Via Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, here's a link to a counterintuitive but compelling argument against the institution of traditional polygamy (that would be polygyny for sticklers but I'm going stick with the conventional term here.)

Cowen links to a Globe and Mail interview of Professor Shoshana Grossbard, an expert in the economics of marriage from San Diego State University by Vancouver journalist James Keller.

[A]llowing men to have multiple wives inevitably leads to a reduced supply of women, increasing demand.

But rather than making women more valuable in such communities, she said, that scarcity encourages men in polygamous societies to exert control over them to ensure they have access to the limited supply.

“In the cultures and societies worldwide that have embraced it, polygamy is associated with undesirable economic, societal, physical, psychological and emotional factors related especially to women’s well-being,” said Prof. Grossbard, whose research has primarily focused on polygamous cultures in Africa.

Prof. Grossbard was the latest academic to testify in B.C. Supreme Court in a reference case to determine whether Canada’s polygamy law is consistent with the religious guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court will also hear from current and former residents of polygamous communities.

Prof. Grossbard said there are fewer women available to men in societies that permit polygamy – even for monogamous men, because they are drawing from the same pool of women.

Since that scarcity could increase what she describes as the women’s “bargaining power,” men in such societies have an incentive to ensure they retain control over who the women marry.

To that end, Prof. Grossbard said, polygamy is associated with teenage brides, arranged and forced marriages, payments to brides’ fathers, little emphasis on “romantic” love and poor access to education or the work force – all designed to restrict the ability of women to choose who they marry.

“The men in polygamous societies want these institutions to help them control women,” Prof. Grossbard said.

Source: Globe and Mail

In his post Cowen asks

I am not a fan of polygamy, but I find this argument strange (though not strictly impossible; men can behave preemptively and incur a large fixed cost to prevent a subsequent erosion of their control). Surely Grossbard would not argue that all institutions which improve the bargaining power of women lead to...less bargaining power for women. So why is polygamy so special in this regard?

Source: Marginal Revolution

I think Grossbard actually answers the question but since, as I say, it does seem counterintuitive I'm going to give it a shot.  The answer, I think, comes from a common but false assumption about Patriarchy, one shared by both by feminists such as Grossbard and agnostics like Cowen: "Patriarchy" is synonymous with "male dominance."  More often, especially in cultures that also practice polygamy, capital-P Patriarchy is better understood as family domination. (Such families are obviously usually headed by a male "patriarch," true, but in such situations subordinate men no less than subordinate women are dominated by family leaders regardless of their sex.)  That said, here's how I think it works.

An adult woman might be able to marry who she chooses. The more autonomous she is and/or the more authentically committed to her (mono or poly) marriage the less likely she is to negotiate for separate wealth such as a dowery. Why should she? Even if marriageable women are scare she'll be sharing some portion of her husband's wealth and/or estate.

To the extent parents can negotiate for the marriage of their daughter they can instead extract wealth from the husband and/or his family (never assume men have much more choice of spouse than women under real patriarchy.) Unlike the prospective bride herself, her family is unlikely to share directly in the husband's family's wealth. Consequently they have an incentive to attempt one of at least two major bride-price-capturing strategies. First they can arrange a marriage with another family before their daughter comes of legal age. Second they can agitate for cultural or legal means to control who she marries even after she comes of age. Either way they come out ahead, and therefore they have *incentive* to try to come out ahead, and therefore Grossbard's argument holds.

Most of Grossbard's assumptions depend on circumstances where marriageable women are in demand. I'm... pretty sure the agreeable-for-women conditions Cowen is thinking about depend on situations where women are either in neutral demand or negative demand, as in regions and cultures where dowrys rather than bride prices are required to secure marriage for a daughter.

Point being that both Cowen or Grossbard can be right. It just depends on who gets to make the marriage (individuals or their parents) and which way the money flows.

Final point: in his post Cowen says

Polygamy ends when children cease to be a net economic asset. As society progresses and urbanizes, there are cheaper ways of having sex with multiple women, if that is one's goal.

In light of my discussion, above, Cowen can be even more right when he says the key is the net economic asset "value" of children. When it's profitable for a family to retain control over who a child marries they'll do so. When there is little or no such value you get crap like infanticide and children "apprenticed" off for "service" in sweatshops and domestic servitude.

Dumb question: if the "seed spreading," "naturally polygamous" ideologies forwarded by sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and the editors of Esquire and Details were true then where high bride prices are demanded you'd expect at least some men to respond by marrying multiple partners. And yet...

One explanation is that in most such cultures families control not only who their daughters marry but who their sons do as well. Another would be that our notions of sexual scarcity distort the deeper reality that polygamy is virtually always either an economic or political rather than a sexual arrangement. Brigham Young didn't marry 143 women because he wanted to have sex with them -- many or most had property that accrued to their husbands upon marriage.

While referencing Utah’s dismally low same-sex marriage acceptance, Em & Lo quipped

Apparently polygamous marriages are okay, but only 22% of the state agrees with gay marriage.

They said it here.

This is actually a pretty not-unreasonable snark based on a non-illogical syllogism: broader society tends to brand both homosexual and group marriages as deviant, and defenders of the “between a man and a woman” standard see permitting gay marriage as a slippery slope gateway to polygamy, (overwhelmingly so!) therefore would-be practitioners of one should be supportive of the other.

I’m going to do a little U-Turn on that position and say that while it’s a perfectly reasonable line of thought it’s also almost completely mistaken: same-sex marriage and Utah-style polygamy couldn’t possibly, possibly be more different. In fact public disapproval is the only thing they have in common!

First of all let’s clear up one other minor misunderstanding. Long-term popular public opinion, as collated, for instance, in the egregiously cis-centric Purity Tests that emerged during the dawn of the networked-computer era, assume that either homosexual or multiple-partner experiences are fetishistic, “kinky,” perverted, or otherwise a departure from “vanilla” normalcy. The first obvious problem being that the vast majority of LGBT community members are as vanilla as cafeteria pudding*. And contrary to any possible myths or fantasies, religious polygamists are just as likely as religious monogamists to have a “for reproduction only” approach to sex. Point being that popular culture’s fantasies of deviancy or licentiousness notwithstanding, actual average gay or polygamist individuals don’t consider themselves “kinky” at all.

But to get to my main point, I think the biggest reason gay marriage is least tolerated in areas that would most tolerate historically polygamous marriage isn’t so much homophobia (though there’s obviously that) but a complete and diametric understanding of the purpose of marriage and the functional roles spouses inside of marriage.

The essence of gay marriage is the love in the subtitle of Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Whereas the essence of historic polygamy, especially religious polygamy in the American inter-mountain west, was (and, where still practiced, is) the acquisition, consolidation, or transfer of property, wealth, or obligations between (pretty much exclusively male) heads of families.

For traditionalists, the way two men would exchange property or obligation would be to do a standard business deal or, if they’re a little more old-fashioned, to arrange a marriage between subordinate family members. And for traditionalists, who historically believed women have no autonomous legal, personal, or property rights, letting two marry is as pointless as letting a man’s cattle marry his house.

Meanwhile I think you’d have to look long and hard to find many same-sex couples who want to marry for reasons larger than to legally and socially cement their personal relationships with each other.

This is not to say that polygamists don’t value love for each other, nor that same-sex couples don’t value tax breaks, powers of attorney, and succession of estates. But it is to say those aren’t the essences of the respective forms of marriage.

So. I think the real question isn’t so much why Utah, with its tradition of polygamy, is so antagonistic to same-sex marriage: the purposes are so diametrically opposed it should be no surprise at all. The real question might instead be whether same-sex couples would be similarly antagonistic to efforts to legalize Utah-style patriarchal, property-based polygamy.

My guess would be yes, same-sex couples would probably be particularly antagonistic. All the more reason, then, not to be surprised that same-sex marriage is least popular in Utah.

Just sayin’

* Quentin Crisp’s flamboyant visibility notwithstanding, for instance, there are far more gay men like the quiet “marines, scaffolders, and rugby players“ he partnered with.

Andrea Zanin of Sex Geek asks an excellent question about a Canadian prosecutor’s decision to bring charges against members of a decades-old polygamous sect in a fairly remote part of British Columbia.

So if Oppal and his legal team have determined that sexual assault, forced impregnation, coerced marriage, physical abuse and statutory rape are occurring in Bountiful, why the hell aren’t they prosecuting the perpetrators for those crimes? There’s no need for recourse to a creaky 120-year-old law for those things – they’re blatant instances of everyday routine unquestionable lawbreaking, clear as day.

Read the quote in context here.

One complication would seem to be that there’s actually not much evidence that any of those crimes have been committed (not all polygamous Mormons are of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints variety.) Complicating that argument is the fact that sort of by-definition isolationist sects tend to be pretty insular and disinclined to cooperate with “outsiders.” No evidence of a crime is not the same thing as no crime.

Zanin says outside observers are concerned that if the case goes to court, subsequent appeals on religious-freedom grounds could result in complete decriminalization of polygamy/polygyny in Canada.

Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, exactly. If no other crimes are committed it’s probably fine for men and women to marry, or not marry, who they choose.

But that’s the other complication, one I’d want to dig into. Because marriage has a tradition of “washing away” an awful lot of crimes. Statutory rape and forced impregnation being two hot buttons, but see also frequently-sanctioned abuse of child-labor law.

Which is why I agree with Zanin that if that’s what the prosecutor says is going on I seriously, seriously wish he’d brought those charges instead.

See also how prostitution magically immunizes customers against charges of statutory rape and pedophilia.

I’m concerned that it’s twittery vs. substance all over again, where sensationalism (ooh, group marriage! Oooh, prostitution) distracts from everyday tragedy.

Update Score one for California! Jill at Feministe points to a man who’s been busted for selling his 14-year-old daughter for sixteen thousand dollars, one hundred cases of beer, and (I love this) several cases of meat. The good news? The man who bought the girl was arrested under California law on suspicion of statutory rape.

Tony Infanti of Feminist Law Professors, quoting a Utah-based lesbian and gay rights group, points to a sliver of possible upside to the recent passage of California’s anti-marriage Proposition 8.

But leaders of the rights group here, Equality Utah, said statements made by Mormon leaders in defense of their actions in California — that the church was not antigay and had no problem with legal protections for gay men and lesbians already on the books in California — were going to be taken as an endorsement to expand legal rights that gay and lesbian couples have never remotely had in Utah, where the church is based.”

Read the rest of the article, and follow the included links, here.

Yeah, it’s always seemed a little funny that opposition to the marriage of “Adam and Steve” would come from anyone so recently persecuted for the marriage of “Adam and Eve and Genevieve.”

(Note: One can condemn the exploitative manifestations of multiple marriage of, say, the Warren Jeffs schism of the FLDS while tolerating at least the theory of non-exploitative marriages of more than one husband or wife.)