It’s funny. It seems like every religous “cult” in the U.S. seems to have leaders with multiple wives or who are allowed to have sex with anyone in their congregation and that the media, the DAs, and cops use that against them to try to bust up their churches.
People say until you have kids, you don’t have a real sensitivity to the abuse of kids, but I can’t help but think the crackdown on their churches is just a bunch of bullshit. I mean it seems pretty apparent to me that multple wives and adultery is natural. If everyone is doing it that gets a chance to break off from our society, people within our society are doing it in secret, and societies throughout history have allowed multiple wives, why are people in our society so insistent on imposing monogamy. What is our problem? Is it women’s fault and the fear of being alone, or is it man’s way of sharing the wealth and keeping one guy from hogging the women for himself? After all, if one guy has 10 wives, then there has got to be some poor slob with no wives.
Does anyone think that the monogamy thing is just a comprimise we’ve made in order to make things fair and maintain peace in the community?
If you’re talking about the case in Texas, to me the issue isn’t so much the polygamy - hey, if they’re all okay with that arrangement, then who am I to care. It definitely wouldn’t be okay to me to be in that situation, but I agree with the consenting adults comment.
The problem for me is these 50+ year-old men taking 13-year-old girls as their “wives,” and forcing 14-year-old girls to marry their cousins. Besides being just plain creepy, those girls are going to be screwed up for the rest of their lives. And the fact that the adults in the sect don’t recognize that as child abuse is chilling.
I don’t care how many wives they take, as long as they’re all adults, and they all agree to it. But molesting kids - no; there’s no hiding behind religious freedom on that one.
Why not? Muslims get away with beating and abusing their wives, many of which, do not agree to it. They have gotten away with brutalizing children, etc.
Infact the limitations on hiding behind religious freedom, don’t seem to exist.
How many catholic priests get away with exactly that?
I agree with you, Cyrene, there are a lot of horrific crimes which are swept under the religious rug, but I don’t think we should just throw up our hands in defeat and not call it out when it happens. A person who harms a child, especially, is the lowest of the low and deserves the harshest possible punishment. Religion should never be considered a valid excuse - I’m not saying it doesn’t happen because we both know it does, all the time. But in reality, there is no valid excuse for child abuse.
I guess, I should make myself a bit clearer. I also don’t think that *any religion should get away with any of this child abuse, but when it comes down to religious polygamy and child molestation, I just find it disturbing the kind of press/reaction it gets, when its so common everywhere else. But I didn’t read the extent that it happened in this case, so maybe I should have kept my lips sealed, haha.
like maybe these cases are uncomparable to common religious abuses. I don’t know the specifics ,really./
polygamy should be legal, just because we live in a society with legalzied monogamy but de-facto polygamy. Lots of people cheap in relationships (THAT WE HAVE statistics for. I have the personal hunch the actual number is much higher, as I have the hunch that most people have reservations about telling even a stranger X when X is “i cheated on my husband” (most people have also slept with more than one person in their life and marriages routinely fail)
but the whole child molestation and being forceedd into marrying cousins, should be watched for.
Okay, yes, I do see your point. Why should this case get so much publicity when so many others occur out of the public eye, right? And I agree that the Texas case seemed like it was handled for maximum publicity - and they pretty much blew it in my opinion. Yanking all of those kids out of their homes, without knowing which of them were abused and which weren’t, was way too heavy-handed. I really feel for those kids - they did nothing wrong and yet look at the trauma they were subjected to. It’s infuriating.
But anyway, back to the original topic. Legalizing polygamy is an interesting idea which opens the door to a host of other issues. Tax code and community property laws would need updating, and then if legislators agreed that marriage between multiple consenting partners was okay, would it follow that gay marriage be legalized too? What are your thoughts on that?
I certainly can’t see why gay marriages among multiple partners should be opposed, besides religious jabbering, and i’m sure there was some constitutional rights for freedom from that kind of influence, while at the same time, ensuring that exact freedom of expression of religion that should ensure gay-marriages of any-kind.
Like, they should be both free from opposition, and free to practice that, whether religiously or secularly. I mean, the type of repressive opposition they often-times faced, not opposition of the free-speach kind from religious people.
I do realize the legalizing this stuff has social consequences, but, then, I can hardly use that to justify holding it back, other than to comment on the interesting social changes that would occur or whatever.
This seems a little facile to me. So, it’s ok what these adults do as long as children don’t get caught up in their craziness. I can respect the sentiment, but…I mean…you do know where children come from, right? What exactly do you THINK is going to happen when some whack job drops of out society with his harem?
theres plenty of examples of people r aising amazingly succesfully, undamaged children, when their parents engage in polygamy. Its not some k ind of instant child/abuse disaster.
Yes, I’m pretty sure I know where children come from since I have three of my own. I don’t understand how that is relevent here? I never meant to suggest that I’m surprised children were born from these polygamous relationships. Should I infer from your last sentence that you think all polygamists are also child molesters? (I’m not trying to be a smartass, just trying to understand the point you’re making here.)
I have a number of friends that lived in communes back in the 60s, did the hippy thing, now turned Yuppie. It was a fairly polygamous setup, kids were not sexually abused. This has been discussed recently amongst those folks. Why attack a kid when you have multiple willing happy partners? Kids were loved, spoiled and are now spoiled adults to some degree.
In religious cults there is obligations force and have to. It is dominate and domain. In communes it was willing happy and cause no pain or harm just love. Saying all polygamous set ups would be cultish is wrong. Communes had their disgraceful problems and were not all ideal but, they did try. A family should be people who love and can share. what ever the gender mix is. The average adult will not have sex with an underage kid given happy willing partners or no partners. Raping a kid is just not accepted and so the average person could not do it.
Nah, I’m just saying that in a general sense, the things adults do privately that don’t affect anyone result in children, and then the things they do are no longer private, and they start affecting their kids. So this sort of thing is bound to happen, and the whole ‘it doesn’t affect anybody else’ thing isn’t really true.
As to the child molestation thing, I’m not familiar with the case, but if all they were doing is forcing their 12-14 year old daughters to marry their cousins, well, I’m afraid that’s been going on since the Flinstones, and still is- just not in places that speak English. I don’t think we can consistently maintain a ‘progressive’ rejection of our cultural taboos when it’s easy, and then immediately retreat to hide behind them again when we get uncomfortable. Either we can restrict behaviors based on cultural taboos, or we can’t.
