If gays can get married, why can't I get married to my 12-year-old twin sisters?

The other popular route seems to be to wilfully bog the whole thing down in a bunch of tedious wrangling about the definition of the word marriage, ie 'who are gays to change the definition of a marriage, eh, eh?'. At least the the slippery slope shit is funny.

x-post x2

sorry, that's enough out of me.

how come i never hear about women w/lots of husbands?

ooo! a new plank for pre-nups!

if, in the course of the marriage, things go less than swimmingly, one party will not try to exorcise the other party

so it made me happy...

Welcome to Norfolk!

That's polyandry. They do it in funny little places in the Himalayas - if a gal marries a boy, she often has to take his little brother too. A way of getting rid of pesky younger sons and ensuring free goat-herding services for the girl's family.

Unfortunatlly those seem to be the one's with political jobs

-- scott seward (skotro...), February 18th, 2004.

Actually this guy argues that gay marriage causes heterosexual couples to avoid marriage. No better perhaps but at least get your mockery straight.

Look at it this way, if you believe that consenting adults should be free to form relationships as they see fit then how can you object to polygamous or incestuous marriages?

Most critics of polygamy have problems with how some groups practice it (involving unwilling and underage brides) or procedural questions (what happens in a divorce?). Surely we can outlaw these abuses without banning it, why let some splinter Mormons ruin it for everyone? Procedural questions exist because the practice is unfamiliar in our culture but surely they present nothing that can't be overcome with a bit of reason.

Incestuous marriages are more problematic but objections to them seem to come more from an "ick" feeling than from any rational source. In fact the only rational objection to it that I can think (again assuming that it is adult-adult) is that there is a greater risk that the children will be born with birth defects. This makes for 0 arguments against incestuous marriage between gay or infertile partners.The increase in defects for first cousins is negligable. For brothers and sisters it is more substantial but the vast majority of children will still be born normal. We allow couples who both carry the Tay-Sachs gene or sickle cell trait (which means a vastly greater chance of these disorders) the right marry and have childeren. How can we deny consenting kinfolk the same opportunity?

that guy made lots of silly arguments. i was only citing one of them.

BTW I'm not against any of these possibilities with regard to "civil unions" between consenting adults .. but that's because there's a difference between being free to pursue a legal contract and entering into a religious bond. I'm not opposed to the religious bond either, but at least I understand the argument against it. But then, it's up to individual churches to make that decision, and the government has no interest in it (i.e. shouldn't.)

Q: Would conservative politicians be OK with two gay men marrying two gay women in a sham marriage so they could get benefits? Because there's nothing stopping that from happening now.