Wait, so that polygamist ranch raid might have been based on a false police report?

[Sacred Jellybean]

I really cannot imagine an argument in favor of polygamy.

Civil liberties?

Should we ignore injustice just because the people being oppressed don't realize that they are being oppressed? Those women in the FLDS don't realize it, because they've been brainwashed from birth.

Polygamy itself, imo, is not necessarily an inherent oppression to women. The women in this cult are oppressed because they're forced to marry into polygamous relationships, not because they're allowed to marry into polygamous relationships.

But going in there and stopping that behavior is the right thing to do anyway because, while morals are something that vary between cultures, I'd say that there are things that are pretty clearly unfair

True.

and polygamy is definitely one of them.

Untrue. ;) I wouldn't say it's definitely one of them. I certainly can see how a woman would feel oppressed in a polygynous relationship, and if I were a woman, I know I'd never enter one (I wouldn't even want to enter one as a man, which runs contrary to what most other young men would say :D). On the other hand, as a social libertarian, it seems worse to me to force people what to do in this case.

Forced isolation and brainwashing are more of them, of course.

Agreed.

People certainly should be allowed to choose for themselves, but when it's something which is to their own detriment, is inherently unfair, is almost always tied closely to sexism... I don't know if it would be truly possible to make such a relationship fair.

I don't know, it depends on how you define "fair". "Fair" is a pretty subjective term, and it seems to me that it depends on the person what they find to be acceptable in a relationship. I can pretty much guarantee, though, that with feminism as strong as it is today, that a woman entering a polygynous relationship would be frowned upon by most people. However, there are some women who don't mind. I remember seeing a newscast of a woman in a polygynous relationship, and she was telling the journalist about its benefits, how there's always another mother/wife to help out, etc. Different strokes, I guess.

It's tied to sexism, yeah, but so are dom/sub relationships. Should dom/sub relationships be outlawed? And if so, what other types of consensual, sexually deviant relationships would you find to be unsuitable for society?

Polygamy does cause social problems.

Only if it's practiced on a wide-enough scale. Like ASM said, most women wouldn't go for "gang-bangs". :)

The only way it could not is if the gender imbalance was so bad that the loss of women (or in rare cases men) to polygamous relationships wasn't so much so as to affect the possibilities for the rest of the population to marry, because having a large number of people (usually young men) who have no marriage prospects really isn't a good idea.

I don't see this happening. Hell, women tend to outsurvive men, so maybe in a sense, this will be balancing things out? :D Like I said, I don't see it happening. Victimless "crimes" tend to remain the same in terms of how many people partake in them, regardless of the law. What matters more is the cultural view of the action, which in this case will be frowned upon by most people.