There are already documented cases of siblings wanting to ‘marry’ – not because they’re incestuous, but because they live together for pragmatic reasons & want benefits.

Once you have unhinged a word from everything it ever meant – and every function it meaningfully serves – it can mean anything; the only restriction is what people will accept, allow, tolerate, vote for, or refuse to accept.

Like so many other ethical situations, we have the choice between integrity on the one hand, and “might makes right” on the other. The fantasy is the belief that there can be something “in between” – there can’t and there isn’t.

“But what is the reason for those who propose to ditch the conjugal understanding of marriage and replace it with a conception of marriage as sexual-romantic domestic partnership (what one opponent of the conjugal conception describes as your relationship “with your Number One Person”)?”

I don’t know why such a domestic partnership–or civil union, or New Marriage, or whatever you want to call it—needs to have a sexual-romantic aspect at all. Says who, and why? I don’t know if the Brazilian threesome is actually a sexual/romantic partnership. The only reason given for their union is to protect survivors’ interests in the case of separation or death.

So, I don’t know why anyone who ditches the traditional conjugal understanding of marriage would object on principle to plural marriage or plural civil unions, and I don’t see why those relationships have to have a sexual or romantic component at all.

• Senior citizens living together, serving as each other’s caregivers, partners, and/or constructed families
• Adult children living with and caring for their parents
• Grandparents and other family members raising their children’s (and/or a relative’s) children
• Single parent households
• Extended families (especially in particular immigrant populations) living under one roof, whose members care for one another
• Close friends and siblings who live together in long-term, committed, non-conjugal relationships, serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers

It does not strike me as a crazy or subversive idea to recognize, and grant certain benefits to, couples or groups who share a residence and live together in an economic arrangement similar to that of “traditional” families or extended families. If some arrangements are “committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner,” I see no bar to recognizing the people as making up a household. The argument is not that every legally recognized household is a marriage or the equivalent of a marriage. It is one thing to want to preserve and strengthen traditional marriage, which I think is a worthy goal. It is another thing to denigrate other living arrangements and deny them economic advantages that would be of benefit to them and to society as a whole. It does not seem to me that this is a “zero-sum game.” It is not that if traditional marriage is to “win,” every other living arrangement has to “lose.”

peg,

But the three-person union in Brazil is not a marriage. Civil unions are not marriages.

On the other hand, about fifty countries worldwide have civil polygamous marriage, including one for which American troops are fighting and dying—Afghanistan. One (probably anomalous) civil union in Brazil ignites hysteria, but American troops are fighting and dying to preserve the Afghan government, with their polygamous marriages and mistreatment of women, and no one is concerned.

The threesome in Brazil entered into their civil union in order to preserve marital-type benefits in case of separation or death (alimony, pensions, inheritance?). They already lived together, sharing bills and other expenses in an arrangement formerly known as “roommates”.

Maybe one of the Brazilians is just a needy sibling, or (if that is still a taboo) a neighbor who lusted after the benefits package and not the bodies of the other roomates?

Who is going to check if the plural union is sexual— or why should it matter anyway, as long as the implications of conjugal union are swept away?