An article in the Viewpoints section of the Sunday Arizona Republic talks about a Mormon fundamentalist community in Centennial Park, AZ that is seeking to have polygamy decriminalized, and claims to be very different from nearby Mormon communities in Hildale, UT and Colorado City, AZ. Those latter two communities are being investigated for allegations of child abuse, domestic abuse, incest, and possible tax and financial crimes. The cult leader, Warren Jeffs, is currently a fugitive.
The Mormons of Centennial Park spoke to the Republic reporter and two representatives from the AZ Attorney General's office to show them that they are not an inbred, backwater cesspool of abuse and coercion. They showed off good schools, happy children, and articulate, confident women. They want to be able to legalize their plural marriages in accordance with their religious beliefs.
The women pointed out that the secrecy into which polygamists were driven by laws against the way of life practiced by early Mormons is a breeding ground for the sort of problems being investigated in Colorado City/Hildale.
By making polygamy a crime, a society that professes a belief in religious freedom has denied them the opportunity to take advantage of law enforcement, child welfare agencies and other resources that can deal with the evils that occur whenever humans live with other humans.
Actually, I think they have a very good point.
Now, let me be clear that I absolutely despise the abuses committed by some fundamentalist Mormon cults in the course of their practice of polygamy. I am totally opposed to forced marriages, child abuse, spousal abuse, rape, and the treatment of women and children as property.
Frankly, I'm not much of a fan of Mormonism in general, particularly because its congregations tend to fall somewhere within the spectrum of the belief that women are inferior. (I also find its origins and mythology a bit goofy-- magical vanishing golden tablets? OK, whatever. But hey, most religions have something downright silly about them. I'm not going to criticize Joseph Smith for making up a religion when Gerald Gardner pretty much cobbled together some Hermetic practices mixed with Theosophy and Victorian occultism, called it Wicca, claimed to come from a family lineage of witches carrying those "ancient teachings", and got a lot of people to dance around naked with him because of it. There's nothing wrong with inventing a new religion-- every religion was at some point-- although it'd be nice if more founders were up front about how much of it was their own invention. But I digress.) As a feminist, Mormon polygamy gives me the heebs because it seems to be all about the privilege and status of men based on how many wives they can collect.
I also can't comment a great deal on this particular community; it seems to have formed as the result of a rift in the Colorado City community, which now regards the Centennial Park community as thoroughly evil, and the reporter notes that the time she spent there felt very orchestrated. It's possible there's a lot more going on under the surface there, or that they are seeking this PR in order to make their ultra-secretive rivals look even worse.
All that aside, though, I absolutely think that they should have the right and the legal recognition to enter into consensual plural marriages between adults.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I am both bisexual and polyamorous. I've been poly pretty much my entire adult life, and even lived in a triad for a time. So yes, there's some personal interest in my demands for the recognition of polygamy.)
First I think it's important to clarify what the legal status of polygamy in America is currently. Polygamy is explicitly illegal according to the federal law that governs US territories, but as far as the states are concerned, there is no specific federal law against it-- but it is also not legally recognized. State-wise, the law varies. Some areas-- notably Utah, which was forced to condemn polygamy in order to be accepted as a state-- have laws specifically against polygamy. In others, the legal status is similar to federal law regarding the states-- it just doesn't recognize it. However, in those areas, anyone engaging in polygamy could be held in violation of laws against bigamy (which legally, I believe, specifically refers to someone who enters into a civil marriage without having dissolved a prior civil marriage, although our connotation calls up someone who keeps one wife/family secret from another), adultery (having sex with someone other than your legal spouse if you are the married party), fornication (sex between unmarried adults), sodomy (anal or oral sex, of particular relevance to gay and bisexual partners), or cohabitation (parties living together as a married couple while legally single). So even though polygamy may not technically be illegal, neither is it legally recognized, and the relations that one might reasonably expect to occur between polygamous spouses ARE often illegal, so it amounts to much the same thing.
A number of those laws (like cohabitation and fornication) are very rarely enforced, and some states have slowly begun to strike them from the books, but for the most part the public discourse remains very firmly opposed to the notion of polygamy. In some cases it stems from bigotry against "weird" religious practices; in others it calls up the bogeyman of hedonistic bohemians having wild orgies (someone might get away with enjoying sex! gasp!) and offends the delicate conservative sensibilities. It's also one of those odd-bedfellow cases, like porn, where Rick Santorum and the feminist majority often end up on the same side of things. The feminist argument is that plural marriages are usually polygynous (multiple wives, one husband) and usually in the context of a repressive, primitive-minded religion where the marriage is used as an active tool of oppression against women; Santorum and his ilk like to scare people into thinking there's a need for a "defense of marriage" amendment by ominously predicting that if gays can marry, pretty soon polygamous marriages will be ok too, and then the GNP will go down the toilet because we're all so busy having frantic sex with dogs, box turtles, garden hoses, gas pumps, and the Thanksgiving turkey, which we will then try to marry so that they can get our Social Security benefits and bankrupt the system. Or something. I don't really know, since any time one of them starts droning on about the "slippery slope" I start thinking about the Dan Savage definition of "santorum"; and start giggling too hard to listen any more.
In any case-- when it comes down to it, the government should not be regulating the consensual relationships between adults nor interfering with the religious practices of consenting adults. The accepted model for marriage in this country-- the one the neocons claim to have to defend the sanctity of-- is based strictly on a relatively modern Catholic/Protestant Christian model. Whenever you hear the term "morality" thrown around in the discussion of monogamy, add "Catholic/Protestant" to that, because that's what we're really talking about. Mormonism, after all, considers polygamy to be moral. In another odd bedfellow moment, so do most Wiccan and Pagan paths (although they usually call it "polyamory" to distinguish it from something that's become synonymous with female oppression). Some sects of Islam still practice polygamy; in fact most religions, including Hindu and even Christianity, have instances of polygamy in their sacred texts or histories.
Basing marital laws on the notion that one man and one woman married and monogamous forever and ever is the only valid moral choice is absolutely religious discrimination-- it says that some religion's beliefs are legally valid, and others' are criminal. Simply the fact that religious belief enters into the legal arena of discussion is a battering ram into the wall between church and state.
Sure, the Founding Fathers probably didn't imagine that their ideas would be used to support the idea of gay or polygamous marriage, but you know what, they couldn't all agree that slavery should be outlawed either. That's probably why they enshrined ideas instead of absolutes and left some wiggle room for the country to change and grow-- because the truly wise man is the one who realizes how much he still has to learn.
Gay marriage is the issue that's really cracking through our cultural assumptions to inspire a discussion whose time has really come: what is marriage? What constitutes a family? When so many of our ideas and traditions about family are rooted in outdated rules of primogeniture, male privilege/female subjugation, and specific religious tradition, why should we not re-examine all our assumptions about the role of marriage and family in modern society, and evolve towards a model that suits our modern needs and ideas? It's a discussion that absolutely must consider seriously the idea of polygamy in order to truly be progressive.
The women of the Centennial Park community are right to come forward in support of legalized plural marriages. The domestic violence that poisons so many fundamentalist Mormon splinter groups is not caused by a polygamous home (after all, no one accuses monogamy of being the cause of domestic violence in monogamous homes), but the culture of secrecy and condemnation in which polygamy exists only prolongs and exacerbates the problem. What's more, if indeed they do freely choose to live as they do, there is no compelling argument that can be made for the criminalization of their lifestyle.
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