What makes polygamy right

That recognition, in turn, leads to the conclusion that they should be able to marry just as other people can. And so, ultimately, we must ask ourselves: Are polygamists deviants who should be repressed, or are they as deserving of respect and dignity as anyone one else?

Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter. Topics: Law , family , marriage. Should courts recognize a right to plural marriage among consenting adults? Shoshana Grossbard, professor of economics. Melynda Price, University of Kentucky. Bradford Wilcox, National Marriage Project. Please upgrade your browser. See next articles.

The Opinion Pages. Understanding Those Who Practice Polygamy. They believe that polygamous marriages create stressful situations for children that could disrupt their development. Other researchers argue that polygamous marriages provide more role models for children who can positively affect their development. According to them, polygamous relationships offer more warmth and affection for children than monogamous relationships do. Learn the best ways to manage stress and negativity in your life.

APA Dictionary of Psychology. Disease dynamics and costly punishment can foster socially imposed monogamy. Nature Communications. Zeitzen MK. Polygamy Polygyny, polyandry. In: The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

American Cancer Society; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. January Often decried, polygyny may sometimes have advantages. October 29, Shepard LD. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.

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I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. What Is Polygamy? History of Polygamy. Types of Polygamy. How to Practice Polygamy. Impact of Polygamy.

Tips for Polygamy. Potential Pitfalls of Polygamy. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Unfinished projects around the house gave a feeling of relaxed chaos. Andy, wearing a loose white dress, offered me drinks and snacks.

Their ethnic and religious backgrounds have prepared them for the marginalization they have experienced as polyamorists. Their pronoun preference, however, is mild. At present, some fifteen occupants can arrive at the house at any time and stay as long as they like. Some forty people stayed at the property, mostly in tents. Seventy more came for the day.

As part of the service, they pledged themselves to the land as well as to one another. There was no officiant, but there was a chuppah. She helped me pick out a dress. Andy grew up in New Hampshire. They had their first polyamorous relationship there, in a lesbian triad. They went to law school in New York City. That led Andy to think about personal choices.

Whichever linchpin gets pulled out first, it all comes falling down. None of them is currently planning to have a child biologically. The group worked with a financial professional who specializes in nontraditional-family planning to set up the house as a joint tenancy with rights of survivorship, so that if one of them dies their interest reverts to the others.

The document also includes prenup-style arrangements for what will happen if any of them decides to leave. For a long time, Cal worked for a solar company that offers health benefits for one domestic partner, and they put Andy on their insurance because Andy needed it the most.

Roo co-owns a small tech worker co-op and gets less generous insurance through that. The question is: what does marriage mean? Andy talked about a watershed moment for gay rights, in —the case of Braschi v. Miguel Braschi was being evicted from the rent-controlled apartment he and his partner shared, after the partner died, of AIDS.

Braschi sued. That seems like a better plan. No family in America has done more for the image and legal standing of polygamists than the Dargers: Joe, his three wives—Alina, Vicki, and Valerie—and their twenty-five children, who live in and around Herriman, Utah. Their house is in a relatively new subdivision, with wide views of nearby mountains. Joe, who works in construction, has built additional houses on the property for two of his adult children. I had previously met Joe, on Zoom, and he had seemed intimidating, with an unkempt beard and a forbidding manner, and he had stuck to facts that I was sure he had recited a hundred times before.

But, when we sat together on his back porch, I found him clean-shaven, relaxed, and forthcoming, and his wives greeted me brightly. As we talked there for the better part of a day, children, grandchildren, wives, and others whose identities were never completely clear to me came and went. Joe and his wives come from fundamentalist Mormon families and have known one another from childhood. Some of their grandparents were jailed together for polygamy after the Short Creek raid, in which state troops arrested an entire community of four hundred people, including more than two hundred and fifty children.

Have the children be neat and comely. Like many children of polygamists, the Dargers grew up in an atmosphere of secrecy, quickly learning not to tell their schoolmates about their families. Joe married his first two wives—Alina and Vicki—on the same day, in He was twenty, and they were twenty and nineteen, respectively.

Alina and Vicki gave birth to their first sons seven months apart, and each nursed both babies. She brought five children with her and had four more with Joe, who has seven children with Alina and nine with Vicki. Alina founded a nonprofit, Cherish Families, which provides support to people both living in and leaving polygamy. Valerie works as an advocate there. For a time, Vicki homeschooled many of their children. They all talked about the difficulties of polygamous life.

At one point, Vicki suffered severe postpartum depression and was consumed with jealousy toward the other women. Effectively, they were married not only to Joe but also to one another. It later emerged that she had an undiagnosed heart defect. Joe drove to a hospital, with Alina doing CPR in the back seat. By the time they reached the hospital, Kyra had died. A nurse came to the house, and then identified herself as an employee of Child Protective Services and interviewed each child alone.

The criminal case was closed after a month and the family-services one two months later, but the automatic suspicion that the family encountered marked a turning point for Joe. It was an inauspicious time to start campaigning for plural marriage. In the early two-thousands, Tom Green, a fundamentalist Mormon, was convicted of bigamy and child rape; he had married one of his wives when she was thirteen.

In , Warren Jeffs, the leader of the F. In , after two trials—on charges including rape, incest, and sexual assault of minors—Jeffs was jailed for life. Supporters of polygamy argue that its illegality makes it easier for men such as Jeffs to operate, because women fear that, if they go to the police, they may lose their children.

But he also believes that polygamists have an obligation to confront what the practice has enabled. Joe acknowledges that the system is patriarchal. It determines our taste in clothing, our sense of humor, the value we place on formal education. Do people in the mainstream argue that polygamists have been brainwashed because mainstream values are alien to polygamous ones?

If so, were most people brainwashed to idealize monogamous marriage? Animal models suggest that monogamy is less natural than nonmonogamy. Yet violations of it serve as the basis for terminating otherwise healthy relationships.

We are brainwashed into keeping pets, taking daily showers, thinking that it makes sense for nations to have inviolable borders; brainwashed about the morality of abortion, the necessity of medical marijuana.

People are brainwashed into Jewish culture or Black culture or French culture. Alina, Vicki, and Valerie were terrified. The publisher phoned Joe just before the book went to press, saying that she would understand if Joe and his wives had second thoughts. It encompasses two towns straddling the state border—Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona—a location that long enabled residents to evade state authorities by crossing back and forth.

The majesty of the landscape—red rocks, red dust, red mountains—is arresting, but as you come into Hildale you pass a white concrete wall surrounding a large, depressing structure that Jeffs built for himself, to house his myriad wives. The town is dotted with other Jeffs buildings, including a gigantic ceremonial hall now converted into a community center; some homes still have the high fences that Jeffs made mandatory. Shirlee works for Cherish Families, the organization set up by Alina Darger.

Vicki and Valerie Darger are her cousins. She proudly showed me a park that had just been replanted. The public school, long closed, is now in use again. Most residents here are or were F. He was incapacitated by a stroke in , at which point Warren took control; Rulon died in Shirlee came to bridle at the entrenched patriarchy of the F.

He banned television, the Internet, the radio, and newspapers. He ordered divorces and remarriages, told people to remove their children from public schools, shut down all medical facilities, and expelled many members from the Church. Shirlee knew that she had to get out—and to leave her husband and the two other wives he had taken after her—but it seemed impossible; she had no bank account, no credit history, and hardly any friends or family outside the community.

She made it to St. George, Utah, fifty miles away, and set up home there. Others were fleeing Short Creek, and Shirlee, wanting to help them, studied social work at the University of Utah.

But she found that most of the organizations offering assistance to those who had fled also campaigned against polygamy and required the women they helped to take a public stance condemning the practice. In , a court froze the assets of the collective that owned the F.