AHC: Polygamy as accepted as homosexuality

With POD(s) after 1900, have polygamy in the western world be at least as acceptable as homosexuality, LGBT rights and such are in OTL 2013 western countries. It can still be outlawed/persecuted in some areas of the world...

But make it quite acceptable to have several wives (and/or husbands) in the western world, so that those that are against it might easily be labeled "polygamophobic", "arch-conservative" or something else.
 
a pod in cuban missile crisis, that erupted into a global nuclear war, with many men died and male : female ratio end up at 1 : 8 worldwide. And human populations dropped to only two millions in north america and europe, with virtually nothing outside them. To repopulate the earth, every male is suggested to took as many wifes as possible.
 
a pod in cuban missile crisis, that erupted into a global nuclear war, with many men died and male : female ratio end up at 1 : 8 worldwide. And human populations dropped to only two millions in north america and europe, with virtually nothing outside them. To repopulate the earth, every male is suggested to took as many wifes as possible.

So the Dr. Strangelove scenario? :D
 
Make the situation in the former USSR the norm, where men are greatly outnumbered by women, and polygamy is considered to prevent a massive die off.
 
Not sure if this is stretching things too much, but I think the key to making this work would be transforming what we mean by polygamy. Instead of having a single husband in the dominant position over multiple wives, there could be group marriages where everyone is married to everyone else, or some kind of polyamory where an individual can be married to multiple people. Maybe have this kind of thing emerge in some liberal subcultures (as it to a small extent has in certain areas OTL) and have these upper middle class liberal secular folks be the face of polygamy, instead of creepy mormon splinter groups leaving in Idaho, and you'd have a chance at making it more acceptable. This takes care of probably the biggest problem compared to gay marriage: that polygamy is associated with patriarchy and conservatism, while the people who are down to expand the boundaries of what's acceptable in society are mostly liberals.

With that out of the way the biggest obstacle as compared to homosexuality is that no one has to be a polygamist. You can't exactly say you were 'born this way.' Still, most of the arguments still apply: it's the government's job to help people live their lives as they see fit, not prescribe how they can organize their personal lives. If a group of people want to form a polygamist marriage, what business is it of anybody else's?
 
I read the title as "AHC: Polygamy accepted as homosexuality".

Same here.

I don't think it possible, going off on sheer numbers and history. Gays will be left off to themselves, some people can comfort themselves with that knowledge, but Polygamy means less women for the rest of the men, which simply isn't going to fly regardless of religion and time. Plus, its easier to justify Homosexuality, as it is two equal partners in an equal relationship. With Polygamy, there is an implicit association that men are the leaders, and women the subordinates.
 
I don't think it is so unconceivable that an earlier and more successful polyamory movement emerges in the countercultures of the sixties and manages to gain wider acceptance (roughly the way gay rights activism did) focusing, say, on challenging couple jealousy and couple relationships as patriarchal and possessive.
Of course, it happened IOTL to some extent and there IS a polyamory advocacy movement.
I am not sure would would take for it to be more successful, although in a sense it's strange that is did not in the last twenty years seeing how apparent is the inadequacy the couple family structure when coping with the current phase of capitalism and some cultural trends. The point is having a movement that focuses on individual freedoms and rights (as in, guaranteeing the freedom to have more than one partner) than on familiar bonds. it also should be able to withstand the conservative backlash after the late sixties (or maybe, if a POD can avoid that, accepted polyamory may ensue as a consequence).
However, the outcome is likely to be more a further weakining of monogamic marriage as an institution than widespread formalized polygamy (that may happen).
 
a pod in cuban missile crisis, that erupted into a global nuclear war, with many men died and male : female ratio end up at 1 : 8 worldwide. And human populations dropped to only two millions in north america and europe, with virtually nothing outside them. To repopulate the earth, every male is suggested to took as many wifes as possible.
That's ASB, there weren't enough Soviet deployable nukes to hurt the US really badly, let alone that badly

Something else that might work would be changing things up so you get a worse and earlier *WWI that ends up killing larger amounts of the European male population than OTL, and Polygamy is legalized as an interim solution [supposedly this happened in Paraguay OTL after the disasterous war there], and then having an *WWII that still bogs down into trench warfare and causes another large male dieoff making polygamy needed again, after two generations of necessity in Europe it becomes an ingrained part of the culture which is then spread to the colonial empires and from there to the rest of the world

Or if we do future history have some biology equivalent of a script kiddie write a virus that kills off mostly males and messes sex selection in favor of females, have him be smart enough the thing spreads and have efforts to contain fail, and make the thing stubborn enough that by the time it's fixable polygamy's ingrained enough no one wants to fix it
 
Having Polygamy as accepted as homosexuality in the West. Well for a long time neither were accepted so I guess you could argue that it was already the case :/
 
The thing with marriage is that it comes with legal obligations and responsibilities. Thus, as the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage shows, acceptance of sexual relationships previously looked down upon is different, and more easily achieved than are changes to marriage rights.
 
The thing with marriage is that it comes with legal obligations and responsibilities. Thus, as the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage shows, acceptance of sexual relationships previously looked down upon is different, and more easily achieved than are changes to marriage rights.

The key here is that polygamy you can have the marriage continued as people die off and others join. So there is no inheritance, estate, etc taxes for the state to collect. Homosexual marriage means that one of the partners will eventually die off, and the state collects then.

You also get into the fun of one person deciding to leave the marriage. They were one of the three people involved, and want an equal share (1/3). By the time the divorce has hit the court, the marriage has gotten more people, and their share is less than 1/3. Lots of fun.
 
Start with the Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v.

I can't see this POD earlier than 1890, but prefer a POD of 1860...

In 1860, the LDS Church accepts that 11 year old Joseph Smith III is the rightful leader of the LDS. Rather than remaining in Nauvoo, the boy moves to Utah. The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints becomes the main branch of Mormonism.
In 1890, Justice Fuller writes for the majority that the Edmunds Tucker Act is unconstitutional. This emboldens the RLDS to reject the 1890 Manifesto. Utah's statehood is delayed, and Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona are admitted without a state constitution that specifically bans polygamy. Utah is finally made a state in 1913 without giving up polygamy.

The RLDS, with its much larger membership and its belief that any person may recieve divine revelation, liberalizes much quicker than in our timeline, becoming a major player in the civil rights and feminist movements in the 60's. In 1974, The RLDS embraces PLGBT (Polyamory, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender) issues on the grounds of religious freedom.
 
That's ASB, there weren't enough Soviet deployable nukes to hurt the US really badly, let alone that badly

Something else that might work would be changing things up so you get a worse and earlier *WWI that ends up killing larger amounts of the European male population than OTL, and Polygamy is legalized as an interim solution [supposedly this happened in Paraguay OTL after the disasterous war there], and then having an *WWII that still bogs down into trench warfare and causes another large male dieoff making polygamy needed again, after two generations of necessity in Europe it becomes an ingrained part of the culture which is then spread to the colonial empires and from there to the rest of the world

Or if we do future history have some biology equivalent of a script kiddie write a virus that kills off mostly males and messes sex selection in favor of females, have him be smart enough the thing spreads and have efforts to contain fail, and make the thing stubborn enough that by the time it's fixable polygamy's ingrained enough no one wants to fix it

Perhaps you're right. But what if in vitro fertilizations discovered and men only asked to provide their sperm instead of actively... wait a minute, whose going to miss extra sexytimes? :rolleyes: ; after more thinking spent in this section, I think it will end up being "Single Mothers are accepted as Norm, with a lot of free lovin arround..."
 

katchen

Banned
I think you would have to start with at least one Muslim world power from the 18th Century through the 20th Century. It could be the Ottoman Empire, Persia or the Muhgals. But it would have to follow Sharia law, which permits polygamy, and thereby legitimate polygamy as a legitimate alternative, worldwide, instead of complete Western Christian domination of the global regime of truth, to use Michel Foucault's term.
 
It would have to be polyamory not polygamy to fly in the Western world.

Accepted polyamory could have been as much a result of the sexual liberation rights style movement as homosexuality was in OTL.
 
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