POLYAMOROUS RELATIONS IN BRAZIL: CONSTITUTIONALITY OF ITS LEGAL SITUATION FROM THE LIBERAL THEORY OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS PERSPECTIVE
Polyamory; Fundamental right to family; Fundamental right to equality; Liberal theory of fundamental rights.
Polyamorous relatioships and the possibility of their legal recognition by the state is a subject whose interest has grown considerably in recent years, mainly because of the news about the registration of these unions in Brazil and the environment created by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the equating between stable heterossexual unions and same-sex unions. The debate on the new dynamics of relationship is related to the discussion about the Family and its double facet. At the same time is a social fact, with its own social and historical origins, and an institution that acquires legal configuration with its prediction in the legal order. In this context, the general goal of this paper is to carry out a legal examination regarding the compatibility of the state omission in the regulation of the polyamorous unions and the possibility of creating a legal institute for such relationships with the control parameters, fundamental right to Family and equality. The instruments of the liberal theory of fundamental rights and their methods of conflict resolution involving fundamental rights are used. From this perspective, questions are debated as the characterization or not of the inaction of the Legislative as unconstitutional; the interpretation of the constitutional non-prediction about polyamorous unions as an eloquent silence of the Constitution or a permissive opening; Monogamy as a limit to the action of the legislator in extending the fundamental right to the family or an infraconstitutional rule pertaining to marriage and stable union; and the existence or not of an essential core of that organizational guarantee to be protected. Finally, it is analyzed, under a critical vision, the confrontation, by the Judiciary, of demands arising from conflicts involving non-monogamous unions, proposing, in the end, some outputs for the judgment of these cases, in spite of the non-specific treatment of polyamory by law.