Connections.Mic
By Oliver Bateman
When it comes to marriage, three is still a crowd. But that might be changing sooner than we think. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, a small-yet-growing percentage of Americans report that they find the concept of plural marriage “morally acceptable,” while polyamorous relationships are increasingly receiving mainstream media coverage. A 2014 Newsweek article even estimates that there are more than 500,000 openly polyamorous families living in the United States today.
Of course, not everyone is thrilled with the prospect of polyamory becoming more socially acceptable, particularly the remaining conservative jurists on the Supreme Court. Writing in dissent in the 2015 Supreme Court decision that made same-sex sexual activity legal throughout the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote that the legalization of same-sex marriage “would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage,” echoing anti-same-sex marriage arguments Justice Antonin Scalia had made years before.
The rise of polyamory (as well as the possibility of a more liberal replacement for Scalia, who passed away in February) begs the question: Will multiple-partner relationships eventually become the norm? And if so, what would actually change from a legal perspective?
When discussing plural relationships, it’s important to note that polygamy (usually understood by to mean polygyny, or the taking of multiple simultaneous wives) is often conflated with polyamory, a term that refers to the practice of maintaining intimate, consensual relationships with two or more people.
While there are many differences between the two — for starters, polygamy is usually religious in nature and refers to a man having multiple wives, while polyamory is secular and refers to people of all genders having multiple partners — both polygamists and polyamorists live on the fringes of society. In fact, despite increasingly visible activism and public recognition, individuals in polyamorous unions remain outside the mainstream of American life, in part thanks to cultural discrimination against alternative lifestyles.
“Our entire system is geared toward the nuclear family model, two biological parents,” Sandy Peace told Mic. Peace is a California psychologist and sex educator who has done extensive work with people involved in the polyamory community. “Many polyamorous families don’t ‘come out’ to neighbors and school administrators because of concerns about prejudice and misunderstanding.”
Yet there are also “real logistical problems” that are posed by polyamorous unions from a legal perspective. Peace said that issues related to divorce and custody in particular are complicated.
“Lawyers who are motivated to secure a better custody arrangement for the non-poly parent could make an issue of poly relationships, stressing that they are having a negative impact on the child’s development,” she said.
Although plural marriage is illegal, meaning that those in polyamorous unions do not receive the insurance or social security benefits that most spouses are entitled to, many polyamorous couples aren’t particularly anxious for legal recognition.
Whether or not plural marriage should be legalized is “debated within our own community, similar to the gay community — there are people who don’t believe we should go after plural marriage, and there are those who do,” Robyn Trask, the executive director of the polyamory support organization Loving More, told U.S. News & World Report in 2015. …