Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ® signed a bill Wednesday allowing public officials to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
State lawmakers approved Tennessee House Bill 878 last week. The legislation states people “shall not be required to solemnize a marriage” if they refuse to doing so based on their “conscience or religious beliefs.” According to the Tennessee Legislature website, the governor signed the bill Wednesday.
Why does a man with multiple wives have a destabilizing effect on society?
Because–and this sounds icky–men with no options for mates tend to be more likely to engage in violent and antisocial behavior. When you look at fundamentalist Mormon communities, they end up making up reasons to excommunicate and expel young men from their communities so that they aren’t competing with the Mormon elders for women. But those are largely isolated and small groups; once you expand that to an entire country, you end up needing to find a way to get rid of the competition in a more permanent way. Historically that’s been war.
I can see how that would be a problem for a smaller, more insular religious community, but on a national scale you would have much more variation in relationships. Most people would probably still be monogamous, some would lean towards multiple wives, others multiple husbands, some more complex arrangements. The impact of any particular relationship pattern would be diluted by the size of the population.
When it’s been legal on a country- or society-wide basis, the tendency has been for a relatively small number of very, very wealthy men to have a large number of wives, even while the majority of the remainder of the population has been monogamous. Women have–again, historically speaking–ended up being commodities.
The effects can be quite significant even if only a small number of people are practicing polygyny, particularly if you have a very small number of men that have a large number of wives (e.g., someone like Brigham Young who had 57 wives, or Warren Jeffs with 87 wives). If you look at relationships as a competition–which they very much are if you take a biological viewpoint–a single person like Warren Jeffs means that you have roughly 86 men that have no opportunities for partners at all.
Now imagine all 86 of those men becoming incels as a result, particularly in an age where it’s easy for people to communicate their grievances and form communities online. Given that the US has been trending towards fewer rights for women (gee, thanks, Mr. Trump…), it’s not hard to see women being fully commodified under a system that permitted polygamy or polygyny.
(To be clear: polygamy = multiple people in a marriage, with gender not specified, polyandry = one wife with multiple husbands, which has, AFAIK, only one historical analog (Joseph Smith Jr. notwithstanding, since his “spiritual marriages” were flatly illegal), and polygyny = one husband with multiple wives, which has many historical analogs. A single wife and many concubines is also fairly common; concubines were legally wives, but their children could not inherit position, wealth, or power from their father.)
I’m not sure that this would hold true if you made polygamy legal nationally today. While I agree that this has been the historical trend, it’s also almost always been tied to high levels of religious fervency and few protections for women. While we can argue about whether the current situation on both fronts is trending one way or another, I think we can agree that it’s certainly improved in the last century.
I doubt that a woman who wasn’t living in a close-knit, isolated, religious community, would tolerate being in an exclusive relationship with a man who has 85 other wives.
I agree that treatment of women has trended towards better over the last century, but it appears that it is trending worse right now. And given that young men are becoming increasingly right-wing, I fear that this trend could continue. It’s especially worrisome given that young men are trending to the right despite being less and less religious as a whole. We’re seeing courts and legislatures erode many protections for women–especially in regards to reproductive rights–that had been the law of the land for nearly half a century in some cases. Obviously we’re seeing a strong, sustained backlash against LGBTQ+ people, and that’s even extending to opposition to things like legalizing interracial marriage.
I have known a number of women that have been trapped in unhappy and abusive relationships because they lacked the economic ability to leave. It’s not far-fetched to imagine a wealthy person structuring a relationship to be economically punitive to any person that tried to exit. Shit, my ex-wife did her level best to bankrupt me and leave me homeless, and we were poor; if she’d had $50k to drop on an attorney, I would have been homeless. That’s definitely a strong disincentive to leaving.
Abusive relationships aren’t unique to polygamy. Assuming that they occur in polygamous relationships at roughly the same rate that they do in monogamous relationships, and that polygamous relationships are less common over all, I think it’s unlikely that highly lopsided marriages would occur often enough that the number of single men would rise drastically and increase the likelihood of violence or civil unrest.
Even assuming that wealthy men, specifically, would acquire and maintain large harems of women who are dependent financially or otherwise, there’s nothing stopping them from doing that now. All a marriage gets them is a higher risk of losing their wealth when one of their wives decides to leave.
Again: commodification. Wives as property. That’s the problem, and the likely outcome of allowing polygamy. That’s historically always been the problem, and given the way society appears to be going, that would likely be the problem.
47% of workers, 42% of managers, and roughly 62% of people engaged in polyamorous relationships are women. Women are financially, socially, and politically more powerful than at any time in the past, and if polyamorous relationships are anything to go by, then we should expect polygamous marriages to be skewed toward multiple men to each woman, rather than the other way around.