Polygamy should be allowed in the United States.

Polygamy should not be allowed in the US. To start off, I will use my opponent's definition of polygamy, which is having more than one spouse at a time. First and foremost, we must look at polygamy as a social policy, simply because marriage is a social issue. A marriage license is a state grant, therefore polygamy, which implys the right not only to love others but also marry many others, is a public issue, not one of personal preference. The next two words that we must pay attention to is "polygyny" and "polyandry". Polyandry refers to one women marrying several men and polygyny is the exact opposite. Polyandry is very uncommon, therefore our debate should be centralized around polygyny, which is one man marrying several women. Most libertarians support the issue of polygamy. Since no societys are truly and purely a liberal democracy, as we progress with innovations and come into a new society where everything is centralized around equal rights, then we will also gradually progress out of polygamy and leave that behind. I will also bring up an idea by Jonathan Rauch. In his article, he notes that if polygyny is being practiced, then more people lose their right to marriage. If one man takes three women, then two other men would be left without wives. As quoted by Jonathon Rauch, "When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others." I agree with this quote above. In a study published by Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, they noted that in polygamous societies, crime rates tend to be higher than that of normal societies. Looking at the example proposed above by Mr. Rauch, many young men are left without wives due to polygynous marriage. Because of this, many single men engage in otherwise destructive manners. As written by these two authors, "In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became entrepreneurs of violence." Lastly, I will quote the last section of the article by the same article by Jonathon Rauch. "Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females: in other words, when one-sixth of men are surplus goods on the marriage market. The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives — numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while. In particular communities — inner cities, for example — polygamy could take a toll much more quickly. Even a handful of "Solomons" (high-status men taking multiple wives) could create brigades of new recruits for street gangs and drug lords, the last thing those communities need. Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street --literally. The sect, reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than 400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness." For all these reasons I support the fact that polygamy should not be allowed in the US. ====== Sources ====== 1) http://www.reason.com...