General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The gay marriage decision has put us in uncharted waters with regard to polygamy [View all]6chars
(3,967 posts)"The States) ... have throughout our history made marriage the basis for an expanding list of governmental rights, bene- fits, and responsibilities. These aspects of marital status include: taxation; inheritance and property rights; rules of intestate succession; spousal privilege in the law of evi- dence; hospital access; medical decisionmaking authority; adoption rights; the rights and benefits of survivors; birth and death certificates; professional ethics rules; campaign finance restrictions; workers compensation benefits; health insurance; and child custody, support, and visita- tion rules...Valid marriage under state law is also a significant status for over a thousand provisions of federal law"
All the above do seem to make it more poly complicated than simply allowing same sex couples to marry and use the laws exactly as written for different sex couples. For example, if one member of a poly family is incapacitated and the others disagree about the medical decision, there would not be a single next of kin. If one member dies intestate, is the estate divided equally among all the other partners - what about the house? Situations might arise where the simple allocation of rights to the single next of kin become more like allocation of rights to surviving children after the death of the second parent. Divorces would involve more complicated terms too if there is disagreement among the partners. How would social security spousal benefits be calculated - based on whose income and split among whom? How would the law interpret the way these and other funded benefits should be allocated without systematically advantaging or disadvantaging poly families over couples?
In this sense, a partnership between more than two people is enough different than one between two people only that it would really work better with different legal language. This is a separate question from whether poly families are respected and valued (but not a separate question from whether they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, as they say). The latter involves working with people throughout society and is not something that can be solved in the courts.
Perhaps poly families could be legitimized under the law, with strong protections against discrimination, rights and benefits defined in a manner analogous to those of couples and family households, but with some thought rather than a simple search and replace. There are surely models out there to draw on. These models could also apply to other kinds of households, e.g., blended families, other voluntary family units that are not assuming a basis of sexual attraction, co-op living, etc. Possibly there would be more than one kind of legally defined family. There might well be a slightly different constitutional argument (one that could piggy back on Obergfell without relying 100% on it) for why such arrangements must be permitted that might stand up better before SCOTUS.