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Facebook Wedding Photos Result In Polygamy Arrest In Michigan
An anonymous reader writes "Police in Michigan have arrested 34-year-old Richard Leon Barton Jr. on charges of polygamy, thanks to incriminating wedding photos on Facebook. The man unfriended his first wife on the social network before marrying his second wife, but unsurprisingly that wasn't enough."
Blah blah FACEBOOK blah ARREST blah!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
So he unfriended his first wife, but are they still brother and sister?
... I thought polygamists got more than one.
It makes no sense to me that something like polygamy is an arrestable offense. Aside from the mediocre tax breaks you get from marriage, what are the benefits that you can glean from multiple marriages that would cause it to be inherently illegal?
Ok, why exactly is that a crime in the first place? Has that something to do with tax evasion or whatever or is that just moral code enforced by law?
Perjury probably. One of the things you're asked to swear to when you get married is that you're not married to anyone else.
And monogamy has a long history outside of Judeo-Christian writings. In general, societies enforced monogamy because otherwise men would marry a whole bunch of women, have a whole bunch of kids with them, be unable to support them, kick the mothers out, and carry on with the younger girls. You could argue that with mandated child support, and women in the workforce we've outgrown the need for that, but ask any single parent and they'll tell you it's much harder solo.
You really should actually investigate things instead of just dumping everything on the scapegoat of the moment.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
And polygamy is illegal why, exactly? (assuming that all involved are ok with it)
.
And why is the state even involved in regulating marriage?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
> In general, societies enforced monogamy because otherwise men would marry a whole bunch of women
and leave back an army of unmarried angry young man. As to my knowledge the ban of polygamy was primarily to prevent a few wealthy old men marrying dozens of young women off the market and leaving hordes of young men without a way to reproduce, leading to explosive social unrest. The Bible had nothing to do with it, the Old Testament, on which the model of the Mormon practices and scriptures was based, was highly polygamous itself.
Contrary to some comments here, I am all about learning new FB horror stories. These stories provide me useful real-life evidence that I use when advising my friends (and my students) why they shouldn't ever post things that might get used against them. Think 10 times before hitting 'submit'.
RTFA. The first one was left without any explanation, and to the second one he said that he was divorced.
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
Well, to play devil's advocate (to AC, sigh):
He could have been on Facebook in 2004, provided (as you mention) that he was in an Ivy League school. I am fairly certain that by the end of 2004, he could have had a Facebook with just a .edu address. However, the quote you reference doesn't explicitly say that he met his first wife on Facebook, it just says they met in 2003 and they met online. Heck: that could have been on AC2 or EQ or a MUD or etc etc.
Then again, people could have their dates all screwed up. The word "reportedly" plays strong in the sentence you quote. How many people have you met in, for example, December of 2007 that if asked you'd say you've known for at least four years? Similarly "not long after" is rather ambiguous. Depending on what your perception is of "a long time" that could be a few days, months, or even right at or a little over a year.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
And why is the state even involved in regulating marriage?
Because marriage has legal status and benefits attached to it and stop people from abusing those benefits.
The question is why marriage should have any legal status at all.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
A solution to that is to allow women to have multiple husbands as well.
No, it's multiple mother-in-laws.
If a man could marry n women, and each of these women could marry n men, each of which in turn could marry other n-1 women, wouldnt this allow for a possible situation where every man is married to everyone, or connected to everyone through a chain of marriages? (Which would, by the way, basically lead to a redefinition of the Kevin bacon number to through how many marriage nodes somebody is married to Kevin Bacon.) (And to a renaming of Facebook to be a "marriage network", etc.)
...whatever that means.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Really? Because, you know, multiple other sources say that Zuckerberg started the prototype in September of 2003, and what we know as Facebook was launched in February of 2004.
If I recall rightIy, my vt.edu email address allowed me to register sometime in late 2004 or early 2005. On campus, it was starting to generate a lot of buzz as a great tool to bring lots of people together on short notice.
Your response is typical of what I was talking about though -- memory is a strange and elastic thing. You've been on Facebook for so long it feels like it's been 8 years, but it hasn't, and it really couldn't possibly have been.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Except the tax breaks aren't for families; married couples without children are eligible for them too. That makes it an issue of fairness, not greed.
Also, by the way, some gays reject the compromise of "civil unions." They, at least, do want recognition.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Except the tax breaks aren't for families; married couples without children are eligible for them too
There's a slippery slop there. Many couples plan on having children, they make decisions based on that. To be fair, a couple that does not intend to have children is cheating on the system.
A totally neutral system would do away with all tax breaks for dependents, but it sucks to be born in a family that cannot sustain itself, so we give children a break. They never asked to be born, did they?
If you can't afford them, don't have them.
A) You can keep saying that, but people aren't going to listen.
B) If people did listen, our population growth would crash hard and not walk away. Can you guarantee you'll have a job for the next 16 years so you can support your kid? Well, if you lack psychic powers, do you at least have $220k on hand in your emergency cash supply dedicated to raising the kid and not to be touched for any other emergency? No? Don't have a kid.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Oh, dear foreigner, how quaint; you assume that in the United States are laws are reasonably applied and rationally carried out. I am afraid to break it to you, but our justice system does neither of these. The laws that forbid polygamy don't have any such thing as tax structure as their logical basis. If anything, the basis outlawing such things is religious and perhaps even biological (if somewhat gray-area between bonobos and gorillas).
Once you are charged with a crime, you are guilty of that crime automatically (unless you are wealthy, a celebrity, an attractive blond woman, etc.). The law will be applied in whatever sense will result in such an outcome. You are then sent to Crime School, a hundred-thousand dollar-a-year tax-player-funded peer-learning teaching system where we as a society teach you how to terrorize and brutalize your neighbors, so when released you are likely to commit more crimes and keep our large class of lawyers and government workers dutifully employed.
If we really didn't like crime of course we would of course do the exact opposite of what we do. That is, we would put a criminal with a large amount of non-criminals in a healthy environment, and he would over time mirror their ethical actions.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Why is polygamy illegal?
Lawyers haven't found a way to exploit it yet.
See, if 2 people get a divorce, then there's half of everything, and that's a big chunk for the lawyer to work with.
But, if 3 people get a divorce, that's only a 3rd of everything per lawyer.
This continues ad nasuem: if you have a rockstar with 100 wives, that's only 1% of his wealth sniped by a gold digger. What kind of tabloid headline would that make? "Golddigger wants divorce, wins 1% of Brad Pitt's fortune!"
So you see, preposterous. If it bucks the trend of lawyers taking all the money, it ain't gonna happen.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
why should I have to pay for all of your children's education(s) with my tax dollars in the first place?
Because civilized society has agreed that the burden of providing some essential needs for those who cannot afford them should be shared by everybody.
There are couples, both gay and straight, that want marriage primarily for monetary purposes
I can guarantee you that no straight couple ever got married for the tax breaks, because it doesn't pay enough. But for gay couples that's the only plausible reason for wanting gay marriage regulated by law.
Hi, this is my husband, Tom. Or hi, this is my (business? What's domestic mean?) partner, Tom.
What you call Tom is between you and him, the law has nothing to say about that.
Then there's inheritance rights.
Make a will, it's that simple.
Then there's the power to make important medical decisions.
That's a problem for married couples as well. There has been cases where spouses and blood relatives have fought in court to make such decisions.
And the ability to avoid anti-gay family members from interfering in the most devastating point of your life.
Why do you think there should be a LAW to protect you against that? Do you believe all families approve the marriage choices of all their members? In-laws are very often a delicate subject in any family.
Why do you want tax breaks specifically for having kids, anyway? If you can't afford them, don't have them.
Tell that to the kids whose parents couldn't afford them. It's perfectly possible for you to tell your same-sex lover to get a job, but you cannot tell a child to go back to the womb.
So make the tax breaks limited to cases where a family has at least one minor dependent. That takes care of traditional married couples with kids as well as gay couples who successfully adopt.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Er, China has a long history of polygamy, and was arguably one of the more stable countries throughout world history. They really only got fucked up under the communists, who were also monogamist-or-die type fellows. The richest guy in Macao (IIRC) has a few wives even still, and in modern Hong Kong the practice remains, though they're simply called mistresses now. It's considered acceptable (by everybody except the Christians) in Hong Kong, though under the don't-ask-don't-tell policy that governs a lot of Chinese public/private life.
To paint a broad brush, every society has always been monogamist for the poor, and polygamous for the rich. Belle Ãpoque France, ancient Israel, whatever. In modern America, we have Tiger Woods, Letterman, and the rest getting money and sleeping around. Not saying it's right, but it is certainly not anything new.
Given that neither wife knew about the other, this is definitely not polygamy. Polygamy is defined as "a marriage which includes more than two partners", and as the "partners" were in separate, distinct, relationships, this does not count.
What we have here is a clear-cut case of Bigamy on the man's part. Nothing unusual about that, as there have been many cases over the years.
There was an old fellow of Lyme
Who lived with three wives at one time.
When asked, 'Why the third?'
He replied, 'One's absurd,
and bigamy, sir, is a crime.'
-- William Cosmo Monkhouse
Have gnu, will travel.
or just stop the fraud that the 'tax breaks' are in the first place?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And, maybe, because it's not our country?
I mean a lot of the world hates the way we bully them into accepting laws that are favorable to us - ACTA for instance - woe be it for us to enforce our ideas of sexuality on countries with entirely different backgrounds and social norms.