1. By allowing men to marry multiple wives, there is a risk of leaving many men with no women to marry. The costs of this include the abandonment of younger boys/men so the "competition" for wives is reduced or eliminated (as we've seen with the "lost boys"), as well as a competition for wives that tends to push down the age of marriage; and a "market" for more girls, which may push women to have more and more babies (sort of wife-producing factories).
2. Fathers in polygamous marriages cannot offer their children adequate attention. Children need their fathers (can we talk about the rampant social ills in communities where kids don't know their daddies?) How much time, love and devotion can a man with dozens of children offer to each child?
3. Polygamous marriages are inherently unequal and undemocratic.
4. Imagine the nightmare of a polygamous divorce. How do you divide children and property?
5. It is no accident that, as a rule, polygamy is illegal in modern, democratic societies, and legal in underdeveloped, autocratic ones. Modern democratic states do not legally allow polygamy. This suggests that the practice of polygamy gives rise to many practices that are antithetical to the development of modern societies, whose citizens have freedom and rights.
The consequences listed above are not all private ones, and as such, become concerns of those who live outside of these polygamous families/communities. It is not in our interest as a free nation to sanction polygamy, even if it is difficult to prosecute.
My two cents!
Flo, so glad you posted that on this thread. So far, most of what I’ve read agrees with you. Some studies have cited a few benefits, but no benefits at all for the individual wives and children—mostly for the men and “the community” in general.
This only holds true if (as in the case of FLDS) everybody is polygamous, rather than a freely chosen, wide range of family arrangements, including monogamy, polyandry, gay marriage (there are a lot more gay men than gay women), remaining single, and celibacy (the Catholic Church, for one, is still hoping that a lot more men will choose that, since they're fast running out of priests). For the most part, given a free choice, people's choices will be heavily guided by what's available. In all likelihood, that would end up being largely monogamous heterosexual marriages, but there's no reason for people in a free country not to freely choose their family arrangements.
2. Fathers in polygamous marriages cannot offer their children adequate attention. Children need their fathers (can we talk about the rampant social ills in communities where kids don't know their daddies?) How much time, love and devotion can a man with dozens of children offer to each child?
Again, you're projecting the FLDS' cultish practices with the concept of polygamy. Polygamy doesn't necessarily mean having a dozen wives. It can just as easily mean having 2 or 3. Nor does polygamy necessarily mean each wife having a large number of babies. A father who has one wife and 6 or 8 children will usually be hard-pressed to spend quality time with all of them, and so will the one wife/mother. In a family with one father, 2 mothers, and 3 or 4 children, all the children would get more quality parental time. A college classmate of mine is a lesbian, and she and her partner have one child whom they co-parent with a gay male couple, one of whom is the biological father of the little girl. You can be sure that child never saw the inside of a daycare center, and now that she's in school, never comes home to an empty house or hired nanny. It's not the lifestyle I'd choose, but it's working well for them, and the taxpayers aren't footing the bill for it. In fact, they're probably in the minority of parents who are actually paying as much in school taxes as the cost of educating their child. I'm none too thrilled with families where the one father works, the one mother is a full time homemaker, and the 4 children are attending public school at $15-20,000 a year per child, while the family pays about $2000 a year in school taxes. They don't think of themselves as being "on welfare", but they most certainly are.
3. Polygamous marriages are inherently unequal and undemocratic.
Huh? How? In 19th century Utah, a lot of women in polygamous marriages worked outside the home, in traditionally male occupations, and when the church opened a college it was fully coeducational from day one. The polygamous family structure allowed for women to have a choice (or alternate) between full time home-making and pursuing work outside the home. When you've got one husband and one wife both being farily equivalent breadwinners, and both relying on the second wife to maintain the home and look after the children while the other parents are out working, I don't see anything "inherently unequal and undemocratic".
4. Imagine the nightmare of a polygamous divorce. How do you divide children and property?
I haven't noticed monogamous divorces going terribly smoothly on average. I don't know that there's any reason to think polygamous ones would be worse, nor that all the adults would split up. If one wife takes off but the other doesn't, that would seem to be a lot less disruptive to the other wife, the husband, and whatever children remained, than a conventional divorce. If the husband leaves and the two wives stay, the children would likely stay put too, and it would still be possible to have one full time homemaker and one breadwinner.
5. It is no accident that, as a rule, polygamy is illegal in modern, democratic societies, and legal in underdeveloped, autocratic ones. Modern democratic states do not legally allow polygamy. This suggests that the practice of polygamy gives rise to many practices that are antithetical to the development of modern societies, whose citizens have freedom and rights.
It's also "no accident" that virtually all "modern, democratic societies" have fully or largely socialized medicine. Doesn't mean it's a good thing. Like government-prescribed marriage definitions, it's a sign that people's lives are being controlled by government, rather than by their own free choices. Underdeveloped countries' governments don't have the resources to control citizens' family arrangements or medical care.