Polygamous families protest bigamy law in Utah: 'If we were gay, we'd be OK'
Source: Associated Press
By MICHELLE L. PRICE, Associated Press · Sunday, February 12, 2017
A group of pro-polygamy protesters rally at the state Capitol Friday, Feb. 10, 2017, in Salt Lake City. Several hundred people in polygamist relationships say they want Utah lawmakers and law enforcement officials to know that they're not going away and should be allowed the freedom to practice their plural marriages. AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) The family on the TV reality show Sister Wives and several hundred other protesters in polygamous relationships and their supporters said Friday they wont stop fighting for the legal right to plural marriage.
Holding signs that read, I love all my moms, and If we were gay, wed be OK, the group rallied in the rain on the steps of the Utah Capitol on Friday afternoon.
I am not a criminal, proclaimed Joe Darger, a Utah man who has three wives and helped organize the rally. If you commit adultery, thats not a felony. Its only a crime when you have a family and you pretend to be married. The demonstration comes a month after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case from Kody Brown and his four wives on the TLC show Sister Wives challenging Utahs bigamy law.
The high court left Utahs law in place, but state legislators are considering changes this year that would leave those convicted under it facing harsher penalties if theyre also convicted of other crimes such as domestic abuse.
Read more: http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/02/polygamous-families-protest-bigamy-law-utah-gay-wed-ok/
oberliner
(58,724 posts)Do you think polygamy should be legal?
Crowman2009
(2,507 posts)Response to Crowman2009 (Reply #3)
JTFrog This message was self-deleted by its author.
getting old in mke
(813 posts)I've thought about it.
I am uncomfortable with saying that any committed relationship among adults should be illegal. That would mean of course that not only polygamy should be legal, but polyamory in general, whatever the membership.
As with all relationships there should not be a coercive quality to the relationship, which can be present in monogamous relationships too.
Certainly people shouldn't be punished for it.
But how and if the relationship should be recognized by the state, I don't know. Being recognized as family for health visitation seems a no-brainer, but how do you handle children legally? Do all non-biological parents adopt all children? In cases of a member of the relationship leaving, how does child support get handled?
On another front, do we now have a maximum number of people covered under a family health insurance plan? Would we have to say "for 10, you need two plans"? Then what about the odd "quiver full" movement of having lots and lots of kids. Why should they be treated differently. Of course, we should be under a medicare for all system, but sadly I don't see it happening soon.
So I guess I'm saying that as a concept (again, not "one husband, many wives" but "more than two adults" it shouldn't be outlawed.
But as to how it might work pragmatically in American society, it's beyond me.
wordpix
(18,652 posts)also, there's a lot of marrying 13 y.o. and such, which is sex slavery.
DeminPennswoods
(15,295 posts)Technically Kody and Robin Brown are the only legally married couple, the other 3 wives just have a commitment bond or whatver it's called. The wives all seem to have married knowing what they were doing. The interesting thing is the kids are being allowed to decide if they want polygomous marriages or not and so far, the older kids don't want a plural marriage.
sofa king
(10,857 posts)Right?
RIGHT?
(crickets from the direction of Utah....)
Crowman2009
(2,507 posts)starshine00
(531 posts)that the older pervs want. Gays communities don't exist to enshroud covert child rape like polygamous communities do and they don't coerce female children from birth to endure polygamy like the plyg communities do. I support polyamory between consenting adults but religious polygamy is depraved.
onenote
(42,829 posts)No, if they were gay it would not be okay. One gay person can't be married to two other gay people, or to another gay person and a straight person, or to two other straight persons.
Dumbasses.
yurbud
(39,405 posts)how many women you can be married to."
metalbot
(1,058 posts)They argued, in essence, that gay people do NOT have fewer rights than straight people, because gay people are still allowed to marry someone of the other gender, just like straight people.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)CanonRay
(14,141 posts)and government benefits are not used to support the additional wives/children (often the case), who cares. I'm tired of the government getting into the bedroom, for whatever reason. I spent a lot of time in Utah (not just Salt Lake) and have met people in polygamous relationships. Some got in as young as 12 (3 kids by 18), which is completely wrong, and some were abused, which is also wrong, and some let AFDC support the extra wives and kids, all bad. But some were legitimately and happily families. Polygamy itself is not the problem, it's polygamy being underground which is the root cause of the problem. Just my humble opinion.
cstanleytech
(26,351 posts)but thats just my opinion.
Yes, there are potential downsides to polygamy but alot of the same downsides exist with traditional marriage as well with abuse potentially happening in both as well as child abandonment.
starshine00
(531 posts)polyamory is one thing, polygamy is a one way street that always leads to child rape and inbreeding, the FLDS out west have inbred themselves into their own genetic disorder, Fumurase deficiency, which causes mental retardation, from being so inbred https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumarase_deficiency
Dallasdem1988
(77 posts)Is these nuts will argue ideological and political coercion from birth is not consent.
Always think of how they will weaponize our arguments against us.
Imagine if they used a photo of a child in a pride parade or even a parents social media posts to slander them.
arithia
(455 posts)My mother has a fondness for what she calls "trainwreck tv", which has resulted in her watching that asshole's family on television on occasion. I've caught bits and pieces over the years and it ain't pretty. He treats the women like crap, actively fucks with their heads and plays them against each other. It's a study in dysfunction and psychological abuse.
Polygamous sects the world over have a history of sex trafficking of minors and of adult women. There is a reason Utah lawmakers are looking to make penalties worse if other crimes like domestic abuse are present- it's too damn common.
women in polygynous communities get married younger, have more children, have higher rates of HIV infection than men, sustain more domestic violence, succumb to more female genital mutilation and sex trafficking, and are more likely to die in childbirth. Their life expectancy is also shorter than that of their monogamous sisters. In addition, their children, both boys and girls, are less likely to receive both primary and secondary education.
http://family-studies.org/the-problems-with-polygamy/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703806304576234551596322690
Enough of that false equivalency bullshit about gay marriage. Two loving people who want to marry isn't the same as one person marrying 6 of the opposite gender.
Oneironaut
(5,541 posts)"polygamy" seeks to be a code word for "control freak male convinces young women to sign their life away to him so that he can discard his previous wife to servant duty."
I don't know if polygamy should be illegal per se, but I think polygamy is a sexist and backwards practice.
mpcamb
(2,880 posts)Buckeyeblue
(5,505 posts)Multiple gay people are not allowed to marry. It is a one on one contract. Polygamous marriages would introduce complications with regard to property rights and other shared obligations.
kimbutgar
(21,270 posts)One who likes to cook and clean, the stud lover and the loving cuddle like partner and the money man.
DeminPennswoods
(15,295 posts)Brother husbands on TLC now where 1 woman is married to 2 men.
EllieBC
(3,051 posts)Their wives have few rights. In the more fundamentalist sects the wives are often still girls married to much older men.
Comparing their brand of marriage to two consenting adults is being disingenuous.
jmowreader
(50,589 posts)In Biblical times, polygamy sounded like a good idea at the time: a society that needed to produce 10 to 15 children to get one adult had a better chance of survival if the handful of men with the best success at impregnating women were allowed to marry as many women as they wanted.
Six thousand years ago, no one knew what an inherited disease was, but they had to have noticed all Efraim's daughters bled to death through their vaginas the first time they menstruated, or all Jacob's kids with fifteen of his eighteen wives went blind and deaf and lost the ability to swallow at the age of three. It was then that the elders of the town figured out that spreading out the fathering duties so every man had only one wife eliminated the possibility one man's defective seed could lead to the town dying out.
That scenario won't happen again - there are enough people who aren't polygamist Mormons to preserve the species - but there's no sense risking it. It would be Religious Discrimination! to require any man seeking a polygamous marriage to undergo genetic testing and cruel to the kids to not do that, so marriage needs to be between two, and only two, people. Gender mix up to you.
starshine00
(531 posts)essentially perverted creeps' excuses to marry children. It seems to accompany herding cults for whatever reason historically but plenty of advanced societies have avoided it or managed not to inbred or practice child rape, it is always a sign of a depraved society.
mr_lebowski
(33,643 posts)Basically as soon as they were of child-bearing age, very often to considerably older men ... was considered perfectly normal and reasonable ... 'polygamy' as such had nothing to do with that phenomenon. It was simply a case of men thinking that by starting w/a young female, they would, in the end, end with up with more progeny overall. And of course by 'starting young', they were unlikely to have to care for another male's offspring from a previous marriage or at least pregnancy.
Was it 'cool'? Of course not. It was downright 'primitive' and animal-like behavior. But it was a very different time, and human's lives were much closer to those of animals. The decision seemed reasonable and normal to them. And if a girl was brought up their whole life to believe they'd be married at 12 or 13, and all the girls around them experienced the same thing ... I doubt it had quite the same negative psychological impact it would have to someone growing up in our present, western society, experiencing the same thing.
It's easy to 'project' our way of thinking onto people of the distant past, but it's probably quite often inaccurate. We don't have much clue how brutal 'life' was for people hundreds of years ago. Being a 13 y.o. girl married to a 30 y.o. man was not necessarily the hugely traumatic 'thing' we imagine. Fact is, you had a lot more serious 'stuff' to worry about back then.
Again,not saying it was 'right' (and is obviously TODAY ... wildly inappropriate and indefensible, given modern life and our level of knowledge, and mobility), but ... 200 years ago life was way different than nowadays. To US, 'older dude was a perv' ... to them ... it probably seemed a reasonable calculus. Some of them undoubtedly were 'pervs' by our 21st Century definition. Others just wanted a ton of kids.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)People can already have as many romantic and sexual partners as they want. Polyamory is always an option.
But the legal system is premised on marriage being between two people at a time. It literally can't function if 5 people can marry each other then divorce one at a time, etc.
And the comparison to same-sex marriage is as offensive as it is nonsensical. A same-sex marriage works just the same as an opposite-sex one, and the injustice was denying it to same-sex couples when doing so wouldn't change any straight marriage anywhere.
HassleCat
(6,409 posts)Gay persons are not allowed to do bigamy, either. If they can be married in the eyes of their "church," why isn't that good enough? The government should get out of the marriage business.
Stargleamer
(1,992 posts)and women to hesitant to ask deep/uncomfortable questions about the meaning of this gendered arrangement.