AN ARGUMENT AGAINST POLYAMOROUS MARRIAGE
P1. Polyamorous marriage reduces the social pressure for fathers to remain in their family
P2. A reduced social pressure for fathers to remain in their family will likely lead to less fathers remaining in their family
C. Therefore polyamorous marriage will likely lead to less fathers remaining in their family
CONSERVATIVE COMMENTARY
This argument is also used against:
Clearly less fathers remaining in their family is devastating for children and the social problem that every society must solve. The impact of fatherlessness on children has been widely studied and research strongly correlates fatherlessness to a wide range of negative effects on children and most notably boys. In the words of Jordan Peterson:
“we know that fatherlessness isn’t good for people by any measure, it’s a catastrophe”
The Effects of Fatherlessness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJgX5XbE6Ok&t=315s
Traditional marriage implies that fathers are essential to a family and the life of a child, whereas polyamorous marriage implies that any number of mothers are just as good as a mother and father and therefore fathers are not necessary. What social effect does it have on men if the law sends the message that children do not need a father? Surely it makes it more socially acceptable for a man to leave his pregnant girlfriend alone with the child.
David Blankenhorn who famously wrote about “Fatherless America” said:
Fatherhood, much more than motherhood is a cultural invention. Its meaning for the individual man is shaped less by biology than by a cultural script or story – a societal code that guides, and at times pressures him into certain ways of acting and of understanding himself as a man.
A father makes his sole biological contribution at the moment of conception – nine months before the infant enters the world.
David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (1995)
Margaret Mead and others have observed that the supreme test of any civilization is whether it can socialize men by teaching them to be fathers – creating a culture in which men acknowledge their paternity and willingly nurture their offspring.
Fatherlessness is becoming a huge issue and polyamorous marriage would surely only exacerbates the problem:
In every state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade. Even as the country added 160,000 families with children, the number of two-parent households decreased by 1.2 million. Fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father, and nearly 5 million live without a mother. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/25/fathers-disappear-from-households-across-america/