My thoughts about marriage rights

[suecochran]

Nancy Lebovitz has a button that says "Respect traditional marriage; one robot, one octopus." I've been thinking about that for a while since Shore Leave in June, and I felt that I'd like to express my thoughts and feelings (regarding that snarky sentiment but in a more serious manner) about marriage rights. After noodling around with these

Comments

[suecochran]

That would not surprise me at all. I don't think America is ready to acknowledge poly rights yet either, sadly.

[pocketnaomi]

I think that when we (hopefully) get poly marriage rights, it will involve changing the details of what is automatically included in the package when you marry somebody, so that one has to actually choose a pecking order for certain purposes. For example, we could stipulate that, unless someone has only one spouse, being married to somebody doesn't give you default status as next-of-kin. Someone who wanted there to be a next of kin who could decide on things for them would have to write that out, as they might with a will (and with the same required witnesses), and choose one person as their next of kin for decisionmaking purposes -- otherwise there wouldn't be any, their spouses included. I'm not sure what currently happens to burial decisions or such when there is not a next of kin who's available but there are clearly interested parties. Whatever it is, though, it could probably be modified for the purpose. And that way, if someone wanted to marry six people but have one person (whether that be one of their spouses or somebody else

Legal issues

[selki]

Don't seem too bad to me. What if a man's children can't agree on how he should be buried? Or if they can't agree whether to keep him on life support? With more than one kid, the pecking order is unclear.

Just saying, poly rights don't really gum up the works more than multiple kids do.

Re: Legal issues

[scruffycritter]

Yeah. I've long said that the first people to use poly marriage rights will be pimps to keep their prostitutes from being legally barred from testifying in court against them.