While the United States is occupied with the federal
challenge to California’s Proposition 8, Canada has its own
pending
marriage case, which is likely headed for
the Canadian Supreme Court. Canada, which redefined marriage
nationwide to include same-sex couples in 2005, against the
backdrop of successful provincial lawsuits against the country’s
marriage law, could be moving on to bigger things — literally.
Specifically, polygamy and polyamory, as this case invokes the
question of whether the government can continue to criminalize
multiple-partner marriages. The case itself, initiated
by the British Columbia Attorney General under a special provision
of that Province’s law, arises in the wake of failed prosecutions
of polygamous sect members in British Columbia.
Advocates of polygamy and polyamory seem to have an ally
in the Law Commission of Canada, a statutory body of government
appointees who propose changes to modernize Canadian law and report
to the Justice Ministry. In 2001, the Commission issued a report,
Beyond Conjugality: Recognizing and Supporting Close Personal
Adult Relationships, that questioned the continuing illegality
of consensual polygamy in Canada.
Recently, the case has been uniquely complicated by an
intervening interest group called the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy
Association. The Association is seeking an adjudication of sorts
that the Canadian laws regarding polygamy (one man with more than
one wife) do not apply to polyamory (“multiple
conjugal relationships”). CPAA’s “twist” on the law is
that polyamory is just fine, and ought to be allowed, while
polygamy can remain unsuitable for Canadian society. The rationale
for their argument is the contention that, beyond the social
science data that shows it is harmful, polygamy promotes gender
inequality, and often involves coercion.
“Polyamory,” by contrast, is strictly egalitarian and
consensual, according to CPAA, and thus does not involve or promote
one gender over the other. Affidavits filed in court
detail (1) a woman and her male partner who
live and have relationships with two other adults in the household
(they also have a child living in the home) and who have agreed
that each can pursue relationships with others, (2) a woman who
lives with two other men (two of her teenage sons also live in the
home), (3) a husband and wife who live with another adult (and the
married couples’ two young children and the third person’s teenage
children), and (4) a man who lives with a woman and another man
(with whom he is raising a two-year-old child). Polyamory advocates
also tout a lack of social science evidence showing any harm from
its practice. In other words, the CPAA is arguing that since you
can’t prove that polyamory is bad for society, it must be good. By
this rationale, we can all rest assured that Jimmy Hoffa is alive
and well.
It may also be true that there is a dearth of published
studies of harm caused by polyamory. This would not be surprising
given the novelty of the practice and its small set of
practitioners. There seems to be no shortage of breathless stories
in newspapers and magazines about these kinds of arrangements but
these do not equate to research. Any study of polyamorous
“families” is likely to be plagued by methodological difficulties
— large holes in data, voluntary samples, reliance on
self-reporting, small sample sizes, poor comparisons, and misplaced
focus.
Even if the courts accept the egalitarianism, consent, and
no data arguments as true, the proposed distinction between
multiple-wife polygamy and polyamory in terms of social harms is
spurious. In fact, it may be the case that acceptance of polyamory
would, if possible, be more harmful.
For instance, the social science data we do have on
children who experience a succession of relationships with parents’
cohabiting partners (a kind of de facto serial polyamory,
or as the sociologists call it, “multiple partner fertility”) is
not encouraging (here
and
here). They are at higher risk for abuse, behavioral
problems, and household instability. The presence of two sets of
unrelated children mentioned in some of the affidavits also does
not sound promising for the well-being of younger children. We
should not be sanguine, therefore, that children raised in
polyamorous homes will be just fine.
If we take seriously the idea that marriage laws have an
educative function, polyamory raises red flags. On each of the core
functions of marriage — promoting fidelity, providing a tie
between children and parents, securing permanence for spouses and
their children — polyamory seems particularly harmful. Both
traditional polygamy and polyamory promote types of infidelity
(though the former is of a more orderly variety), of course, but
the chaos of polyamory blurs distinctions of parenthood more
significantly than does a setting where a child has an established
set of parents and lots of half-siblings. The ethic of “choice” at
the root of polyamory does not bode well for permanence
either.
As complicated as the day to day existence must be for
children in homes with multiple adults acting as “parents,” the
breakup of polyamorous relationships would be dramatically more
complicated for children. There would be an exponential increase in
the possible divisions of a child’s time, of decision-making
authority and demands for the child’s loyalty, when the dispute
involves three or more people than when only two disputants are
involved.
Clearly, when it comes to marriage, the adage “the more
the merrier” does not apply.
