Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

2/2 “…it seems that everyone, both men and women, could enter into plural marriage. Thus, polyandry, polygamy as well as group marriage, would likely be legal—all because of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.“ (174) Read Plural Marriage for Our Times: A Reinvented Option? Second Edition, by late Bryn Mawr anthropologist Philip L. Kilbride and journalist Douglas R. Page. Kilbride was a Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr, Page a journalist. A first edition appeared in 1994 but the text was completely rewritten for the 2012 second edition I looked into. Again, long story short, this is one book White polygyny advocates can SKIP. While I reproduced a few favorite passages in the first post, here I bring to light the authors’ ulterior motives that call into question whether polygamists and plural wives should consider them allies. Dry, academic, and often reading like a report written for a committee, throughout Plural Marriage for Our Times Kilbride and Page make their worldview clear. Although they disavow absolute cultural relativism, they make clear that by “for Our Times” in the title, they mean for the changing familial landscape we live in post-same-sex marriage. Like many less reflective conservatives did at the time, the liberal, egalitarian authors posited that plural marriage was the next frontier for “rights” touching on sexuality. They were evidently mistaken; why, we’ll get into, but it is revealing about the authors that they misunderstood the nature of the zeitgeist they supported. On the other hand, it should not be lost on us that Kilbride was an anthropologist, who was used to comparing conflicting cultural forms. It suggests a bit of craven conformism that he would, as above, cheer on this legal framework where new “rights” are continually discovered thanks to the 14th Amendment, as if it was a source of continual divine revelation. It would have made sense to wonder at the absurdity of this whole legal setup. While Kilbride and Page had mostly kind things to say about FLDS polygyny—for instance, while there is often am impression that plural marriage is an unstable family form, divorce is less frequent in fundamentalist Mormon communities than in America at large—they see a number of problems, some, but not all, being the ones you would expect. Regarding those we would expect, throughout the text, they remind readers that they only support plural marriage “for consenting adults”. You would think this would go without saying, as marriages with underage brides would be broken up by the state. But even here, their reluctance to argue from nature shows. They crouch behind their disclaimer, and treat it as a non-issue because it doesn’t appear to be a coming item on the “rights” agenda. The best they can do is repeat that in polygamist communities, sometimes “Teenage girls are married to much older men—often against their will—and, therefore, have high-risk pregnancies,” (171). Alas. Per the intro paragraphs on the current version of Wikipedia’s article on “Teenage pregnancy”: ”There are additional concerns for those under the age of 15 as they are less likely to be physically developed to sustain a healthy pregnancy or to give birth. For girls aged 15–19, risks are associated more with socioeconomic factors than with the biological effects of age. Risks of low birth weight, premature labor, anemia, and pre-eclampsia are not connected to biological age by the time a girl is aged 16, as they are not observed in births to older teens after controlling for other risk factors, such as access to high-quality prenatal care.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Teenage_pregnancy&oldid=1291852722 In other words, these risks are only connected to biological age until 15 or 16; this also only applies where they consummate the marriage right away, and don’t avoid pregnancy by an artificial means, or naturally by timing. The “often against their will” opens another significant question the authors hardly address. In FLDS communities, marriages are arranged by the decision of a prophet in a leadership role, but naturally, the prophet isn’t bridenapping a girl “off the streets”: her parents agree to marry her off, because they are members of the FLDS Church, and comsent to the prophet’s decision. This returns us to questions that often arise as we contemplate a return to patriarchy: does a young woman decide whom she will marry, or does her father or her parents together arrange the marriage, and who decides when she’s ready to marry? I can’t imagine defering the question to a “prophet”, but in the premodern family, as it existed before feminism, a girl’s folks could have done so if that was their belief. But that definitely doesn’t fit in with the kinds of plural families Kilbride and Page envision being mainstreamed. Those were the expected problems; now for the really suspect issues the authors have with really existing polygyny. Speaking of Bountiful, British Columbia, per a professor they cite, “Bountiful… has developed… a culture of secrecy typical of fundamentalist Mormon communities. Residents of Bountiful conduct all aspects of their lives within their community… Their community has also acquired an increasing ability [sic] to meet residents’ health and social needs, which risks intensifying its insularity as residents will be less likely to move beyond community borders to access necessary resources and services…” (177) Denizens of Bountiful DO have their health and social needs well provided for. This is a strange problem to have! Or rather, it clearly isn’t a problem for the plural families that live there, it’s a problem for control freaks in Ottawa who fret that, just maybe, these White families with numerous wives and throngs of children don’t need them. Polygamists pose a more positive threat to central governments by reaping available public benefits. In Bountiful, for instance, FLDS Bishop Winston Blackmore had 22 wives and 119 children when the book came out; per Wikipedia, the gent now has 27 wives and 150 children. Enviable! Come on, isn’t there something both adorable and amazing about that? A single man can father a remarkable number of children, but to exercise this part of his nature, he needs the devoted cooperation of dozens of women. But the govermment doesn’t recognize all these beautiful marriages, and so, taking the state at its word, Blackmore’s wives all receive welfare assistance for their children, a strategy hilariously dubbed “bleeding the beast” by polygamists whose treatment by the state is rarely amicable. Here Kilbride and Page note, ”…unemployed wives with children often obtain child tax benefits based on one low income mother’s rate, a situation it could be noted would not be possible if all the wives were legal and therefore taxed,” (197) This should call to mind perennial questions about welfare programs. Why is the government intent on subsidizing single mother households, such that plural wives, who collect benefits but are actually married, are considered to be cheating the system? Certainly, I can see some help for unmarried mothers due to compassion for weak human nature, but surely, they should never be entitled to more than married mothers! Plural Marriage for Our Times is a bit of a wake up call for the threats to plural marriage from some of those who campaign as its friends, and want to LEGALIZE it. Kilbride and Page often remind readers that government registered plural marriages, as they envision them, would not be limited to polygyny, but would include polyandry, too, plus group marriages where all the parties are married to each other. It feels like a mockery of nature to say that five women concurrently pledging their sexual qualities and fertility exclusively to the same man, are doing something equivalent to a woman who gives five men a lottery ticket chance to be the father of each child she has, or that two sister-wives married to one man are in the same relation to one another as they are to their man. But any connection to human nature, or right and wrong, fell away from our laws long ago. Imagine, all the “reinvented option” the authors promote might mean is, instead of just Parent A and Parent B on a form, there are Parent C and Parent D, too. You almost wouldn’t want to submit plural marriage to this indignity by legalizing them. Ultimately, I think the authors erred in thinking polygamy might be the Next Big Thing for progressives, because they misunderstood how vastly different it is from same-sex marriage. While the man and his wives can certainly feel personal fulfillment and satisfaction from plural marriage, they are working at the same child making, child rearing exercise as monogamists, that benefits the whole community. “Gay” and lesbian unions, whatever the conscious motives of the partners, are essentially selfish, however. Anyone who has read about what the pre-“gay rights” homosexual subculture was like (for instance, in Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colors), knows what they are really like: the leopard does not change his spots, though he does fly a rainbow flag to redirect your attention. What actually followed same-sex marriage was of course “trans rights”, the visible narcissism and mental illness of trannies being so revolting that there has been a huge backlash, and there is even an energetic movement to end sodomite marriage making its way across red state America. https://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen5/25b/NYTimes-warns-about-MR-resolution/index.html Back to the book. Polygyny advocates ought to form their own proposals to counter Kilbride, Page, and their ilk. Polygynous marriages are not so far distant from “traditional” one man, one woman unions—they are simply concurrent marriages between a man and several women—and so might recognizing them as such can be envisioned as a next step to fully restoring the patriarchal family after same-sex marriage is overturned. We could do worse than advocate adopting the beautiful language of the Irish constitution: ”The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.” The family, plural families included, needs to be protected from state overreach, not the other way around. For the specific tax question, a provision should be sought that in no case will public benefits for a married mother and her children be less than they would have been had she been single. There could perhaps be something like motherhood UBI. There is also need to respond more forcefully to critics on the Right. One such that Kilbride and Page respond to is Stanley Kurtz, who criticized polygamy in a piece, “Beyond Gay Marriage”, in the now defunct neoconservative Weekly Standard. You can read it here: https://pages.pomona.edu/~vis04747/h21/readings/Kurz_Beyond_gay_marriage.pdf As the authors quote, “Why is state-sanctioned polygamy a problem? The deep reason is that it erodes the ethos of monogamous marriage. Despite the divorce revolution, Americans still take it for granted that marriage means monogamy. The ideal of fidelity may be breached in practice, yet adultery is clearly understood as a transgression against marriage. Legal polygamy would jeopardize that understanding, and that is why polygamy has historically been treated in the West as an offense against society itself.” (205) Yes, that’s right: this grievous “offense against society itself” is that some of the best men, that is, of that sex whose role in mating is giving women their baby seeds, which they have more of than they could ever use, aren’t held down to female levels of fertility. That a handsome, popular, leading man isn’t limited to helping make one baby every nine months or more, but can get to work impregnating three, four, five, six other women when his first is already with child—under vows to love and care for them and their children all the days of his life—offends “the ideal of fidelity”! This is offensive to reason (as is Kurtz’s obvious misreading of data beneath on the page, when he shows that polygamist men in urban Africa cheat LESS than monogamists). Kilbride and Page try to present polygyny as a family structure and good for children (which it is), and downplay it as a sexual practice, but as we see above, that’s not going to work. Critics will never let us forget that polygyny allows married men to have sex with more than one woman. But we shouldn’t want them to forget, because we should proudly present that as a strength, a boon we should be glad our best men get to enjoy, and that devoted wives themselves ought to desire “for him”, who has done so much for her and for their children. Plural marriage advocates need to continue making a muscular, unabashed response to these critiques, and develop an apologia for polygyny with a robust sexual ethics and vision of how family life should be. I’ve also included the page where Kilbride and Page briefly mention Fr. Eugene Hillman’s 1975 study Polygamy Reconsidered (188). Kilbride was Catholic, and paid some attention to the thoughts of Catholic theologians in the text. I would say that Fr. Hillman’s point was not merely that from a “constructionist” perspective Trent had to be rethought, but that the historical practice of forcing converts to choose between hellfire and alienating all but one of their wives violated the spirit of the Gospel. The pic is young women of Bountiful, BC at work during an expansion of their community’s school. From this old pro-FLDS blog: https://protectingtheyfzchildren.blogspot.com/2011/01/bountiful-school-expands.html?m=1 The blogger amusingly commented, citing some forgettable narrative repeater, ”If you listen to that crackpot at the Vancouver Sun, Daffy Branham, and the little old sour biddys in Creston, BC, The children of Bountiful, all 600 of them, are illiterate due to the fact that their parents do not educate them. “That is difficult to reconcile with the Canadian School Ministry who monitors the academic achievement of all its schools, and finds that the children of Bountiful score AT LEAST 10 percent higher than their counterparts in the rest of Canada.” They have rich social life, their own health care, and better than average schools. If there is a threat, it’s to “the system”. #PhilipLKilbride #PhilipKilbride #DoulgasRPage #DouglasPage #PluralMarriageForOurTimes #pluralmarriage #polygyny #polygamy #feminism #feminist #egalitarianism #egalitarian #marriage #divorce #family #anthropology #books