@dstark: “Does your rabbi believe in God?” OMG! That reminds me of the priest of the church I belonged to for a while, we wondered the same thing about him lol. I don’t know much about orthodox Judaism, none of my friends are or were, so I can only speak for the places I have been:).
I’ve known people in apparently functional poly relationships as well, but the 14th amendment doesn’t mean that the government has to provide marriage benefits to any and every potentially positive domestic arrangement. It means that it can’t grant recognition to one couple while denying it to a similarly-situated couple without providing a really good reason for it. “The bible says you can’t do this” and “its icky” are not good reasons. There are a number of practical reasons for not treating polyamorous (or polygamous) relationships as marriages between all the parties. The obstacles to it may not by insurmountable – if marriage and benefits weren’t so closely linked, a lot of them would disappear – but I don’t think that obliges states to recognize these unions.
I can see poly relationships becoming more common, but I think it will be a long time before we see any legislative or legal recognition for them. This seems totally fair to me.
David Koch is a gay rights supporter and signed one of the amicus briefs
Libertarian is not the same thing as conservative.
I sat next to a person on a plane and we chatted for a long time. He was absolutely rabid on the topic of throwing non-Jews out of Israel, and building in the disputed lands. He said he was in some sort of recognized position in the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.
At one point in the conversation I made a comment about both believing in God, and he stopped me and said he was an atheist. I said, Wait a minute, you’ve been saying the Jews have an unassailable right to the land because of the Biblical grant. So how can you now say you don’t believe in the God who made the initial grant? I never did understand his answer!
Musicprnt, 
I was 8 years old. I go to the Orthodox Synagogue. The men are sitting on one side of the synagogue. The women are sitting on the other. The men and women are separated. The men are running the services. The men are in charge.
I thought, “Hmmmm. I thought God was everywhere. Men aren’t the bosses at my house. God could not have missed my house. What is going on here? Something is wrong here.”
The Orthodox Rabbi believed in God. I just saw him last year. Almost 50 years since I first saw him.
I hope I am not insulting anybody. I am just telling stories. My uncle had a very different experience than I had at the synagogue.
@hayden, speaking for myself, most of the Jews I know do not believe in God but I do have a couple of Jewish friends who are religious and do believe in God.
My friends are divided on gay marriage and ACA.
I assume there are cultural Jews. That’s not the point I was making though. My point is I don’t understand how someone can justify a group of people owning land because of a decree from the Biblical God, then say the Biblical God doesn’t exist. Seems a tad inconsistent.
Let’s be sure not to drift off topic
“Drift” off topic, fallenchemist? We were more like lunging off topic… So, point taken. :">
Polyamory is going to be a hard sell, because it is so different and raises questions about how to implement it, but I do think that the 14th amendment is at play, as well as other rights. If we fundamentally have the right to self determination, the right to love whom we wish, then whether it is a standard marriage or a poly one, the government should recognize it. I have heard arguments it is different than same sex marriage, that same sex people who want to be married after all are doing what straight people , that poly people wanting to get hitched are completely changing the understanding, but the reality is the opponents of same sex marriage argued the same thing, that Same Sex couples were completely changing the understanding, and in their view it does, but nonetheless, the 14th amendment applies. Poly people can love more than one person at a time, they form relationships based on that, the same way straight people and gay people who love one other person do, so there is a rights issue here, polyamorous people are a group, the way straight people are, gay people are, or interracial couples were . I think courts are going to be a lot more reluctant to act on poly couples, I think they will be a lot more cautious to try and determine if there is a rational basis to deny it before acting. The thing I would say is that given how few people relatively live in or want poly relationships, it is kind of idiotic to argue they will cause harm or destroy society, a small minority like that, even assuming their relationships destabilize things (which I obviously don’t believe), a poly relationship getting recognized is about as likely to cause harm, even if it had the potential, then an ice cube does to cool down the pacific ocean.
I can imagine what my dad would say if the issue of poly relationships came up, I think he would shake his head, and say something like "if they want to do that, be my guest, but I’ll never understand it, I have enough trouble with the one woman I am with:)
A local “poly authority” chimes in on why the polyamorists are not actively campaigning for it:
Guess you are not that far off with double yelling about the toilet seat, musicparent. 
I’ve retyped this several times in an effort to hide my aggravation and being overtly political…
People who say things like “Well, I don’t want that so I don’t care if anyone else gets it” get under my skin. Even if only one poly family wants a poly marriage, they should be able to get one. Things shouldn’t have to reach critical mass before they are allowed.
If only people who were affected by x, y, or z “issue” cared enough to actually try to enact change around that issue, we’d have gotten no where in this country.
(I think I’ve been watching too many early days of AIDS documentaries in the last few days… carry on.)
I agree that the fraud argument is a non-starter, but when was marriage ever not “tied to legal and economic benefits”? This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. Perhaps you know more about the history of marriage than I do, but from my casual inquiry it seems to me it’s always been about legal and economic benefits. I suppose you could go back to pre-legal societies where nothing like a state existed to promulgate formal laws, but even there, wasn’t “marriage” (to the extent it was recognized in the society, culture, and community) largely about who had rights to occupy a dwelling space, use household property, inherit property, and have other exclusive rights and benefits? Medieval marriages were largely about cementing economic alliances. Practices like dowry and bride price have varied across societies, but the economic benefits of marriage have always been a large part of the equation. Perhaps modern state regulation of marriage didn’t emerge until modern taxation systems made it necessary to have definitive legal (as opposed to customary) rules about who had what rights to property controlled by members of a household, and who had legal rights to ownership of property once the nominal owner died, or in the event of divorce. But given the realities of state taxation of property and of income generated from property, it’s hard to see how you could not have heavy state involvement in regulation of which relationships “count” as marriages conferring certain legal and economic benefits, and which don’t. Of course, you could just contract around the state’s rules, or contract in the absence of state rules; but the reality is that most people don’t contract for alternative arrangement, or contract only incompletely, necessitating state rules as a default.
I say this, by the way, as an avid supporter of same-sex marriage, which to my mind is just a fundamental civil rights issue. But I think the idea that we’d be better off if we just kept the state out of marriage is just wrong-headed. It will never happen.
Sorry, this is one of those things that get lost in “typed” language… that was my point. There have been accusations of “fraud” marriages since time immemorial. In my lifetime, it was same-sex marriage. Different time periods have different “insert adjective here” marriages that will be accused of being abused.
There is the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Defense League. The former has a rather low opinion of the latter (whose views seem to resemble that which you describe of the person you sat next to on the plane): http://archive.adl.org/extremism/jdl_chron.html .
Old social sciences prof held that the notion of marriage or the fixed, publicly sanctioned relationship was to guarantee sexual rights and then some knowledge the children a woman bore were the progeny of that man- hence part of the need to restrict women around other men. Ownership and assurance. She thought marriage, in the long view, benefited nervous men more than women, at least, in history or non-modern cultures.
Medieval marriages were also about reducing the potential for aggressions.
I do think we veer into some pretty romanticized notions of marriage and forget that it’s not always entered into with the idea of making it good and lasting, nor an awareness of the complexity and hard work.
Poly marriage is quite a bit more complicated and expensive for the gov’t to recognize.
Should multiple SAHW’s of a polygamous man be entitled to Social Security survivior benefits?
They could take the benefit amount and allocate it between the number of spouses he had. So if the benefit was 1200 and he had 2 spouses each would get 600
The poly thing is completely new to me so here’s a question. If you had 3 people, say, are all three married to one another then? The old school model so far as I know is one man with several wives. In a poly marriage would all parties be married to one another (now possible with legal SS marriage) or would it just go one way with a “head of household” who is married to more than one person but those people aren’t married to each other. It seems like that would be the big legal question. One would create a household unit that is bound across all parties and the other would be what we now call bigamy.
Should polygamous families w only one breadwinner be entitled to a lower EFC?