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First, let's remember that marriage is a legal institution.  You can fornicate with as many people as you want (assuming everyone is capable of giving adult consent); you can live with as many people as you want; you can have children with as many people as you want.  What you *can't* do is expect to have government benefits for multiple partners.

The government has provided for certain rights and obligations for two people who make a certain type of contract with each other.  It is limited to two people.  The Legislature could abolish those rights and obligations (at least on a go-forward basis -- I don't want to digress into the Contracts Clause issue here), and it could expand them to include multiple people.  All of that is subject to the Legislature's police powers to create forms of contracts between adults.

The issue with gay marriage is that most Legislatures have permitted these contracts between two people only if they are of different genders.  But that discrimination against same-sex couples (I would argue; it's a legitimate debate either way) violates the Equal Protection Clause.  That's why gay marriage should exist IF the Legislature has permitted straight marriage.

However, the Legislature has not permitted polygamy.  The polygamists would have an argument if *some* polygamy were permitted, but not other (e.g., permitting plural wives but not plural husbands).  That's why the polygamists' argument based on gay marriage (at least in the United States) is constitutionally unsound.

As for gay marriage leading to a right to bestiality, I won't dignifty that contention by responding to it other than to say that anyone who asserts it should be dunked in a bucket of a frothy mixture of santorum.   (See www.urbandictionary.com/define.php if you don't know the term.)

Well said profrobert.

Also, it would be absurd to expect an individual's employer to extend benefits to multiple spouses, or a hospital to give multiple spouses rights as next of kin. There isn't any point in legal recognition of polygamy, because the legal rights that marriage (or civil union) is designed to protect could not reasonably be extended across multiple partnerships.

The polygamists might have had a legitimate point if they were arguing that it should not be illegal for them to live in households where multiple persons have religiously, but not legally, recognized marriages. The thing is, no one gets arrested for this. They get arrested for the multitude of other crimes they commit in living their horrid lifestyle.

While it would certainly be bigoted to call homosexuality a horrid lifestyle, it is not bigoted to describe what these men have done as amounting to a horrid lifestyle. Homosexuality involves a mature relationship between two adults of full rational faculty. This is not the case with the polygamy that is prosecuted. Little girls who have been raised in a life that is intentionally designed to keep them ignorant to the realities of the world and subservient to their despotic leaders are victims of these polygamist marriages. It goes well beyond simply being rape. They are willfully treated as chattel, made to think that this is right, or, when they dare to disagree, physically forced into lives they do not want, often through assault and/or battery. The horrors that young women on compounds are subjected to are enough that there is significant legal precedent established to say that even if multiple marriages were legal, the girls were over the age of consent, and did agree to the marriage, they are not of right mind to consent.

These men being arrested aren't Bill Hendricks. Even if they were living the life you see him live on Big Love, it is naive to say that the women of the Hendricks family are not victims. The most insightful and revealing moments of the show are those where the women have moments of clarity and reveal how horribly conflicted they feel about their lifestyle. Healthy relationships, gay or straight, do not ever involve such a deep and abiding inner conflict. Abusive relationships do.

Perhaps more substantially, these people aren't just looking for legal acceptance; they are looking for societal acceptance. It is of tantamount importance that we as a society never accept such a horrible way of life. It is appalling that we tolerate it to the extent that we do. This is nothing like accepting the gay community, because whether or not one believes there is something wrong with homosexual acts, there is nothing objectionable about a gay lifestyle. No one is being hurt; there is no victim. On a polygamist compound, almost everyone is a victim, including the young boys who are seduced into becoming evil men. There is nothing more appalling about our nation than the fact that we continue to allow this to go on. It's not an issue of freedom of religion, or of privacy, or any of the deeply held American values. They are crossing lines which are deep seated enough in human consciousness that people have recognized these sort of actions as evils committed against other humans for nearly as long as we have recorded our values. It's not even a grey area. It's abhorrent, and we cannot say that every one of us is truly free until we take action to erase from our lands any tolerance for such slavery, rape, and the domination of one's fellow man by means of violence, intimidation, and the shackling of the mind.

As stated above. Marraige is a metacontract between two people, it includes automatically power of autorney, power to choose if someone is taken off life support, links debt and benefits.

This would be very complicated to extend beyond one person, because then what if those multiple people disagree? In the end marraige is a choice that 'this one person has my back, this person can speak for me if the need should arise'. As stated above, nothing should legally stop those two people from then sleeping with or living with other consenting adults.

My problem with polygamist sects though isn't about the multiple marraige part, its the part where young girls are forced into marraige and where women are treated as cattle, not as partners.