“Some men will be left out as polygyny increases.” This is based on the
assumption that in a culture with gender equality, polygyny would still be more
plentiful than polyandry. Anti-equality people, based on this assumption,
insist that this will result in unmarried men devolving into criminals.
The mistake here is assuming that the second, third, etc. wives in a
polygynous marriage would have wanted one of those unmarried men rather than
legally sharing the man they did marry, and that the unmarried men would in
turn want to marry them. Some of those men may want to marry men, or not marry
at all.
Why not allow people to marry the person or people of their choice? Why
try to force people to settle? Also, the system is not closed. There are
billions of people in the world and more and more people are reaching the age
and status of eligibility every second.
There was a study
attempting to link polygny to criminal behavior in
unmarried/unpartnered men based in part on
nineteenth century frontier America. Things have
changed a little since then. And guess what? Married men commit crime, too.
Most of the men in prison have been married, were married or had at least one girlfriend
at the time they were convicted.
Maybe men in the hypothetical polygynous community who don’t get married are
violent people. Is it better that they have a wife to beat instead of
committing crimes on the street? I don’t want to be the one who tells a woman
she can’t marry the man/men or woman/women she wants; rather, she has to marry
a less desirable man so that he can take his aggression out on her.
The warnings that
polyamorous or polygamous freedom to marry will result in an increase of violent gangs of
unmarried men committing crimes falls flat when one considers the overwhelming
data revealing both that
1) Men in the US are getting married for the first
time later than ever, and 2) Crime rates in the US have decreased.
There is no good reason to deny an adult, regardless of gender, sexual
orientation, race or religion, the right to share love, sex, residence, and marriage
(and any of those without the others) with any and all consenting adults without prosecution, bullying, or
discrimination.
Feel free to share, copy and paste, and otherwise distribute. This has
been adapted from this page at Full Marriage Equality:
http://marriage-equality.blogspot.com/p/discredited-invalid-arguments.html
Go to NOT a Good Reason to Deny (Polyamorous) Love #15
Go to NOT a Good Reason to Deny (Consanguineous) Love #17