, and a Limited Partnership is a legal structure with overlapping but not identical effects to a general partnership that involves more involved goverment rules, sure, the State could create a “Family Limited Partnership” having the a similar relation to marriage as a regular limited partnership has to a general partnership, but simply legalizing the existing family system with more than two partners would be the less intrusive, simpler approach (and a lot of the problem areas that people raise with that already have fairly obvious solutions from generalizing the multipartner handling in the law of general partnerships back to marriages.)
> a five-wave longitudinal time-series study using a sample of 1,063 people found an increase in perceived social norms supporting gay marriage after the ruling but no change in personal attitudes. This pattern was replicated in a separate between-subjects data set.
Makes sense. People respect the authority of the law/government to varying degrees. Of course their opinion is swayed when the government officially sanctions something. People don't have strong, let alone informed opinions about tons of things so legality is a signaling mechanism for good/bad.
I agree. Many people (perhaps those without religion or some other mechanism that provides an external moral code) just adapt the law as their moral code: if it's legal, it's moral; if it's illegal, it's immoral.
Of course, this fact is always obfuscated when talking about drug legalization because it is harmful to the legalization effort to suggest that legalizing a drug will lead to increased usage/acceptance of said drug (usually the opposite claim is made - that legalizing the drug will reduce usage)
So, my two reactions:
1) duh
2) but, proving cause vs. effect seems tricky here, since which states legalized was in no way assigned randomly. An accelerating decline in antigay bias would be exactly what we should expect to happen around the time the legislature or courts see which way the wind is blowing, and legalize gay marriage. Not that I disbelieve the conclusion, but this doesn't seem like it would be very convincing evidence if I weren't already convinced.
This title is misleading considering their findings. Only in states that were already moving towards legalization and reduced bias did you see a sharper reduction after federal legalization. States that weren't moving towards legalization only dug in their heels and had increased bias after federal legalization. Looks like another case of the government trying to speak for everyone with a one-size-fits-all solution and only serving to polarize people further.
"Although states passing legislation experienced a greater decrease in bias following legislation, states that never passed legislation demonstrated increased antigay bias following federal legalization."
The government (the Supreme Court in this case) wasn't speaking for everyone, they were merely protecting the rights of a certain segment of the population. It's an important distinction to make. There was no constitutional basis for denying same-sex marriage.
True that, but that can be completely true, and yet it can be also true that having it imposed by the courts leads to a backlash, and an increase in anti-gay bias.
It is sort of like how people never like it when their candidate in an election loses, but if the courts intervene and disqualify their candidate, their resentment of the winner is greater. Regardless of whether the courts were right or not, the fact that a non-electorate authority made the decision, increases the dissatisfaction with the outcome.
Good point, I guess the comment to which I responded could be read two different ways also.
No one likes to be forced to do anything, and any perception of unfairness could easily elicit a stronger response of resentment or resistance.
I personally think when it comes to protecting rights it may be warranted, but I definitely see how the situation you explained could also be true. It's a tough thing to balance.
My thoughts, too. If you've got to pick one, the much more parsimonious explanation would be that people's attitudes are influenced by the attitudes of their friends and acquaintances.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a mix of both. I'm sure people's ethical judgments are influenced by the law, too. It's the main reason I can think of why, for example, alcohol tends to be so very much more socially acceptable than marijuana in places where the one is legal and the other is not.
Sure, I also believe it is a mix of both. But, this study is probably overestimating the degree to which the legalization is responsible for the change in attitudes.
Also, it is probably "only" accelerating a change that was going to happen anyway. For example, there were times and places when divorce was legal, but did not become "accepted" socially for a generation or several. So, I don't think the causation primarily goes from legalization-->social attitudes.
Sure, gays who got thrown out into the street after their lifelong partner died and the parents inherited the house weren't bothered by that in the least. Keeping the house was never one of their goals.
(Does this need a sarcasm tag? Or can people figure that out on their own?)
The problem you mentioned did not require marriage per se, it just made it easier. Inheritance and visitation and all the legal stuff could have been conferred by domestic partnership. Marriage, in this case, was somewhat besides the point.
Normalization has a much greater impact than property rights.
Many years ago, I read an interesting article about an idealistic young hetero couple cohabiting. They chose to have a baby together.
The guy began saying "My wife and I just had a baby" so people would actually congratulate him. When he said "My girlfriend just had a baby" people were all "Oh, sorry, dude. That sucks."
Trying to arrange health coverage, wills and a zillion other things involved jumping through so many hoops they were considering getting married because a lot of those things would be automatic or vastly easier if they were married.
Normalization isn't insignificant. Neither are the 169 rights a gay college professor stated in one of my classes were conferred by marriage.
>Neither are the 169 rights a gay college professor stated in one of my classes were conferred by marriage.
None of those rights have meaning without normalization. I think of this, sometimes, when I consider moving out of California. My husband was in the hospital once. I wasn't sure he was conscious or not; I had to tell the receptionist who I was to find out what room he was in. He didn't think twice, I was able to proceed without incident. Would the same have happened if I lived in rural Texas? Sure, marriage is legal everywhere for us. The law is on our side. But the law doesn't mean anything if the people standing between you and your husband don't respect it.
You need normalization to exercise those rights as effectively as possible. Certainly, prejudice can mean there is a difference between theoretical de juris outcomes and de facto actual outcomes.
But normalization without those rights still leaves you unable to do a lot of things. It leaves you with "You can't visit your husband in the hospital because policy says family only and the law says you aren't family, even though no one here is a homophobe. We still can't let you through because we can get fired for breaking the rules."
You need both things to enjoy a high quality of life. I don't know why you are arguing otherwise.
Rights without social cooperation certainly hampers your ability to exercise those rights, but social cooperation without rights is still a big problem.
I could see someone taking the position that normalization implies having the same rights as a baseline starting point. But I cannot see arguing that normalization is more important than legal rights and legal rights were never the point.
I will add the article in question indicates legalizing it is helping to normalize it. Rights are not some insignificant detail, not by any stretch of the imagination.
That was my opinion 10-15 years ago. Which was despite what the professional fainting goats left claimed the best thing to do about gay marriage was a full court press to force it through after which the issue would just quickly disappear.
So the fact that weed is illegal means there could be an anti-smoker bias? One based purely on the law and not any other reason? Probably. I still say legalizing pot smokers should be the next civil right.
Certainly, it would remove a lot of the stigma of pot as contraband and pot smokers as criminals. Fine, upstanding citizens don't want to be associated with criminals, right?
One based purely on the law and not any other reason?
I don't think so. People already have a bias against tobacco smokers and that doesn't have any criminal law component. Habitually smoking (or vaping) any substance is viewed as a vice and a moral shortcoming. It also tends to make a person smell bad and people naturally feel a bias against bad smells.
The fact that smokers are accustomed to the smell and don't notice it is also frustrating. It's an externality.
I can't read the article b/c of paywall, but I do wonder how they controlled for legislation vs. the effects of media, subsequent social pressure and acclimation, the higher likelihood of legislation being passed in a state already favorably disposed toward SSM, etc. Also, what is the definition of "anti-gay bias"? My guess is that any critical attitude would be classified as such which is an ideological tactic i.e. normalization through the repeated conflation of opposition with bias or even hatred. In any case, the idea that the government can play a role in normalizing certain behaviors and attitudes is not surprising. With history as my witness, all kinds of things, good and bad, have been normalized partly by government backing.
In any case, whether SSM makes sense or should be recognized is not a matter of purported benefits, but a matter of principle. It doesn't take much imagination to recall evil deeds that may result in some desired effect. What matters is whether SSM should in itself be recognized. Note the use of the word recognition. Marriage is not a manufactured social construct (pace postmodern), but a natural institution that governments only have the freedom to recognize. Neither societies nor governments can arbitrarily manufacture institutions. They can pretend to do so, just as they can pass immoral "laws", but neither such ersatz laws nor such ersatz institutions have any legitimacy and thus may and must be freely rejected by citizens (coercion has forced citizens to simulate assent and submission to such false laws and institutions, of course).
> "This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion," says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. "There's more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in the past thirty years in the United States than there ever has been in recorded attitudes in the United States on any issue."
In the episode itself, they compare how fast attitudes are changing toward various biases. If anti-gay bias continues shrinking at the rate it is currently shrinking, it will be under a decade for them to be pretty much gone.
Biases about black people, on the other hand, would take about 60 years to mostly go away. Biases about skin tone...about 140 years. Biases based on ago...over 150 years.
(NOTE: those are not predictions. They are simply illustrations of how rapidly or slowly those biases are changing right now. It is extremely unlikely that any particular bias is going to diminish at a constant rate from now until it is virtually gone).
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709567750/radically-normal-ho...