Jonathan Rauch doubles down on the supply-of-women argument for why polygamy is not like same-sex marriage.

Here's my earlier post, "I've got a problem with the supply-of-women argument for distinguishing polygamy from same-sex marriage," poking Rauch (and Richard Posner) for relying on the social interest in preserving more women for men. They seem to think women are "some kind of natural resource to be conserved for the benefit of males." Like there needs to be a bag limit.

Rauch now has another article, going on at greater length and still failing to take account of the problem:

[W]hen a high-status man takes two wives (and one man taking many wives, or polygyny, is almost invariably the real-world pattern), a lower-status man gets no wife. If the high-status man takes three wives, two lower-status men get no wives. And so on.

This competitive, zero-sum dynamic sets off a competition among high-status men to hoard marriage opportunities, which leaves lower-status men out in the cold. Those men, denied access to life's most stabilizing and civilizing institution, are unfairly disadvantaged and often turn to behaviors like crime and violence.

In this view, women are society's tools, to be used to tame men. If some men are successful in winning too many women — if, after getting one woman, they can continue to take additional women out of the pool of potential wives — then there are fewer women left over to do the dirty work of civilizing the less desirable men, men who, undomesticated, run wild and do destructive things.

Rauch does pause to look at it from the female perspective:

The situation is not good for women, either, because it places them in competition with other wives and can reduce them all to satellites of the man.

But that's just offering the advice to women that, in general, polygamous marriages are a bad choice. It's not an explanation of why the choice should be denied to individual women who decide that a particular polygamous marriage they're considering is a good one, better than their other options.

Rauch says there might be "competition with other wives." But the idea of his bag-limit theory is to put more women in competition with all the other unmarried women and thereby to make the competition for women easier for men. Why can't the individual woman choose which kind of competition she prefers (competition with other wives or competition with other unmarried women)? The answer seems to be: Because we want to preserve the supply of women to increase the odds of matching them up with less desirable men lest these low quality men wreak havoc on society in general. 

Rauch points to research:

Here’s a 2012 study, for example, that discovered “significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault robbery and fraud in polygynous cultures.” According to the research, “monogamy's main cultural evolutionary advantage over polygyny is the more egalitarian distribution of women, which reduces male competition and social problems.”

Men are a problem, and women are the solution.

[S]ocieties become inherently unstable when effective sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females, such that a sixth of men are surplus commodities in the marriage market. That's not a big number: "The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives—numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while."

Of course, in nontraditional America, women have sex outside of marriage, and I suspect 10% of men already have 2, 3, or 4 women. And many women — often women with children — go for long stretches of time with no man. We don't just lower our standard until we get a husband. It's not like starving, where you'll eat anything. So the bag-limit argument for monogamy isn't doing the work you want anyway.

By abolishing polygamy as a legal form of marriage, western societies took a step without which modern liberal democracy and egalitarian social structures might have been impossible: they democratized the opportunity to marry.

Fine. But we're already a modern and egalitarian, and you're trying to justify cutting off the individual's freedom of choice. You need to have a reason why cutting off this choice — an informed, free decision to enter a plural marriage — is something government is allowed to do. Rauch doesn't attempt to discuss any process of slipping back into pre-modernism that could occur if polygamy became a recognized legal status in America. Instead he says look at this map:



Yikes! Disturbing! See? The argument by map is a different kind of argument. It invites disgust and contempt for the Muslim world. But I assume Rauch is one of the enlightened people who would not deliberately excite the forces of Islamophobia. Back when the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the criminalization of polygamy, in Reynolds v. United States (1878), it said:

Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people....

I don't think that's the kind of reasoning that Americans are going to want to make out loud today. Of course, we don't want the terrible burdens on liberty that prevail in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, but I don't see how pointing at the limitations on liberty elsewhere works as an argument for imposing a limitation on liberty here. (I certainly concede that Islamophobia, handled subtly, will prod a lot of American minds, but I doubt if Rauch would admit, even to himself, that's what he's doing.)

Rauch has some other arguments at the end of his article, and there are other arguments. All I'm doing is demonstrating the distastefulness of the supply-of-women argument (and the Islamophobia argument). These arguments might work legally. I just don't know if these are things an advocate should want to come out and say.

I presume Rauch doesn't even think he is saying these things. But lawyers and politicians need to be able to see the ways in which the things that sound good to them can be restated unprettily. You have opponents, and you will be paraphrased.