It's closest example you can have. The fact that there is some payback - even if it's 100% and even with interest would however ONLY get the money BACK - it would NOT give you a consistent 700% over and above what you spent. That's the return on investment. Yours is a typical example of somebody focussing on an irellevant detail because they cannot actually disprove the conclusion so they pretend that some minor detail which wasn't fully clarified must nullify it.
How does anything you say account for this being one of the only investments that *exist* which shows a consistent 700% return ?
Only if you limit the definition of "human" to the people who had those rights in the 17th century and continue to think of everybody as property.
In fact, you will find that so called classic liberals were very concerned with protecting property and ensuring that whatever is property will be so for ever, at a time when the definition of "property" included the vast majority of the human race - and those ideas about liberty is designed to ensure that everybody didn't fit the bill would *remain* property for ever. It does not protect the rights of everybody else - because it was DESIGNED to ensure they wouldn't HAVE any.
And the problem with personal responsibility rhetoric is that its logically impossible to be responsible for things you do not control, have no authority over and cannot change. Nearly everything that rhetoric opposes falls in that category. Defending the weak and powerless against things that are done to them by the powerful (or just bad luck) and which cannot be prevented or planned for or prepared for.
Ive never met a prochoice person who didnt think abortion was terrible. Ive met plenty who opted to have an unplanned baby instead if gettng an abortion. But its not killing by any stretch. If not sacrificing bodily autonomy so a fetus can live is killing, then not being an organ donor is mass murder. Why should dead people have more bodily autonomy than live women ?
Stolen wealth is when the people who actually produce things gets rewarded so little they can barely eat while people who contributed nothing at all get 4000 times more than them of the fruits of their labour.
Stolen wealth is when banksters commit fraud that cost ordinary people a 13 trillion dollar bill and then profit off the resulting suffering and not one if them goes to jail.
Capitalism is nothing but a system to steal the wealth produced by the industrious many and deliver it to the lazy few.
Religions cannot even agree on what the belief is. Using the same old testament as primary source Christianity concluded that humanity starts at conception and so are anti-abortion. But Jews, noting genesis in particular, concluded that life starts at the first breath and so they dont have an issue with abortion. Both are wrong. Scientifically consciousness is the closest appriximation of human and that happens between those extremes.
Interestingly most fundamentalists even oppose abortion in cases of rape and incest: despite the bible flat out authorising it in those cases. Biblical law allows for stoning babies resulting from rape or incest at birth. Modern medical abortion is just a less cruel way to do that.
Actually no, on the left we say: Live and let everybody else live. All those "rules" you hate, they are what "let everybody else" live LOOKS like - breaking them KILLS people.
>Anyone with a silver tongue and no qualms about ripping people off should be rubbing their hands with glee at the moment.
And the best bit is, after you rip them off, if the police try to charge you with fraud - they will all show up at hte trial to testify in your DEFENSE !
It's pretty amazing how almost everybody who is anti-abortion is also anti-welfare and anti-public-school and almost always pro-death-penalty. They will force a life to come into this world, but they won't bat an eye if that child and her mother starve to death a week later (nor will they move an inch to pay the not insignificant medical costs involved in giving the birth they forced her to give). And if that child growing up in hardship ever does something wrong, they will be quite happy to electrocute and adult instead.
Whatever the hell the anti-abortion crowd is they sure as fuck are NOT "pro-life" - they are, at best, "pro-birth".
Then why do I have the right to NOT donate blood that will save your life and let you die? Why do I have hte right to choose not to be an organ donor.
Seriously why does my dead CORPSE have the right to let you die if it doesn't CHOOSE to be violated to save you, but a woman doesn't have that autonomy ?
In every other case where bodily autonomy and a third party is involved the legal standard in every free nation is that you must opt IN, you must CHOOSE to save that life, you can't be forced to give up your bodily autonomy to save somebody else.
1) It's not a baby. Not by a long shot yet. Science trumps belief. 2) Your claim requires women to accept LESS bodily autonomy than we give DEAD people.
If somebody is about to die, and you can save his life by donating blood - even if you're the only person in the city with the right blood type and not donating is tantamount to murder - they still cannot FORCE you to donate blood or prosecute you for failing to do so. And that's an adult human - no ambiguity about whether it's a person in the science there. You can let him die, to preserve your bodily autonomy, and nobody can stop you from doing that by law. We could question the morality of it - but we can't force you to agree to that morality.
If that same person is dying and needs a heart transplant and you are DEAD we cannot put your heart in him unless you gave consent before you died. Your CORPSE has the right not to have his bodily autonomy violated to save another person's life. Yet you want to demand that women be forced to give up their bodily autonomy for the life of something that isn't even close to human yet.
Your bodily autonomy is NOT violable for the sake of a third party, no matter who the third party is, no matter if you are related or not. There is no sane version of an abortion law. No version of one that does not lead to endless death, violence, carnage and horrors like prosecuting woman for having miscarriage. There is no version or example of one that has ever existed that did not have these outcomes and did not flagrantly go against every principle of liberty. Oh and coincidentally, there is no example anywhere in the world, anytime in history, where an abortion law has reduced the number of abortions whatsoever. Abortion laws simply do not work. They do not save fetusses lives. The only thing they do is to drive abortions underground where they are done unsafely and instead of just a few dead fetusses you end up with a bunch of dead women on top. In fact, to the extent that abortion laws affect abortion rates at all - it is to push them slightly UPWARDS because generally where they access cheap and easy access ot birth control does not.
So what you are saying is that people who probably committed no crime, if given fair trials are likely to be exonerated and you think that is a bad thing because what if they commit crimes after they are released ?
You should vote for Cruz. When Cruz was a state attorney general a 16 year old boy was convicted of robbery and got 10 years. 6 years later while investigating another crime the police found incontrovertible proof that their suspect had committed that old robbery and done it alone. Incontrovertible proof that the boy was innocent. The now 22 year old applied to have his conviction overturned in light of the new evidence (while the other guy had the old robbery tacked onto his charge sheet). Generally the government doesnt contest such applications when there is such strong proof of evidence. Not Cruz though. Ted the evangelical Christian from the religion of remorse fought that application through every level of appeal and lost badly while the state suppreme court severely reprimanded him for it. Ted Cruz shares your values. He would fight to keep an American in prison despite incontrovertible proof of evidence, imagine what he will do to pesky browmskinned foreignors where there is no evidence.
PS. the rules of war sure as fuck dont allow even real POWs to be held indefinitely.
To back you up. The one major free college program in the US, the GI Bill on average makes back 7 dollars for every dollar spent on it. But republicans always conveniently forget the other side of the ledger. They count investments as costs and ignore the returns.
>Your reply is nice, but I'm trying hard to parse it, because it doesn't make sense to me.
Genetic flaws happen, they occur to a rare few individuals, who rarely procreate, and they have limited impact on the species as whole. Perfection rapidly becomes dominant, and then prevents the forces of competition from keeping population growth in check - result the entire species goes extinct.
>So what you are saying is that if we tweak the calcium phosphate in humans to be a little more durable, humanity will go extinct? Probably not. That's far too small a change to qualify as risky perfection.. But humans who are resistent to all diseases (our only remaining predator) and all live to be 200 but keep breeding at the rate we are ? That's definitely not a recipe for survival.
>So tell me, let's say you have a genetic flaw like Huntingdon's Again I wasn't negating the horrors of flaws, I was merely indicating that they only affect individuals, actual perfection would doom the entire species. That's like saying "So you oppose nuclear weapons, you must be perfectly okay with gunshot victims then".
>Sharks are perfect predators and are not in danger of going extinct
Beeeeppp wrong. Sharks are definitely not perfect predators, they are extremely good - but they are far from perfect. I've actually watched videos of a seal managing to win a battle for survival against a great white - swimming around him and dodging till the shark was too tired to continue pursuit. They do not always succeed.
And the reason they are so good is because that's how good they need to be to survive at all, the ocean is bloody huge and meals are few and far between - to survive at all you need about a 99% success rate at hunting when you only get to hunt maybe once a week.
And if anything this is the exact opposite of the anti-GMO crowd's arguments. Your ignorance of basic biology is the only reason you could possibly imagine a resemblance. It is however an argument for cautious approaches when tinkering with incredibly complex systems where even the tiniest change is GUARANTEED to have massive impacts. Evolution is both emergent and chaotic, we simply do not HAVE the mathematics to predict what changes will come out of ANYTHING we do. So we should be very careful because some of those knock-on effects WILL be bad for you. But that's not an argument against GMOs because guess what, those exact same risks to exactly the same degree applies to all forms of breeding and farming.
>Evolution is far far from perfect. Nothing wrong with tighening up a few parameters here and there.
That's because you're mistaking evolution as something that happens to a species. It is much more accurate to say that evolution is something species do to each other and one of it's most IMPORTANT outcomes is to ensure that no species is ever perfect. Perfection is more guaranteed extinction than any flaw could be.
The perfect predator goes extinct, because none of his prey survives to produce a next generation that can feed his babies.
The perfect predator-evader also goes extinct, because nobody keeps his numbers down so very soon there are too many of them for the food supply to sustain.
That applies at every level.Evolution doesn't happen in isolation, every living organism alive at any given moment is doing it to every other living organism and they all had it done to them already by every organism that ever lived before - yes even the ones who have no genetic descendents to day, because their very existence altered the genes of the ones who do have descendents today.
You can't evolve to eat eggs until something evolves that lays eggs, When you do, you can't be *too* good at finding them or your children don't have food. Perfect creatures cannot survive because everything must coexist. Evolutionary history is generally divided into two types of events. Parochials are rare one-time events, this trait evolved in something somewhere and survived for a while, but nothing else has it who didn't inherit it from there. Feathers are a parochial, the birds got it from the dinosaurs but nothing else has feathers. There are no feathered mammals or feathered reptiles or feathered fish. Only in that one line did they ever evolve.. Universals happen over and over in different lineages with no shared ancestors that had the trait at different times and places, they happen because they universally benefit the species. Eyes are a universal, insects and fish and moluscs all evolved them independently (with very different designs) and passed them on to their young. Wings are a universal too - birds, insects and mammals (bats) all evolved them independently.
And the extinction of perfection is a definite universal. In fact, even "near perfect" is doomed. There is a classic example: herbivores develop bigger horns and thicker, bony plates to make themselves harder to hunt. In turn predators developer bigger teeth to overcome these defenses. So the herbivores get even bigger armor. Repeat through a few evolutionary generations and you end up with herbivores covered in so much tank-like armor they can barely move and carnivores with teeth so gigantic they actually cannot close their mouths anymore. Both species promptly go extinct. This arms-race-to-mutual-destruction has happened in the known evolutionary record hundreds of times, to everything from insects and spiders up to dinosaurs and the giant mammals. Just being sufficiently better than your predators that you force them evolve a major change to keep up - can doom you both to extinction.
It is only complete anthrocentric-arrogance that could make anybody think humans are immune to the process of evolution or that every other species is *not* still doing it to us. As it stands our biggest risk to survival probably is being almost too perfect at intelligence, luckily we got a fair number of stupid humans to balance that out a bit. We may not survive another too-perfect trait.
Fuck it, lets got full Kerbal and create a strain of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis that can infect humans and just get the damn zombie appocalypse over with already.
>whether, in retrospect, the ethics concerns and regulations that pervade the field of medical genomics will come to be seen as stifling and detrimental.
Maybe they will, when that happens, it would likely be the right time to relax them. If we had been more cautious when we discovered pencilin we could have had almost all the lives antibiotics saved still saved, without all the people now being killed by antibiotic resistant bacteria. Severe antibiotic resistant TB is a terrifying way to die.
>The state has said nothing about three people being married by a church. That marriage just wouldn't have the legal benefits.
This theory doesn't accord with actual laws on the books which practically make "married in church but not before the state" between three or more people illegal in many cases - laws like prohibiting cohabitation.
In theory these laws were passed due to the extreme patriarchally one-sided nature of most polygamous religious cultures and the frequency with which they included marrying girls well below the age of consent, but in practice they are stopping things like polyamorous marriages (which have none of those issues) as well.
Though the US is still less crazy there then South Africa, where the law actually allows polygamous marriages but *only* if you're from a culture that traditionally practiced it, in which case those marriages are legal and governed by the common-law system (which is not handled by the legislature but effectively determined by sitting judges in accordance with the cultural values at the time and constrained only by the constitution itself). That dual legal system was inheritted from the Dutch-Roman legal system but was expanded to include the traditional legal systems of African cultures as equal to the Dutch common law (even though their operation is different. African courts are judged by a council of elders and so have more in common with a jury trial than the Dutch single-judge model, and of course the jury-of-judges evaluating the evidence and witnesses are not legally trained, the chief is not a king and he cannot act alone, he basically acts as chief justice). So while that is very nicely multicultural and egalitarian it also makes the law quite confusing sometimes, and Indian Muslim can be polygamous but a Hindu or Christian cannot. Somebody born to a marriage between a Muslim and a Christian would by birth be subject to both Dutch and Muslim common law but in adulthood if they chose one religion would cease to be subject to the other.
And of course, it leaves atheists and areligious concepts like polyamory out in the cold.
The reality is unfortunately a lot more complicated than you describe it, a consequence of history that over the years had very different social norms surrounding hte concept of marriage which made their ways into laws.
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It's closest example you can have. The fact that there is some payback - even if it's 100% and even with interest would however ONLY get the money BACK - it would NOT give you a consistent 700% over and above what you spent.
That's the return on investment. Yours is a typical example of somebody focussing on an irellevant detail because they cannot actually disprove the conclusion so they pretend that some minor detail which wasn't fully clarified must nullify it.
How does anything you say account for this being one of the only investments that *exist* which shows a consistent 700% return ?
Only if you limit the definition of "human" to the people who had those rights in the 17th century and continue to think of everybody as property.
In fact, you will find that so called classic liberals were very concerned with protecting property and ensuring that whatever is property will be so for ever, at a time when the definition of "property" included the vast majority of the human race - and those ideas about liberty is designed to ensure that everybody didn't fit the bill would *remain* property for ever.
It does not protect the rights of everybody else - because it was DESIGNED to ensure they wouldn't HAVE any.
And the problem with personal responsibility rhetoric is that its logically impossible to be responsible for things you do not control, have no authority over and cannot change.
Nearly everything that rhetoric opposes falls in that category. Defending the weak and powerless against things that are done to them by the powerful (or just bad luck) and which cannot be prevented or planned for or prepared for.
Ive never met a prochoice person who didnt think abortion was terrible. Ive met plenty who opted to have an unplanned baby instead if gettng an abortion.
But its not killing by any stretch. If not sacrificing bodily autonomy so a fetus can live is killing, then not being an organ donor is mass murder.
Why should dead people have more bodily autonomy than live women ?
Stolen wealth is when the people who actually produce things gets rewarded so little they can barely eat while people who contributed nothing at all get 4000 times more than them of the fruits of their labour.
Stolen wealth is when banksters commit fraud that cost ordinary people a 13 trillion dollar bill and then profit off the resulting suffering and not one if them goes to jail.
Capitalism is nothing but a system to steal the wealth produced by the industrious many and deliver it to the lazy few.
Religions cannot even agree on what the belief is. Using the same old testament as primary source Christianity concluded that humanity starts at conception and so are anti-abortion.
But Jews, noting genesis in particular, concluded that life starts at the first breath and so they dont have an issue with abortion. Both are wrong. Scientifically consciousness is the closest appriximation of human and that happens between those extremes.
Interestingly most fundamentalists even oppose abortion in cases of rape and incest: despite the bible flat out authorising it in those cases. Biblical law allows for stoning babies resulting from rape or incest at birth. Modern medical abortion is just a less cruel way to do that.
Actually no, on the left we say: Live and let everybody else live.
All those "rules" you hate, they are what "let everybody else" live LOOKS like - breaking them KILLS people.
>Anyone with a silver tongue and no qualms about ripping people off should be rubbing their hands with glee at the moment.
And the best bit is, after you rip them off, if the police try to charge you with fraud - they will all show up at hte trial to testify in your DEFENSE !
Men have the ability to use contraception too. If they don't it's not HER fault.
And it's already illegal to pay abortions with tax money, has been for decades.
You're an ignorant asshole.
It's pretty amazing how almost everybody who is anti-abortion is also anti-welfare and anti-public-school and almost always pro-death-penalty. They will force a life to come into this world, but they won't bat an eye if that child and her mother starve to death a week later (nor will they move an inch to pay the not insignificant medical costs involved in giving the birth they forced her to give).
And if that child growing up in hardship ever does something wrong, they will be quite happy to electrocute and adult instead.
Whatever the hell the anti-abortion crowd is they sure as fuck are NOT "pro-life" - they are, at best, "pro-birth".
Then why do I have the right to NOT donate blood that will save your life and let you die?
Why do I have hte right to choose not to be an organ donor.
Seriously why does my dead CORPSE have the right to let you die if it doesn't CHOOSE to be violated to save you, but a woman doesn't have that autonomy ?
In every other case where bodily autonomy and a third party is involved the legal standard in every free nation is that you must opt IN, you must CHOOSE to save that life, you can't be forced to give up your bodily autonomy to save somebody else.
1) It's not a baby. Not by a long shot yet. Science trumps belief.
2) Your claim requires women to accept LESS bodily autonomy than we give DEAD people.
If somebody is about to die, and you can save his life by donating blood - even if you're the only person in the city with the right blood type and not donating is tantamount to murder - they still cannot FORCE you to donate blood or prosecute you for failing to do so. And that's an adult human - no ambiguity about whether it's a person in the science there. You can let him die, to preserve your bodily autonomy, and nobody can stop you from doing that by law. We could question the morality of it - but we can't force you to agree to that morality.
If that same person is dying and needs a heart transplant and you are DEAD we cannot put your heart in him unless you gave consent before you died. Your CORPSE has the right not to have his bodily autonomy violated to save another person's life.
Yet you want to demand that women be forced to give up their bodily autonomy for the life of something that isn't even close to human yet.
Your bodily autonomy is NOT violable for the sake of a third party, no matter who the third party is, no matter if you are related or not. There is no sane version of an abortion law. No version of one that does not lead to endless death, violence, carnage and horrors like prosecuting woman for having miscarriage. There is no version or example of one that has ever existed that did not have these outcomes and did not flagrantly go against every principle of liberty.
Oh and coincidentally, there is no example anywhere in the world, anytime in history, where an abortion law has reduced the number of abortions whatsoever. Abortion laws simply do not work. They do not save fetusses lives. The only thing they do is to drive abortions underground where they are done unsafely and instead of just a few dead fetusses you end up with a bunch of dead women on top.
In fact, to the extent that abortion laws affect abortion rates at all - it is to push them slightly UPWARDS because generally where they access cheap and easy access ot birth control does not.
So what you are saying is that people who probably committed no crime, if given fair trials are likely to be exonerated and you think that is a bad thing because what if they commit crimes after they are released ?
You should vote for Cruz. When Cruz was a state attorney general a 16 year old boy was convicted of robbery and got 10 years. 6 years later while investigating another crime the police found incontrovertible proof that their suspect had committed that old robbery and done it alone. Incontrovertible proof that the boy was innocent. The now 22 year old applied to have his conviction overturned in light of the new evidence (while the other guy had the old robbery tacked onto his charge sheet). Generally the government doesnt contest such applications when there is such strong proof of evidence. Not Cruz though. Ted the evangelical Christian from the religion of remorse fought that application through every level of appeal and lost badly while the state suppreme court severely reprimanded him for it.
Ted Cruz shares your values. He would fight to keep an American in prison despite incontrovertible proof of evidence, imagine what he will do to pesky browmskinned foreignors where there is no evidence.
PS. the rules of war sure as fuck dont allow even real POWs to be held indefinitely.
There is one republican who could have a chance in the general. But he wont be the nominee for the same reason. Kassich is just too close to sane.
To back you up. The one major free college program in the US, the GI Bill on average makes back 7 dollars for every dollar spent on it.
But republicans always conveniently forget the other side of the ledger. They count investments as costs and ignore the returns.
One is in the works, supposedly coming out this year. Or so I read sometime last year.
>Your reply is nice, but I'm trying hard to parse it, because it doesn't make sense to me.
Genetic flaws happen, they occur to a rare few individuals, who rarely procreate, and they have limited impact on the species as whole.
Perfection rapidly becomes dominant, and then prevents the forces of competition from keeping population growth in check - result the entire species goes extinct.
>So what you are saying is that if we tweak the calcium phosphate in humans to be a little more durable, humanity will go extinct?
Probably not. That's far too small a change to qualify as risky perfection.. But humans who are resistent to all diseases (our only remaining predator) and all live to be 200 but keep breeding at the rate we are ? That's definitely not a recipe for survival.
>So tell me, let's say you have a genetic flaw like Huntingdon's
Again I wasn't negating the horrors of flaws, I was merely indicating that they only affect individuals, actual perfection would doom the entire species. That's like saying "So you oppose nuclear weapons, you must be perfectly okay with gunshot victims then".
>Sharks are perfect predators and are not in danger of going extinct
Beeeeppp wrong.
Sharks are definitely not perfect predators, they are extremely good - but they are far from perfect. I've actually watched videos of a seal managing to win a battle for survival against a great white - swimming around him and dodging till the shark was too tired to continue pursuit. They do not always succeed.
And the reason they are so good is because that's how good they need to be to survive at all, the ocean is bloody huge and meals are few and far between - to survive at all you need about a 99% success rate at hunting when you only get to hunt maybe once a week.
And if anything this is the exact opposite of the anti-GMO crowd's arguments. Your ignorance of basic biology is the only reason you could possibly imagine a resemblance. It is however an argument for cautious approaches when tinkering with incredibly complex systems where even the tiniest change is GUARANTEED to have massive impacts. Evolution is both emergent and chaotic, we simply do not HAVE the mathematics to predict what changes will come out of ANYTHING we do. So we should be very careful because some of those knock-on effects WILL be bad for you.
But that's not an argument against GMOs because guess what, those exact same risks to exactly the same degree applies to all forms of breeding and farming.
Scientific value >= social value >= economic value.
FTFY.
Even McGuyver would need to use the radiative phosphorous from his glow-in-the-dark watch hands to build this !
>Evolution is far far from perfect. Nothing wrong with tighening up a few parameters here and there.
That's because you're mistaking evolution as something that happens to a species. It is much more accurate to say that evolution is something species do to each other and one of it's most IMPORTANT outcomes is to ensure that no species is ever perfect.
Perfection is more guaranteed extinction than any flaw could be.
The perfect predator goes extinct, because none of his prey survives to produce a next generation that can feed his babies.
The perfect predator-evader also goes extinct, because nobody keeps his numbers down so very soon there are too many of them for the food supply to sustain.
That applies at every level .Evolution doesn't happen in isolation, every living organism alive at any given moment is doing it to every other living organism and they all had it done to them already by every organism that ever lived before - yes even the ones who have no genetic descendents to day, because their very existence altered the genes of the ones who do have descendents today.
You can't evolve to eat eggs until something evolves that lays eggs, When you do, you can't be *too* good at finding them or your children don't have food. Perfect creatures cannot survive because everything must coexist.
Evolutionary history is generally divided into two types of events. Parochials are rare one-time events, this trait evolved in something somewhere and survived for a while, but nothing else has it who didn't inherit it from there. Feathers are a parochial, the birds got it from the dinosaurs but nothing else has feathers. There are no feathered mammals or feathered reptiles or feathered fish. Only in that one line did they ever evolve.. Universals happen over and over in different lineages with no shared ancestors that had the trait at different times and places, they happen because they universally benefit the species. Eyes are a universal, insects and fish and moluscs all evolved them independently (with very different designs) and passed them on to their young. Wings are a universal too - birds, insects and mammals (bats) all evolved them independently.
And the extinction of perfection is a definite universal. In fact, even "near perfect" is doomed. There is a classic example: herbivores develop bigger horns and thicker, bony plates to make themselves harder to hunt. In turn predators developer bigger teeth to overcome these defenses. So the herbivores get even bigger armor. Repeat through a few evolutionary generations and you end up with herbivores covered in so much tank-like armor they can barely move and carnivores with teeth so gigantic they actually cannot close their mouths anymore. Both species promptly go extinct. This arms-race-to-mutual-destruction has happened in the known evolutionary record hundreds of times, to everything from insects and spiders up to dinosaurs and the giant mammals.
Just being sufficiently better than your predators that you force them evolve a major change to keep up - can doom you both to extinction.
It is only complete anthrocentric-arrogance that could make anybody think humans are immune to the process of evolution or that every other species is *not* still doing it to us. As it stands our biggest risk to survival probably is being almost too perfect at intelligence, luckily we got a fair number of stupid humans to balance that out a bit. We may not survive another too-perfect trait.
Fuck it, lets got full Kerbal and create a strain of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis that can infect humans and just get the damn zombie appocalypse over with already.
>whether, in retrospect, the ethics concerns and regulations that pervade the field of medical genomics will come to be seen as stifling and detrimental.
Maybe they will, when that happens, it would likely be the right time to relax them. If we had been more cautious when we discovered pencilin we could have had almost all the lives antibiotics saved still saved, without all the people now being killed by antibiotic resistant bacteria. Severe antibiotic resistant TB is a terrifying way to die.
>The state has said nothing about three people being married by a church. That marriage just wouldn't have the legal benefits.
This theory doesn't accord with actual laws on the books which practically make "married in church but not before the state" between three or more people illegal in many cases - laws like prohibiting cohabitation.
In theory these laws were passed due to the extreme patriarchally one-sided nature of most polygamous religious cultures and the frequency with which they included marrying girls well below the age of consent, but in practice they are stopping things like polyamorous marriages (which have none of those issues) as well.
Though the US is still less crazy there then South Africa, where the law actually allows polygamous marriages but *only* if you're from a culture that traditionally practiced it, in which case those marriages are legal and governed by the common-law system (which is not handled by the legislature but effectively determined by sitting judges in accordance with the cultural values at the time and constrained only by the constitution itself). That dual legal system was inheritted from the Dutch-Roman legal system but was expanded to include the traditional legal systems of African cultures as equal to the Dutch common law (even though their operation is different. African courts are judged by a council of elders and so have more in common with a jury trial than the Dutch single-judge model, and of course the jury-of-judges evaluating the evidence and witnesses are not legally trained, the chief is not a king and he cannot act alone, he basically acts as chief justice).
So while that is very nicely multicultural and egalitarian it also makes the law quite confusing sometimes, and Indian Muslim can be polygamous but a Hindu or Christian cannot. Somebody born to a marriage between a Muslim and a Christian would by birth be subject to both Dutch and Muslim common law but in adulthood if they chose one religion would cease to be subject to the other.
And of course, it leaves atheists and areligious concepts like polyamory out in the cold.
The reality is unfortunately a lot more complicated than you describe it, a consequence of history that over the years had very different social norms surrounding hte concept of marriage which made their ways into laws.
Here mean's South Africa... I'm pretty sure there is no cable from Caborra Bassa to anywhere in Europe...