From Mercatornet.com:
A very interesting read in The Economist about the link between same-sex marriage and opening the door to polygamous marriage.
“One of the assumptions that gay marriage calls into question, for many conservatives, is: why pairs, then? If not man-woman, then why not man-woman-woman, and so forth? Again, the response of gay-marriage proponents is generally ridicule. I don’t think this is a ridiculous question…It’s easy enough to show that gay marriage does not empirically lead to pressure to legalise polygamy; that hasn’t happened anywhere that gay marriage is legal. But this is different from explaining why opening up the boundaries of the 20th-century understanding of marriage shouldn’t raise the possibility of legalising polygamy. Why shouldn’t it be legal for more than two consenting adults to marry each other?”
It is interesting that this problem with same-sex marriage has been getting an increasing amount of attention. As Carson Holloway at The Public Discourse pointed out, Justice Sonia Sotamoyor also raised this issue during the oral arguments on Proposition 8.