Polygamous Marriages

I'm going to get the necessary parts of this round out of the way pretty quickly so that I can go on to address the new points my opponent brings up.In short, my opponent drops literally everything that's been said so far. My opponent concedes to having dropped everything. This means that not only on a theoretical level I'm justifying polygamy by showing that marriage is about love, and therefore there shouldn't be anything to prevent multiple people from getting married to each other if they love one another and desire marriage, but I'm also answering back the problems he had with polygamy from a pragmatic standpoint, which means under both frameworks I'm winning this debate. Hold my opponent to these drops and concessions. With that out of the way, back to actually discussing polygamy. Since the last round from my opponent is a bit scattered, I'll try to answer things line-by-line.Con says: "Do you have any suggestions of what our laws of marriage would look like..." I would argue that in terms of the resolution at hand, I don't really need to discuss specific policy options because the resolution doesn't ask me to outline a specific legal code for how this would work, rather asks me to justify polygamy as a concept. In this sense, I shouldn't have to explain how I would codify this into a law. Con says: "when a high-status man takes two wives ... a lower-status man gets no wife." First, I think there's a dangerous assumption within this argument that every man inherently deserves to have a wife in that if he does not marry in his lifetime that he was wronged in some way, and vice versa. That's not really how relationships work. Secondly, I'd argue that this isn't a problem that's inherent to polygamy. Think of all the women who obsess about marrying, say, George Clooney. All the women out there who go absolutely nuts over him and say that they won't marry any other person other than him. The moment he got married, their potential marriage pools went from one person to zero people, meaning that there's already a lot of guys who aren't getting wives. Thirdly, I'd argue that this statement misunderstands the way that marriages actually occur. People form dating relationships to test their compatability as a couple before they go off to get married. There's people who are just incompatable with other poeple. Trying to force people who are just incompatable with each other to marry one another is asking for marital problems, and potentially an eventual divorce. Con says: "Those men ... are unfairly disadvantaged and often turn to behaviors like crime and violence." This seems like a pretty big stretch. Before I'd buy this argument, I feel like my opponent needs to actually provide some kind of evidence that proves that men not getting married in time makes them devolve into criminals. Con says: "The situation is not good for women, either, because it places them in competition with other wives and can reduce them all to satellites of the man." I'd argue that this wouldn't always be the case, nor does it have to ever be the case. There's no reason to believe that a polygamous family can not all equally love one another so that it doesn't devolve into this kind of situation. Con says: "a 2012 study ..." The study cited by my opponent is outdated. The most recent evidence used within the study to justify the claims made is from data drawn from Nepal in 1963 when they outlawed polygamy. The rest comes from India 1955, China 1953, and Japan in the 1880s. Needless to say, half a millenia changes a lot of things. Moreover, the internal justifications for this type of conflict that leads to the crime aren't applicable to modern day society anymore. There's far more access to resources and wealth in today's society than existed within the 50s and 60s. With more people having more things, there's less reason for people to fight among one another. This also solves for a lot of the lack of child welfare problems - if there's less reason for them to fight among one another, that time that used to be spent fighting can now be used on effective parenting, which would only help child welfare. As that's pretty much everything that Con says, I'll pass the floor back over to them.