Polygamy is simply very different than same-sex marriage. It’s associated with patriarchy and sexual abuse, rather than liberation and equality. It flourishes in self-segregated communities, Mormon-fundamentalist and Muslim-immigrant, rather than being widely distributed across society. Its practitioners (so far as we know) are considerably fewer in number than the roughly 3.5 percent of Americans who identify as gay or bisexual.

While some polygamists may feel they were “born this way,” their basic sexual orientation is accommodated under existing marriage law even if the breadth of their affections isn’t, which makes them less sympathetic than same-sex couples even if their legal arguments sound similar.

Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality. That's a modern attitude. Marriage is associated with the treatment of a person as property and arrangements for political and financial reasons, even to this day. And yet here you are, saying one type of marriage is okay and the other kind that you're not particularly close to is associated with Mormons and Muslims and antiprogressivism, while lauding a modern view on one marriage and taking the dated view on another.

The reason plurals doesn't flourish, to you, is because the people who practice it don't tell you, lest you tell them what you just told us, and the inevitable "are you Mormon?"

Marriage of course depends entirely upon the married, their culture and their interpretation. Especially in America where we have fused 100 cultures and traditions, there's little you can call universal truths about marriage.

Every single child has a mother and a father. If that's not a prime universal truth, I don't know what is.

Men and women have been found by psychologists in every culture and tradition to differ in aggression and general activity level, types of cognitive strength, and sensory sensitivity. The differences between man and woman are obvious to all but the most ideologically blinded deconstructionists.

Don't be silly. Sometimes its a sperm donor; often the father is not biological. Children are orphans; they are adopted; they are born to a surrogate. That's got to be about the silliest thing anybody has said on HN for a long time.

> Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality. That's a modern attitude.

"Nothing about marriage has anything to do with liberation or equality, except in these modern times"?