Posted on 05/04/2008 4:14:25 PM PDT by Flo Nightengale
"And now, polygamy," sighs Charles Krauthammer, in a recent Washington Post column. It's true. As if they didn't already have enough on their minds, Americans are going to have to debate polygamy. And not a moment too soon.
For generations, taboo kept polygamy out of sight and out of mind in America. But the taboo is crumbling. An HBO television series called "Big Love," which benignly portrays a one-husband, three-wife family in Utah, set off the latest round of polygamy talk. Even so, a federal lawsuit (now on appeal), the American Civil Liberties Union's stand for polygamy rights, and the rising voices of pro-polygamy groups such as TruthBearer.org (an evangelical Christian group) and Principle Voices (which Newsweek describes as "a Utah-based group run by wives from polygamous marriages") were already making the subject hard to duck.
So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is thinking about polygamy as social policy.
If the coming debate changes that, it will have done everyone a favor. For reasons that have everything to do with its own social dynamics and nothing to do with gay marriage, polygamy is a profoundly hazardous policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
My wife has six sisters. All I can say is...
NO EFFIN' WAY!!!
I don't believe in homosexual marriage, but I do agree that marriage stabilizes and polygamy destabilizes. So the argument could be made that making homosexual "marriage" legal won't necessarily lead to the legalization of polygamy.
And your point is? There are many arguing for polygamy’s legalization; this article addresses why that would be a destabilizing factor in society.
> My wife has six sisters. All I can say is... NO EFFIN' WAY!!!
Ah, well, too bad... my wife has one sister, and if that were the option, I could see trying for it, were it not for one major drawback (which might be why you replied as you did also):
Sisters conspire.
A man just wouldn't stand a chance.
So I take back my suggestion about marrying sisters. Nevermind... ;-)
Getting "consent" in the case of necrophilia might be a tad difficult, even implied. Unless it was obtained pre-decease. I don't think we want to go there. In fact I'm really SURE we don't want to go there...
LOL I’m reminded of my dear Dad, who raised 4 daughters and has been married to my Mom for 55 years. He says the secret to their wedded longevity (for him, anyway) was having his own bathroom. Come to think of it, he did spend a lot of time in there. :)
What the authorities found in the FLDS compound, that something around 50% of the girls between 12 and 16 had either had babies already or were pregnant, gives real credence to my opinion. Those girls are getting no childhoods, no education, no preparation for anything other than making more sweet young things for the horny old men.
Does anybody hear about all the 40 year old women who are pregnant? Hell, no. It's just the youngest, most beautiful, most malleable and vulnerable. The whole thing makes my stomach churn and my skin crawl.
The fate of the male children is even more sad and pathetic. They will be competition for the available young girls, so will be chased away, just as they were when FLDS was in Arizona.
I'm undecided about jail time for these old men, but I am in favor of castration. Let's see these guys be horny old men after that!
> Getting “consent” in the case of ...
I believe these sick bastards capable of cooking up all sorts of schemes, for all you know they may go to a notary public to sign a contract before dying! You may remember the case of the German cannibal.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3286721.stm
Yeas, though until you mentioned it, I was happy to have forgotten it. Yes, I suppose given a large enough group of people, every possible perversion and sickness will be represented. Ga-ack.
You make some good points.
Legal marriage is one thing.
‘Spiritual-marriages’ are another.
Can you claim polygamy if you aren’t legally married to more than one person?
“All I’m saying is that when the authorities invaded that ranch, they did so by crapping all over the Constitution.”
Would you mind being a little more specific?
So is spittin' on the sidewalk in many cities.........
Having dealt with my wife’s 5 sisters for 19 years, I can only shudder in horror...
Yes, polygamy is illegal, but only when you are legally married to more than one person. What constitutes being married, a legal document, or a promise? I doubt if the FLDS men were legally married to more than one woman. It’s not illegal to live with a woman or women without the benefit of legal marriage and it is not illegal to father a chidren by women that you are not legally married to.
I doubt were "debating" polygamy now any more than we were "debating" Anna Nicole Smith a year ago.
It's just the media trying to get an audience.
In Texas it is considered Bigamy if you are legally married to one person and you are living with another under circumstances that would lead anyone else to believe that you are married.
So if any of these men were legally married to any other woman, and then lived with another person under the appearance of being married then they have committed bigamy.
While Bigamy is a misdemeanor, conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor is a felony. Since the FLDS Church officials purport to marry these people knowing that they are going to be committing bigamy, you have a conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor and hence these guys can be prosecuted as felons.
Well, this article was written about two years ago. And if you've been following this FLDS story (maybe you haven't), you'd know that a debate about polygamy has very much become part of that story---not just here on FR, but on plenty of other blogs and bb's.
Thanks for posting this. I knew I’d read Texas’ bigamy statutes somewhere, but couldn’t find them. It’s funny-—people essentially keep making the argument that it’s impossible to commit the crime of polygamy because it’s, well..illegal. This begs the question-—Why bother making anything illegal if it’s impossible to commit the crime?
Is that actually the way the law was written, if you live with another woman before divorcing the first, you are considered a bigamist and can be prosecuted? Wow, there must be a lot of guilty people in the state of Texas.
For instance, where are all these FLDS sperm-donors who have sired children with different women? Everyone one of these men and women who are parents of the FLDS children taken into custody should be giving their DNA immediately to identify their children to the Texas authorities.
If they don't step up to identify their own children, it's reasonable to believe that they are unfit parents.
As to children living in a homosexual household, they are living in an abnormal situation.
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