The Black American Party advances the producer class of the Black American community — through ownership, enterprise, constitutional principle, and economic solidarity. What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans.
The party supports the legal and ethical practice of plural marriage for consenting adults who choose such an arrangement.
The Black American Party supports the legal and ethical practice of plural marriage for consenting adults who choose to enter into such familial arrangements.
Two words in that sentence carry the weight, and neither is decorative. Consenting means adults who freely chose, with full knowledge, and who are free to leave. Ethical means openly, with obligations acknowledged and met to every partner and every child. Without both, this party is not describing the arrangement it supports.
Because it is already happening, and the pretense that it is not is what makes it dangerous.
Arrangements resembling plural family life exist across American society and are common enough in ours. Because they have no legal standing, the people inside them - overwhelmingly the women and the children - have no protection. No claim on an estate. No standing in a hospital. No custody rights, no support order, no share of a home she helped pay for, no survivor benefit when the man dies.
The law's refusal to recognize a relationship has never once caused the relationship to stop existing. It only decides who is left with nothing when it ends.
This is the argument that has to be understood clearly. When this party says legal, it is not saying the state should encourage plural marriage. It is saying that where adults have made this arrangement, the law should be able to see it - so that support can be ordered, paternity established, property divided, inheritance secured and abuse prosecuted.
Everything that protects a woman and a child inside a marriage works through legal recognition. Withholding recognition does not withhold the relationship. It withholds the protection.
Nothing in this position touches minors. Marriage is for adults, and this party's view on that is not negotiable in any configuration.
Nothing here contemplates coercion, isolation from family, or the closed communities in which the practice has historically been abused. Those are the failure modes and this party names them rather than waiting to be accused of ignoring them. A structure that cannot be left is not a marriage; it is captivity with a ceremony attached.
And nothing here reduces the standard of paternal responsibility. The paternity chapter and the family chapters apply in full, to every child, in every household. A man who cannot meet the obligations of one family does not acquire the right to a second by declaring a philosophy.
The party has not proposed a statutory model, a position on how such arrangements would interact with tax, benefit or immigration law, or the mechanism by which recognition would be established. Those are drafting questions and this chapter does not pretend to have answered them.
The party supports the legal and ethical practice of plural marriage among consenting adults who choose such arrangements.
Because these arrangements already exist without legal standing, which leaves the women and children in them with no claim on an estate, no custody rights, no support order and no survivor benefit.
No. Recognition is what allows support to be ordered, paternity established, property divided and abuse prosecuted. Withholding it does not withhold the relationship, only the protection.
Marriage is for adults only, coercion and closed isolating communities are rejected outright, and paternal responsibility to every child is undiminished.
No. It has not proposed a statutory model or resolved how such arrangements would interact with tax, benefit or immigration law.
Material and institutional reparations for the descendants of American slavery, secured by Constitutional amendment rather than by a bill.
The party supports an immediate suspension of all immigration, the return of those here without status, and a protected border.
Police work should be done by officers held to a far higher standard of education in human psychology and sociology.
Crime is a major issue in our community. The party attacks it at its source - economics, family, child rearing, education, and a system built to rehabilitate.
The party's stated interest is a system weighted toward rehabilitation rather than punishment - because almost everyone it takes eventually comes home.
Across communities, Americans agree the justice system needs serious reform. The party fights the wholesale prosecution of Black American youth.
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