If most men had many wives, there must have been a lot less men than women, and/or a lot of men with no wife at all. Or perhaps wife sharing would account for it.
You're not supposed to refuse to do business with someone on the basis of your religion (or theirs). However, even though it's illegal, but plenty of people get away with it - "We don't like yer kind in here!"
Getting out of the draft is different, you aren't offering a business to the government.
There was a study in Italy of a patient who was cured of a severe form of bipolar called rapid cycling bipolar with "darkness therapy". They locked him in a dark room for 14 hours a night and after a couple months his sleep and his mood stabilized. No medication.
You said the difference is academic. No, it requires significant changes to the legal framework of marriage.
Consider the following programs:
1) A program that allows a PC to talk to a Mac
2) A program that allows a PC to talk to a PC.
3) A program that allows a Mac to talk to a Mac.
4) A program that allows any number of Macs and PCs to talk to each other all at once.
The point is that given 1, it's pretty straightforward to write 2 and 3. 4 is a just a lot harder to get right. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the difference in the patches required to support 2, 3, and 4 is not academic.
Laws are pretty similar to programs, and there's a big jump in complexity going from 2 of something to 3 of something. Anyone that was actually poly would know this from all the honesty, negotiation, and ground rules that are required to make it work.
Can you name one other kind of marriage that will necessarily get legalized because we legalized same-sex marriage?
Can you name one other kind of marriage that is demonstrably more likely to get legalized because we legalized same-sex marriage?
If there's any kind of slippery slope, it's the slippery slope from man-woman marriage to adult-adult marriage. Well, we've slid down it, and now we're at the bottom.
What is the difference between specifics and fundamentals? Aren't the legal ramifications the fundamentals? I mean, it is a legal institution that we are talking about, right?
I'm not saying you can't have a loving and intimate relationship between 3 or more people, I'm just saying same-sex marriage is much closer to heterosexual marriage in terms of legal ramifications because it's only 2 people. Lines and triangles are both geometric figures, but that doesn't make them fundamentally the same.
So the child of a divorce has to move between more than 2 homes now? A wealthy man can split his income with more than 1 wife that doesn't work?
It's not the same, it's qualitatively and quantitatively different. Is there a limit to the number of members? Can you join a union halfway through? Can you leave a union without dissolving it? Those questions don't come up under 2-person unions.
> You're right, it's not a slippery slope. It's a gate we've opened and said that whatever your [thoughts, feelings and behaviors about X are], no one else has a right to tell you that it's wrong. That is a very dangerous gate to open and you don't get to close it after [X] is approved - others will want the freedom as well.
This isn't an insult, but you're a nitwit? The argument you're making is the prototypical "slippery slope" fallacy.
Is the conflict you read about a bug in the compiler or a bug in the standard? A bug in the standard is much worse, whereas implementation bugs can be fixed. Maybe you read about undefined behavior? Implementations are free to change how they handle it.
> Ad homimen would be "people named Eric cannot be trusted".
Since you actually wrote this sentence 9 hours ago, it is safe to infer that you really don't know anything about logical fallacies or what you're talking about in general, since you can't possibly have learned all you need to know about them in 9 hours. Given this level of confidence in something that is both wrong and easily checked, why should we trust any of your claims at all?
Or... should we trust you? But not ESR? Would that not be hypocrisy?