(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Mormons: once again, ruining things for everyone.

(Short version: Plural marriage remains illegal among consenting-adults-as-equals because Mormons insist that trafficking children for sexual purposes is a religious obligation *and* that it's the same as plural marriage, and the Mormons themselves were the test case before the court.)

Comments

Re: flames.... at the side of my face.... red.... burning.....

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Not a strong parallel. DVDs might be a target of thieves, but AFAIK, they generally don't cause theft. If somebody burgles your house and they don't find DVDs, they'll take something else. Even with something shiny enough that it does encourage crime - let's say you buy a million-dollar diamond and people are tempted - the person who experiences the risk is the person who chose to buy the diamond in the first place, so we might as well let them decide for themselves whether that's an acceptable risk.

Polygamy - of the type that these Mormon groups practice - is a whole different thing, because there's a causal link to child abuse. When you have a social/religious pressure for each man to have 2+ wives (while not permitting women to have multiple husbands) you inevitably run short of marriageable women. There are several ways to deal with that problem:

- Selective abortion of males (not likely to be a popular option)
- Large-scale recruitment of girls/women from outside (generally unlikely)
- Kill off large numbers of males (has its own drawbacks)
- Large-scale expulsion of boys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_%28Mormon_fundamentalism%29)
- Gradually redefining 'marriageable' to younger and younger women/older and older men

If you have equal numbers of men and women, and life expectancy is around 80 years, then you end up with 50-year-old men marrying 20-year-old women as the norm. Or 48-year-old men marrying 16-year-old girls. Or 47-year-old men marrying 14-year-old girls. Or...

It's not just a coincidence that there's so much child abuse in FLDS-type communities; it's an inevitable result of the demographic pressures that come from mandatory polygyny without polyandry. Even when it doesn't get into what might legally be considered child abuse, having large age-gaps as the norm tends to do unpleasant things to the status of women.

So short of educating people out of these religions altogether (hard), legal sanctions seem to be the only way to deal with a toxic social structure. As a poly person myself, I don't like that at all, but it seems like the lesser of evils.