Posted on 05/10/2008 7:17:57 AM PDT by MizSterious
Last Update: 5/09 9:41 pm
It's outlawed under the Utah constitution and that's unlikely to change. But decriminalizing it could mean lesser penalties for bigamy convictions.
“I think something needs to happen. Something needs to be changed. It needs to be decriminalized,” said Dorothy Allred Solomon.
Solomon is the daughter of Rulon Allred she says she grew up in polygamy and said she had a happy childhood. Allred was murdered in 1977 in a hit ordered by rival polygamist Ervil Lebaron.
“What happens when a way of life is outlawed is that it attracts outlaws. And it attracted the worse sort of outlaws in the Lebaron case,” she said.
In the wake of the FLDS raid in Texas, there may be a chorus of people close to polygamy here in Utah sounding the same call.
“The polygamy statute needs to be revised. Thoroughly revised,” said Don Timpson who lives in a polygamous community. “The state has to realize that polygamy is not going away.”
Attorney general Mark Shurtleff is said to be open to discussion of turning polygamy from a felony crime into a misdemeanor. This could mean that a man convicted of polygamy may spend a year or less in jail instead of several years in prison.
Those opposed to the change fear it will harm innocent victims.
(Excerpt) Read more at kutv.com ...
Thank you for posting that.
susie
the 7 men watching football?????????
Noooo silly! Post 50!
susie
AS for sister wives, I don't think so. I can see that getting ugly fast if one touched my belongings or wanted to trade nights. I am not good at sharing ....
There were marriages as young as 14 in the pre-Warren FLDS, but it wasn’t the norm and it wasn’t forced.
This only holds true if (as in the case of FLDS) everybody is polygamous, rather than a freely chosen, wide range of family arrangements, including monogamy, polyandry, gay marriage (there are a lot more gay men than gay women), remaining single, and celibacy (the Catholic Church, for one, is still hoping that a lot more men will choose that, since they're fast running out of priests). For the most part, given a free choice, people's choices will be heavily guided by what's available. In all likelihood, that would end up being largely monogamous heterosexual marriages, but there's no reason for people in a free country not to freely choose their family arrangements.
2. Fathers in polygamous marriages cannot offer their children adequate attention. Children need their fathers (can we talk about the rampant social ills in communities where kids don't know their daddies?) How much time, love and devotion can a man with dozens of children offer to each child?
Again, you're projecting the FLDS' cultish practices with the concept of polygamy. Polygamy doesn't necessarily mean having a dozen wives. It can just as easily mean having 2 or 3. Nor does polygamy necessarily mean each wife having a large number of babies. A father who has one wife and 6 or 8 children will usually be hard-pressed to spend quality time with all of them, and so will the one wife/mother. In a family with one father, 2 mothers, and 3 or 4 children, all the children would get more quality parental time. A college classmate of mine is a lesbian, and she and her partner have one child whom they co-parent with a gay male couple, one of whom is the biological father of the little girl. You can be sure that child never saw the inside of a daycare center, and now that she's in school, never comes home to an empty house or hired nanny. It's not the lifestyle I'd choose, but it's working well for them, and the taxpayers aren't footing the bill for it. In fact, they're probably in the minority of parents who are actually paying as much in school taxes as the cost of educating their child. I'm none too thrilled with families where the one father works, the one mother is a full time homemaker, and the 4 children are attending public school at $15-20,000 a year per child, while the family pays about $2000 a year in school taxes. They don't think of themselves as being "on welfare", but they most certainly are.
3. Polygamous marriages are inherently unequal and undemocratic.
Huh? How? In 19th century Utah, a lot of women in polygamous marriages worked outside the home, in traditionally male occupations, and when the church opened a college it was fully coeducational from day one. The polygamous family structure allowed for women to have a choice (or alternate) between full time home-making and pursuing work outside the home. When you've got one husband and one wife both being farily equivalent breadwinners, and both relying on the second wife to maintain the home and look after the children while the other parents are out working, I don't see anything "inherently unequal and undemocratic".
4. Imagine the nightmare of a polygamous divorce. How do you divide children and property?
I haven't noticed monogamous divorces going terribly smoothly on average. I don't know that there's any reason to think polygamous ones would be worse, nor that all the adults would split up. If one wife takes off but the other doesn't, that would seem to be a lot less disruptive to the other wife, the husband, and whatever children remained, than a conventional divorce. If the husband leaves and the two wives stay, the children would likely stay put too, and it would still be possible to have one full time homemaker and one breadwinner.
5. It is no accident that, as a rule, polygamy is illegal in modern, democratic societies, and legal in underdeveloped, autocratic ones. Modern democratic states do not legally allow polygamy. This suggests that the practice of polygamy gives rise to many practices that are antithetical to the development of modern societies, whose citizens have freedom and rights.
It's also "no accident" that virtually all "modern, democratic societies" have fully or largely socialized medicine. Doesn't mean it's a good thing. Like government-prescribed marriage definitions, it's a sign that people's lives are being controlled by government, rather than by their own free choices. Underdeveloped countries' governments don't have the resources to control citizens' family arrangements or medical care.
Ah, the Playboy and Viagra King and his celestial brides. How heavenly. (sarc)
And they’ll have ten kids...
Man, 20 husbands? She must be worn out...
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- A federal prosecutor will work with state and local authorities to end lawlessness in polygamous communities and may stop the so-called polygamy underground railway across the Canada-U.S. border.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this week that a senior prosecutor in the U.S. deputy attorney general's office would carry out the review with the attorneys-general of Nevada, Arizona and Utah.
Reid described the problem as an "epidemic of lawlessness in polygamous communities."
Reid had previously contacted U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to urge a review of how the federal government could help state and local authorities "tackle this complex problem."
Arizona Attorney-General Terry Goddard said yesterday that he welcomes the review, which he and others had sought three or four years ago. "The problem traditionally has been that the laws have not been enforced in these remote communities in Utah, Arizona and Nevada," he said.
"My fundamental guiding star is, there is nothing special here. They need to follow the law like anyone else and it is up to us as prosecutors to make sure it happens," Goddard said.
The Canadian government should be working with the United States on the cross-border issues, said British Columbia legislator Bill Bennett.
He said that polygamous groups transport young women to and from Bountiful, British Columbia to marry older men.
"What we need is a cooperative effort by the province, various states and the two federal governments, who have primary responsibility for immigration and customs," he said.
The U.S. federal review was announced a month after a raid on a 1,700-acre compound in Texas of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a polygamous religious sect.
Authorities found more than 20 girls that they believed were under the age of 18 and pregnant or who already had children. Child protection officials said they found evidence of sexual abuse and a pervasive pattern of grooming young girls for underage sex. They apprehended 463 children at the compound, including at least one Canadian girl, and placed them in foster care.
Former members of the polygamous sect have said young women were regularly sent across the Canada-U.S. border, in both directions, to marry older men. Bountiful is a FLDS community of about 1,000 in the Creston, British Columbia area.
Reid said that the U.S. federal government should have done more in previous years, when Utah and Arizona asked for federal co-operation in investigating "the systemic lawlessness" in polygamous communities. State authorities had sought federal action on violations of federal civil rights laws by Colorado City marshals and on Internal Revenue Code violations.
Source: Daily Camera Online.
Are you ok with a woman having several husbands?
Yeah but joking aside this is for the benefit of the guys only. If the doctrine changed and women no longer believed it was a “get to Heaven” issue and had a choice, how many would choose to share vs having their own home and their own man?
And never mind the farting contests between the boys (and sometimes their father). Best thing I ever did was to buy socks that were all the same. I could tell which ones were my youngest though—the ones with all the holes in the soles.
Sure. I don’t even want one, but if someone else wants 2 or 3 or 4 that’s fine with me. I do have an acquaintance (friend of a friend, really) who has two “husbands”. I don’t know if she’s legally married to either one, and they have one young son and both men act as fathers to him (again, I don’t know which is the biological father). Not my cup of tea, but it seems to work for them. She’s no great catch and I was frankly surprised when I learned she’d acquired even one man. And neither of the men strike me as likely to be big earners, so I imagine having two breadwinners is a good thing there (last I heard, she was a full time homemaker). Last time I saw them was about 3 year’s ago at a wedding, and they all seemed quite content. From what I hear from our mutual friend, they still are. The little boy would be about 6 now.
Someone posted..well some guys have a wife and a mistress. True but what usually happens...the mistress wants to be the wife and the wife usually ends up divorcing him? I’ve never heard of the mistress, wife and husband just deciding to co-op, and live happily ever after.
I expect quite a few would still choose a polygamous household, but the power dynamics would be VERY different, and I doubt most of these particular men would stick around for it. It's one thing to boss around 10 wives, and a very different thing to have 10 wives ganging up to boss YOU around. Absent the "be perfectly obedient to your husband or you won't get to Heaven" crap, the latter is likely how it would be.
It’ more common than you’d think.
Let me re-phrase. Would the FLDS’s be ok with equal rights for the men and women?
I would guess “not many.” Sharing wouldn’t work for most, not even sure it works with polygamists.
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