Tired arguments, lousy logic

I didn't really mean to have so many gay marriage posts in the last few days, but the issue just keeps cropping up.

It must have been a slow day for conservative columnist Katherine Kersten, because she devoted her entire allotment of newsprint to regurgitating one of the tiredest attacks on gay marriage -- that it will necessarily lead to polygamy.

Her argument:

But wait. What if a person loves two people, or three or more? If "one man-one woman" is a discriminatory limitation on the choice of a life partner, on what grounds can the state logically restrict marriage to two people? The fact is, once you adopt same-sex marriage -- legally changing the standard for marriage from one-man, one-woman to a "committed relationship" -- there is no principled way to prevent its extension to polygamy or other forms of "plural marriage" or partnership.

First, let's just note that in practical terms this is a straw man. The number of people who actively support polygamy are vanishingly few. It just isn't going to be legalized any time soon because there's no meaningful political pressure to do so.

But I'll play along.

Legally speaking, the major problem with preventing gays from marrying is that the government allows these two people to marry, but not those two people. The only reason for the different treatment is the gender of the people involved. That is presumptively discriminatory, and must be justified on practical grounds -- showing that the discrimination serves a legitimate government interest.

That is qualitatively different from saying any two people can marry, but any three (or more) can't. The situations are not the same, so treating them differently is less of a problem. You might still need to justify it, but the hurdle is far lower.

Logically speaking, polygamists can already make the "two vs. three" discrimination argument. That doesn't change just because we recognize two people of any gender and not just man/woman pairings.

Further, polygamy is a choice, not a condition. That makes it more susceptible to regulation than more ingrained characteristics such as sexual orientation.

Let's now get into the philosophy of gay marriage.

Philosophically, one can view gay marriage as "imposing" acceptance of homosexuality on an unwilling majority. But that implies that legality equals acceptance, which isn't a traditionally conservative viewpoint. A true conservative argues that citizens should generally be free to do as they please, and government intrusion should be kept to a minimum, stepping in only as much as necessary to preserve order.

Approval simply doesn't enter into it. What such a viewpoint defends is the concept of individual liberty -- not whatever each individual chooses to do with that liberty.

And that's all that allowing gay marriage would do. It's not forcing anyone to do anything; it's simply allowing homosexual couples to have the same rights and responsiblities that heterosexual couples do. There's no imposition in any meaningful sense of the word.

Having established those cases, let me now take up the separate question of whether polygamy should be outlawed.

Respect for individual liberty means that the only reason to ban a behavior is if it can be shown to be harmful. So before we get all upset about the prospect of polygamy being legalized, we should establish why it should remain illegal. If we can't show harm, there's no logical reason to ban it.

What harm does polygamy do? And is that harm sufficient to warrant government intervention?

I'm willing to believe that there are provable downsides to polygamy, but I can't think of one offhand. There are plenty of plausible arguments -- it subjugates women, for instance. But proof seems to be in short supply.

There are also practical arguments, such as an increased risk of welfare fraud or the need to rewrite a sizable chunk of our legal code to deal with multiperson marriages. Those are not philosophical objections, and would not be weakened by the existence of gay marriage.

That's the ultimate way to draw a line between two behaviors: show actual harm. Gay marriage opponents have repeatedly failed to show that gay marriage will be harmful to society. So they raise the specter of legalized polygamy as part of their rearguard action. Well, the solution to that is entirely in their hands: if they don't want gay marriage to lead to polygamy, all they have to do is show that polygamy is harmful. Do that, and I'll lead the charge to keep it illegal.

You know where to reach me.

Minnesota, polygamy, Kersten, gay marriage, politics, midtopia