Plural marriage and juristic personhood

I think that the arguments that encourage support for legalizing same-sex marriage might be useful for legalizing polygamy. I am going to talk about a worldview that does not necessarily coincide, at least not literally, with conventional legal theory. This ideas might be useless in American courts of law, YMMV.

I think of marriage in terms of juristic personhood.

We treat corporations and non-profit organizations with some degree of personhood, including EINs that look like Social Security numbers, tax returns distinct from the tax returns of any constituent members, and the ability to sue/be sued in court. Sometimes the coordination of combined will, knowledge, memory, actions, bodies, and responsibility we instinctively associate with a literally individual human person can also appear to limited degree in relationships between people.

If we legally banned someone's mouth from voicing medical decisions for that same person's body, that person's mouth would probably spend much time petitioning for changes in law recognizing the right of one part of a person to care for another. I acknowledge that two people related by blood are not literally parts of the same body, but for some critical situations, such as situations requiring medical decisions, the consequences of family members' legal rights to speak for each other might simulate in miniature form the consequences of the legal right for an individual's voice to speak for the rest of its person. This is one reason it is useful to recognize legal kinship. I'd rather permit family members to make certain decisions for one another than to deny such rights, compelling them to petition for that right when they could be doing otherwise productive things.

I am sympathetic to contemporary views of marriage as a bizarre old-fashioned legal construction, but I can also see some reasons to respect it. Sometimes a sexual union forms a bond between people not already related by blood. They become family in every sense that touches on the cohesion of will and actions, the desire to share responsibility, and in medical situations like those mentioned in the preceding paragraph. It is useful to have marriage to provide legal kinship when these relationships come into being.

These relationships can occur between people of the same sex, so it makes sense to me that we would legalize same-sex marriage.

I could also see these relationships occurring between multiple "spouses," and so I don't have an a priori moral objection to legalized polygamous marriage.

I acknowledge I have concerns that civil polygamous marriage might be technically difficult to implement. Rewriting tax forms would be a headache. Updating insurance law sounds like a nightmare. I guess I would try replacing policies that allowed a person to cover his or her one spouse with policies that allowed a collection of people to pool their payments to cover each other so that on average, 8 spouses in a plural marriage, for example, would pay the same as 8 spouses in 4 two-person marriages.

P.S. I might be interested in continuing to develop a concept of civil marriage along the lines of this blog post, but my interest in this line of reasoning and its silence regarding incestuous relationships should not be interpreted as any dismissal on my part of the possible legal suitability or morality of recognizing incest. I'm not sure I have an objection to sterile incestuous relationships per se even though I personally don't wish to enter such a relationship, as my brother, I am sure, would be relieved to know.