If a society is to survive, in it individuals must form families and have children at rate higher than 2 per couple.
The polygamists are not suicidal. Our culture? Suicidal so it seems. By fact, not delusional “hopes” and “ideals”. We are no longer forming families, and our “couples” aren’t bearing children.
There’s an old proverb: Put your own house in order first.
G-d judges a whole society too, and not just the individuals.
G-d does not like suicide.
Marriage is ideally one man and one woman. Children are ideally raised in the warm tender and caring embrace of a mother and father, lovingly and faithfully married under one roof.
The roof of our house is blown off, and the walls falling in, and we are outside yelling at the neighbors about what is, in context, trivial.
Mathematics isn't your strong suit, is it?
Let's first review some living examples...and then we'll cite one study on the child-producing effects (or lack thereof) that 19th century polygamy had in the U.S.
Brigham Young had 55 wives & 57 children...figure the averages...
Just over 1 child per mom. (Quite a bit less than your "higher than 2 per couple")
How about Joseph Smith, Jr.? He had children in single-figures...27 wives...although reports are that a "Dr. Bennett" aborted many of Smith's pre-borns in Nauvoo.
Now, leaving out the evolutionary crap that a university like Indiana University injected (see link below), the stats bore all this out...that...contrary to common myth, 19th and early 20th century Mormon polygamy actually resulted in less children per mom, not more!
Simply put, the more sister-wives a Mormon woman had, the fewer children she was likely to produce. "Although it's great in terms of number of children for successful males to have harems, the data show that for every new woman added to a male's household, the number each wife produced goes DOWN BY ONE CHILD OR SO," said IU Bloomington evolutionary biologist Michael Wade......Wade says, polygamy is a bad thing for most males of a species. "When the ratio of sexes is about equal, for every male that has three mates, there must be two males that have none," Wade said. "If a male has even more mates, then the disparity among male 'reproductive' haves and have-nots can become quite great."
Source: Polygamy hurt 19th century Mormon wives' evolutionary fitness
Sorry. Mormon polygamy was indeed "sexual suicide" (to use a George Gilder term)
The women had one less child less than had she married in a one-man, one-woman relationship. And the men? If a man had three wives, he robbed two men of having a single wife! Zero children then among a great number of men in Mormon culture! Mormon male leaders snuffed out the family lines of many men! [Tell us, BVW, how many "kids" and "generations" are produced when you have Heber C. Kimball take 45 wives; Brigham take 55 wives; Smith take anywhere from 27 to 33 to 40 wives...all leaving over 125 men to have NONE????]
All you have to do in reviewing polygamy is to study sex-selection abortion/infanticide in China and India to realize the tremendous parallel negative effects this has had in those cultures!
Allow me to provide another example to you.
The area of "Short Creek" has been an active polygamous site going back to at least the 1870s. [This is the twin polygamous communities of Hildale, UT and Colorado City, AZ...just across the border from each other]
To hear you tell it, these two small communities should be thriving metropolitan areas by now if polygamy was producing all these "extra" children.
But again. The number of children per most fLDS women is actually less than what many LDS women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s have had!
And a significant swath of boys & teens who grew up in those areas were "booted" out of those communities -- deemed as unwanted "competition" for older men claiming teen "brides."
Now it is true that the child-bearing rate among Lds women in their 20s has dropped significantly. But, hey, they can't find marriageable Mormon men.
For every 3 Mormon women in Utah, there's only 2 Mormon men. 2 self-identified Mormon men, that is...IOW, they are "ex-Mormon." It's not that Mormon families are producing an overwhelming number of more girls than boys.
For more on this development, see this article posted just this week: New study confirms many LDS stereotypes [Lds church bloats stats; men defecting @ high rates]