What next? Apparently this.
First came traditional marriage. Then, gay marriage. Now, there's a movement combining both—simultaneously. Abby Ellin visits the next frontier of nuptials: the "triad."
Less than 18 months ago, Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one another. Nothing unusual about that—Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55—were legally married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something "husband." Says Sasha: “I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together openly and proclaim our relationship. But also to have all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-07/threesome-marriages/
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Those who claim "triads" will never catch on ignore the fact that the door for doing so has been blown wide open, swinging in the breeze.
And,as citizens,they're free to seek a change in the laws to accomplish their goals.
However, the appeal for the freedom of same-sex couples to marry is a relatively straighforward equal protection claim to a set of laws that are already written to accommodate couples.
Polyamours have a much harder task -- and perhaps an impossible one: a wholesale rewrite of laws that would have to provide a baseline set of legal expectations for multi-partner relationships. What are the commonalities between, say, the desires of polygamous Mormons and non-religious polyamorous groupings? What are their expectations regarding emergency medical decisions? Majority rules? Seniority? Rock/paper/scissors?
What about intestate sucsession? Would a newer, perhaps younger member of the group have the same claim to the assets of the deceased as more established members?
Who knows?
More importantly -- since marriage laws provide a set a baseline of legal expectations, can such a baseline even be set for poly groupings? We don't know, because the potential commonalities between such groupings are unknown.
As it stands, appeals to the putative slippery slope of polyamory as an easy argument against same-sex couples' freedom to marry are simplistic to the max.
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