Polygamy

[MagnetMan]

The recent bust on the Texas polygamy community is top news.
Listening to the charges makes me wonder what moral guide America uses to establish and pass judgment on each other over social and spiritual values.

This is the way I read the goings-on. Tell me where I err if you can:

On the one hand we have a larger gun-culture cowboy community, which condones state-sponsored polygamy via allowing its members to have as many spouses and families of kids as they like, with the legal proviso that they kick each successive spouse out of the house before they marry the next - caring less about the abuse the children suffer from broken homes - resulting is an epidemic of teenage sex, unwanted pregnancies, alcohol, tobacco and drugs abuses - busting another smaller unarmed community with armored tanks and machine guns, ripping four hundred small children from their mother's arms, for no better reason than finding five sixteen-year olds pregnant - and because the community refuses to kick older spouses out into the cold when marrying new ones.

Am I on the right planet?

[TarotDragon]

Um, tough subject. There really is two sides to this whole thing which never makes anything easy.

I get what they were trying to accomplish here, I think. The leaders of this church told the members that the outside world is immoral (which it is in a lot of ways, we have to admit) and if they ventured outside they would be corrupted. Very possibly true. They believed it was wrong for girls to engage in unmarital sex and such which many people outside of this chruch believe.

What's got most people freaked I think is the sixteen year old girls marrying older men. In most if not all states that's a definition of "rape" whether its consensual or not. So when people scream rape about this it doesn't necessarily mean that they were violently attacked or what not, it could just mean that they slept with some one above their legal age range.

Also, I think their have been a few cases of actual abuse and that has forever tarnished the reputation of polygamy. All you ever hear are the horror stories and that's all people can see anymore. And by some of the accounts of the women that have "freed themselves" and accused their husbands of abusing their kids, the women themselves admitted that the men hadn't done it, that they just "might eventually".

So the polygamists have retaliated by secreting themselves away and poisoning their members against the outside world to keep themselves safe, I think. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, its just the impression I've gotten. And you always have those few who just don't agree and run away and another compound is raided and the whole vicious cycle just keeps on going.

I don't know the whole story on this particular compound, I'm just sorta talking in general terms of all the stroies I've heard.

[fay]

well, a man should think about whats best for his family. and if he just have to hae more women then polygamy should be allowed to prevent all that what MM has said above.

like kwan yu said in another thread, that girls are ready to start family when their body is ready. at 16 a girl is ready i think. my grand mother was 16 when she gave birth to my mother. i think i would like my daughter to marry also when she is ready, be it 16 or 18 or 20. i would not want to deny her the pleasures of life.

if all parties agree , then polygamy is ok.
based on my observations of how immature men can be, the older spouse should remain with the man to support the family, and i mean in emotional and wisdom terms.