WORRYING ABOUT POLYGAMY: There’s been a lot of that on the right lately, much of it tied to questions of whether polygamy is being used to “normalize” gay marriage, or the reverse.

There’s a pretty good argument that polygamy is usually bad for the societies it appears in, producing a large surplus of sullen, unmarriageable young men. On the other hand, those are usually societies in which women, especially — but men, too — are mostly poor and uneducated. If polygamy were ever to become popular in the United States, which seems unlikely to me, I doubt it would look much like polygamy in, say, Mali.

I’m occasionally amused by the implication that there’s something unnatural about polygamy, though: It’s quite possibly the most common form of marriage in human society, and certainly far too common to dismiss as some sort of perversion. (Heck, read your Old Testament). But I think that most of the polygamy-talk now is just a symptom of the gay-marriage debate, rather than a genuine freestanding concern.

The solution to all of this, of course, is to separate marriage and state. There’s no reason why the government should be involved in this sort of thing (the origin of Tennessee’s statute requiring marriage licenses, it turns out, was a desire to ensure that county clerks got fees, not exactly an overwhelming justification) and there’s no reason why people’s private living arrangements should be part of public debate. That’s my take, anyway.