A Review of Anderson Cooper's interview with the Brown family

A Review of Anderson Cooper's Interview with the Brown Family of TLC's "Sister Wives" and the FLDS children who were disposed of, like trash by their parents, who follow convicted sex offender Warran Steed Jeffs.

By Chana Bogsted

Just finished watching Anderson Cooper: here's my take on the show as someone who didn't grow up in polygamy and wasn't exposed to it except by what I've learned from reading about it and talking to all of you.

Kody et al are pretty good at presenting themselves. I think most people who aren't familiar with polygamy are going to take them as they present themselves: nice people who just happened to choose 'this lifestyle.' People who get along and work out their differences and all love each other. They dress like "normal" people, talk like "normal" people, so that's what they must be.

The kids from FLDS, however, were able to see the hidden side because they lived it. From years of hearing to "stay sweet,' they understand the emphasis on deceit, on pretending that things aren't what they are, in order to survive. One of the boys, Holden, I think, talked about how his parents would pretend to get along and talk about how happy they were to have other wives to take care of the kids - until the door closed and reality emerged.

I think most Americans are going to take the Browns and maybe the Dargers at face value, because most Americans are pretty naive and trusting. The Browns were very careful to distance themselves from Jeffs and the FLDS so that the public can distinguish between "good" polygamists and "bad" polygamists. If they can get most Americans to identify with them, they may be able to persuade the country that polygamy shouldn't be punished, but child abuse should.

Unless we can get people who have grown up in polygamous families that are more like the Browns' than Jeffs', then I think they have a fighting chance of winning the war of public opinion. Even Cooper, who is very critical of the fundamentalists who don't look and dress like us, the "bad" polygamists, sounded fairly sympathetic.

Sorry I can't give a different review of the show, but this is how I saw it.

Polygamy is an adult choice?

Thanks to Rebecca Kimble, who is a survivor and a supporter of the efforts of the AAAP

Rebuttal to Polygamist Propaganda by Rebecca Kimbel MscD DTM

Polygamy is an adult choice?

We polygamist born children were taught from birth we had to live polygamy or lose our salvation. Only polygamists were accepted in our family, our society and by our God. To not live polygamy was to be damned. Our choice in marriage was confined to polygamy. Some had a choice between one of two older married men to be “spiritually” married to, but choosing any man outside of the polygamist culture was not a choice.

If we chose not to live polygamy, the basic doctrine of our “religion” said we would be “destroyed”and blood atonement to save our souls was sanctioned by God, even if the leaders chose not to carry it out. Some of us, like myself, had friends and family murdered in the name of “blood atonement”, the same blood atonement all fundamentalists’ polygamists include as the word of their “prophets”. To choose to not be obedient can be a dangerous choice in fundamentalist Mormon and Islamic polygamy.

There is no adult choice. Children are indoctrinated with fear to force them into polygamy.

Polygamy is voluntarily maintained?

Women stayed in polygamy because we had children when we were children. We were never allowed to think for ourselves or to learn to provide for ourselves, yet we had a houseful of children to provide for. Many women stay in bad marriages because they can’t support their children. Polygamist women have a double problem; few of them know how to support themselves. They stay because they don’t know any other way to survive and keep their children. Most of them are threatened if they try to leave and take their children. Fundamentalist polygamists teach that the children belong to the men.

Single mothers are often attracted to polygamy, believing it will be easier to provide for their children with the help of a sister wife. What they fail to realize is that the number of children to provide and care for will increase, not diminish. The emotional, financial and educational rescores will diminish. This attributes to the fact that polygamist women by percentage do not live as long as other women. Is this “voluntarily” maintained life style what they want to decriminalize as an adult choice?

There is no adult choice. The glue that binds them together is poverty and fear. They don’t believe they have a choice. The pathetic reality finds that those enslaved by fear soon perpetuate the same lack of choice onto their own children. Those who don’t understand this have not experienced the devastation and the life style most polygamist women experience. Polygamy is not an adult choice. When CHILDREN are indoctrinated with fear from birth to accept polygamy and have CHILDREN, to perpetuate polygamy. The fact that it involves the lives of CHILDREN makes it NOT AN ADULT CHOICE. The non coerced adult choices in polygamy are the male converts who have not been indoctrinated, but see an opportunity to expand their narcissistic behavior. If they are married, their wife has one choice; accept polygamy or be abandoned. For the wife, it is not an adult choice. It is a coercive threat.

The statement that men can choose another sex partner if one wife is unwilling, is a side show to distract attention away from what is going on in the main tent of polygamy’s “circus”. In the main tent, he always has all the sex he wants. Women are the ones who are lonely and unfulfilled. He is not a lover, he’s a breeder. He cares only about his own satisfaction. In his mind he’s a “cowboy” who thinks an eight second ride makes him a champion. Women are capable and entitled to sexual fulfillment but that’s against his religion. Fundamentalists teach women that sex is for propagation only. We were taught that it must be accomplished without lust. ( We were too uneducated to know that was a physical impossibility). His needs are “God’s commandments”, her needs are “weaknesses to over come”.

All humans find it stressful and emotionally painful to share their mate. Narcissistic men force women to share their mate, but they would never tolerate it for themselves. Women are not sexually inferior. If men had the sexual capacity of women, polygamist men would be prostitutes instead of polygamists. Polygamists justify their breeding practices by blaming the nature of bulls in cattle breeding. If they want to blame nature they should check out the life of a male sea horse. He is the one who carries the baby sea horses. Check out the black widow and the praying mantis. Some species have a built in responsibilities that go with breeding. Blaming animal behavior for human behavior is greed justified through ignorance. The right to breed carries a responsibility. Polygamy produces lots of people, but comparatively few responsible adults.

Polygamy offers career and a sister wife to help with the children?

The odds of a career for a polygamist woman are rare indeed unless you consider working as a cashier, house maid, or any other low paying job a career. I’ve seen many polygamist women work out of the home for long hours and little money and return to a home bulging with children where they try to fill in the gaps of motherhood which couldn’t be filled by the exhausted sister wife who tried to manage on the domestic front.

The economy of everyone living in the same house is not an asset of polygamy. Go down to a day care center and spend the day. Imagine four or five times more children in the room than were actually there. If you can imagine this, you get some idea of the joys of polygamy. My mother moved into a chicken coop with no heat, in Utah, because she had to be alone (with her six children). Massive numbers of people in the same quarters is difficult at best.

Polygamy does NOT help financially; on the contrary, it creates poverty. It is a financial disaster for the family and the nation. Polygamy creates an unusually high percentage of demands for Government funds, bankruptcies, and other means of assistance. Polygamy produces more children than it supports. In all countries where polygamy flourishes, poverty isn’t far behind.

Most polygamist women are poor. The big houses you see on TV don’t compute with the income levels. Follow the money trail and prepare your self for a shock.

Polygamy is a “pyramid” scheme. The one at the top is wealthy and the wealth spreads out and dwindles down, diminishing as it goes, until it reaches the wide base at the bottom which consists primarily of women and children who live below the national poverty level. Yet they are the base, the foundation upon which the pyramid stands. They are the means of its expansion. Women constantly produce more workers, tithe payers and believers into the system.

The one at the top (the prophet) receives 10% tithing from the wages of each person below him, plus the dedicated free labor they donate to ( him) God. Followers are encouraged to build their homes on church land ( held in title by the prophet, not the parishioners) and many also create businesses on church land, which puts them in a position of great lose if they question authority. Many men have lost their wives, children, homes and land when the “prophet” finds them “unworthy”.

Polygamy is a system that “fleeces its own sheep”, becomes a parasite to government coffers and violates the human rights America stands for. Polygamy is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. When you are told you have freedom of choice and blind obedience, you can be sure your choices will be limited to what they tell you to do.

Polygamy and freedom don’t exist together. One inhibits the other and that fact remains true in every culture, every nation and in any century.

The concept that “traditional norms” of historical and modern polygamy, should vary across continents or centuries, is incorrect.

Polygamy carries the same percentage of dysfunction regardless of its place in geography or history. One fact of cause and effect remains constant; the degree of abuse is always in direct proportion to the degree of distance between the powerful and the powerless. Polygamy ALWAYS has a higher percentage of abuse than monogamy because it is a system based on inequality. In all human relationships, those who have no equality receive more abuse. This fact alone creates more abuse in polygamy.

Polygamy is notorious for propaganda. Propaganda and truth are not the same. Knowing the difference can determine your freedom or the loss of it. Our nation would be wise to educate itself about polygamy.

You can read more about Rebecca Kimbel and her personal story here.

Changing the world in perspective

Hope. That's what every activist lives on. Speaking to a friend the other day I had to remind her of something. I had to remind her that big changes in the world have rarely come easy or fast. A mere one hundred years before the year of my birth, the American Civil War was ending. It took another 100 years for the American Civil Rights Movement to come into its own.

To help encourage those in this fight, who so often understandably want to quit, I offer the following loose timeline, thanks to Wikipedia.

The first American movement to abolish slavery came in the spring of 1688 when German and Dutch Quakers of Mennonite descent in Germantown, Pennsylvania (now part of Philadelphia) wrote a two-page condemnation of the practice and sent it to the governing bodies of their Quaker church, the Society of Friends.

The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was the first American abolition society, formed 14 April 1775, in Philadelphia, primarily by Quakers who had strong religious objections to slavery.

The first article published in what later became the United States advocating the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery was allegedly written by Thomas Paine. Titled "African Slavery in America", it appeared on 8 March 1775.

The importation of slaves into the United States was officially banned on January 1, 1808.

Beginning in the 1830s, the U.S. Postmaster General refused to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South. Northern teachers suspected of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists.

In 1841 John Quincy Adams represented the Amistad African slaves in the Supreme Court of the United States and argued that they should be set free.

The well-established colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, generally opposed abolition.

In the early 1850s, the American abolitionist movement split into two camps over the issue of the United States Constitution. This issue arose in the late 1840s after the publication of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery by Lysander Spooner. The Garrisonians, led by Garrison and Wendell Phillips, publicly burned copies of the Constitution, called it a pact with slavery, and demanded its abolition and replacement. Another camp, led by Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and eventually Douglass, considered the Constitution to be an antislavery document. Using an argument based upon Natural Law and a form of social contract theory, they said that slavery existed outside of the Constitution's scope of legitimate authority and therefore should be abolished.

The most influential abolitionist tract was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the best-selling novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (which made the escape narrative part of everyday news), Stowe emphasized the horrors that abolitionists had long claimed about slavery.

Historian Frederick Blue called John Brown "the most controversial of all nineteenth-century Americans."^[48] When Brown was hanged after his attempt to start a slave rebellion in 1859, church bells rang, minute guns were fired, large memorial meetings took place throughout the North, and famous writers such as Emerson and Henry David Thoreau joined many Northerners in praising Brown.

Union leaders identified slavery as the social and economic foundation of the Confederacy, and from 1862 were determined to end that support system. Meanwhile pro-Union forces gained control of the Border States and began the process of emancipation in Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, and in the next 24 months it effectively ended slavery throughout the Confederacy. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in Dec. 1865) officially ended slavery in the United States, and freed the 50,000 or so remaining slaves in the border states.


The movement started in 1688 and was effectively victorious with the end of the American Civil War in 1865.


It took another 100 years, 1965, to bring a movement that finally brought equality and true civil rights to the former slaves.


On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks (the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement") refused to give up her seat on a public bus to make room for a white passenger. She was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and had recently returned from a meeting at the Highlander Center in Tennessee where nonviolent civil disobedience as a strategy had been discussed.


1965 Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other such requirements that were used to restrict black voting are made illegal.


We live in the Internet age, where we expect such immediate results for anything we do. And sometimes, if we don't see it, we start to question whether we are even doing the right thing at all.

I don't know how often, on news story message boards, I have read, not without a shiver, some polygamy apologist saying that polygamy is a viable "form of marriage" as evidenced by history, and most specifically the bible. The same, the very same can be said of the practice of slavery. Its history, too, is one as old, and real, and viable as the history of the world, and even of the bible. Yet, here we are, today, in a world where very few of us will ever see the gross message on a news comment site, lauding or defending the institution of slavery. The world has changed. It never changed because of one single person's efforts, but was the culmination of centuries of sweat and toil and the blind love of the right thing, by many different individuals.

Let us not make the mistake of becoming faint of heart, just because the world does not fall at our feet and declare the gross error of its ways. Let us take cheer in the knowledge, that like others before us who faced the very same things, they pressed on. That is, after all, what faith is, isn't it, the ability to keep doing what you know is right, even when the circumstances around you offer little or no proof that is exactly what you are, right.

Sister Wives of TLC Affiliated with a criminal Polygamist Group.

Reported by Rebecca Kimbel

Eureka Tribune Reporter

Kody Brown’s (star of Sister Wives TV reality Show,) Affiliated with a criminal Polygamist Group.

In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, Kody Brown said his family was part of the Apostolic United Brethern.

The current leader of the AUB is LaMoine Jenson. LaMoine and the late leader Owen Allred involved in a 1.5 million dollar theft, (Hill vs. Allred). The verdict was awarded in Hill’s favor. Owen Allred told his congregation Virginia Hill had given the money as “tithing. The congregation is currently paying the money back. In between the theft and the congregation being stuck with the bill, the court documents show that Owen recorded the meeting where he decided not to return the stolen money. Like Warren Jeff’s, Allred was found guilty from the recordings he had made. Despite these facts, Owen convinced his congregation that it was all because they are persecuted for polygamy. Jeff Norman went to prison, but Jeff Norman had no power of decision at any time. Owen Allred and LaMoine Jenson were in power. Owen died. LaMoine now leads. In between the theft and the congregation being stuck with the bill, money was laundered into directions the congregation has no legal claim to. This too is in the court documents.

Criminal behavior isn’t new to the AUB. Three of their priesthood members were accused of child molest: Joseph Thompson in 1994, George Maycock in 1998, and Shevroll Palacios in 2002. Palacios went to prison. The AUB distanced them selves from Shevroll Palacios only AFTER he was under investigation. Thompson remained affiliated in the AUB with so much authority their own members didn’t realize he had been “released from his position” (on the AUB records only) and Maycock’s behavior was likewise ignored.

Kody Brown admits affiliation with the AUB, but refuses to name his employer. According to the “reality” show Kody had money of his own. Sources tell us he drove a Lexus. Yet he admits his plural wives have to work to help support themselves. Public information show Kody and first wife, Meri filed for bankruptcy 6-6 2005, plural wife Christine Brown in 2010 and new plural wife Robyn, in Mexico 6-15-2011. That’s three bankruptcies in one family in six years. Why is Kody having more children when he can’t support the ones he’s got? Is using laws to protect you from the bills you have created, the life style we want to legalize in America? How many children can a man produce without financial obligations that stick? Who knows, he isn’t through yet. Is Kody’s “belief” system and the group he is affiliated the life style we really want to promote in America?

A Simple Sexist Test

"If this were done to a man or would it ever be done to a man—has it ever been done to a man?"
~Gloria Steinem

Is the practice of polygamy inherently sexist or abusive? Take a long look at this photograph of Warren Jeffs' concubines and put it to the simple test one noted American feminist recently suggested.

With that simple test taken, now I invite you to review a piece I wrote in February of 2009. It angered some and offended others. I still stand by it, though.

An Open Letter to My "Sister" Feminists

Dear American Feminists,

Although I have contacted numerous national feminist organizations, which I will not attempt to embarrass by naming here- because I would still like to see you step up to the plate, about the gross abuses occurring to women and children living in polygamy, in the American west, none of you has responded, not one. You have ignored me.

To my "sisters" on the East and West Coasts, I have concluded you must not think I am a real woman or a real feminist. I suppose, I've failed to attend Vassar, Brown, Berkley, or NYU, and abort a baby or two along the way to protect my academic career and prove I'm worthy of being considered a real woman.

To my "sisters" in Atlanta, who are diligently working to ensure that road signs are not sexist, by spearheading a campaign to change them from "MEN AT WORK" to "WORKERS AHEAD", all I can say is, bless your hearts.

It is to the rest of America's women, who may not fall into one of those groups, I now appeal. We have a problem here in Texas, with a sex cult run by Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints leader, Warren Steed Jeffs.

We have hundreds of eyewitness testimonies from men, women, and children who have left, been abandoned, abused, or exiled from polygamy in the states of Utah and Arizona, where the FLDS residents of the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas came from. We now have evidence of sexual abuse perpetrated against young girls, Texas citizens, on Texas soil.

Our other "sisters" continued silence indicates they are indeed flirting with the trendy, liberal idea of allowing legalized polygamy in America, as another valid alternative lifestyle choice. In doing so, they are allowing their sophomoric, fantastical, and unrealistic ideals about political correctness and liberal tolerance to endanger every woman in America.

If they go along with legalizing polygamy as a valid alternative lifestyle choice, here, based on my four-year investigation of the FLDS in Mohave County, Arizona, is what you can look forward to as an American woman:

• Your husband can come home one day and tell you that he has taken a new wife or three...
• You will now have to compete for his time attention and affection, daily, or divorce him.
• You will now share the financial resources of your family with the other woman or women, and any children who come along.
• The more that come along, the less there is for your children, or their futures.
• If you leave, you are no longer entitled to half of everything in your marriage. Now you get one third, or depending on the number of concubines in the marriage, one sixteenth, or one hundredth?
• Muslim American men, now free to build American harems, pressure masses of Muslim American women to wear the burqa.
• Other costumes, uniforms, or "coverings", such as long prairie dresses emerge from Middle America, as men claim "religious inspiration" to pressure their concubines to dress "appropriately".
• These same masses of women will be secluded, and as they give birth to more children, their access to communication with the outside world and education cut off.
• Emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual, and physical abuse will thrive in environments where one man is now the focus of the complete attention of multiple women.
• When a polygamist man dies, and his multiple unions recognized as legitimate marriages, each wife is now entitled to receive a check from Social Security.
• Each now legally legitimate child also gets Social Security benefits.
• Thousands of women will find themselves thrust into abject poverty, because their husband is unable to support all of his concubines and children equally.
• Thousands more will be forced to accept government assistance for food and medical care, for the same reason. Their family structure is legitimate in the eyes of the law, so they will qualify for multiple government assistance programs for the poor.
• Birth rates among polygamist marriages will skyrocket, more children = more benefits.
• Infant mortality and child death rates among polygamists families will soar – see the Colorado City, Arizona death rates.
• Accidental child death rates among polygamist's families will increase – see the Colorado City, Arizona death rates..
• The reporting of domestic violence shrinks to zero in entire communities, for decades at a time – see the Colorado City, Arizona history of zero prosecutions for domestic violence in over a decade.
• Competition to the older, more powerful men, underage boys and young men driven from their communities, with no education or job skills, become a burden on law enforcement and social services in neighboring, non-polygamist communities where they are abandoned - see the Colorado City, Arizona history of driving 400 boys out of their town.
• Trained from birth to expect assignment in marriage, complete submission to patriarchal religious authority, and acceptance of the "blessing" of an early marriage, millions of bright American girls, along with their potential talents and contributions to society, will be lost for generations.

We face that chilling future if polygamy remains either unchecked or legalized in America.

These sorts of things, however, are apparently unimportant to the average American Feminist.

Stay up there in your classrooms, drum circles and symposiums, where you can drone on forever about the suffering and ignorance of the typical American housewife, I mean homemaker. My grammar check doesn't seem to like the word housewife and has now twice suggested homemaker, as an appropriate gender-neutral job title.

You laugh when I support a Marriage Amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman. I'm not an intellectual, I'm a Southern conservative, so how can I know anything about the world?

On Gays and lesbians: Come let us reason together. Like Sara Palin, I am not against civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, the key word being couples. They deserve, when they are in loving, committed, stable, and monogamous relationships to enjoy the tax, ownership, inheritance and medical power of attorney benefits, or the same property/custody/relationship termination headaches of heterosexuals. Kinky Friedman is right, "Homosexuals should be free to be as miserable as the rest of us".

Go play with your words. I've got dozens of unexplained dead children, sexually abused little girls, abandoned little boys and abused women to think about. You know, the same ones that child advocates and anti-polygamy activist in Utah and Arizona have been begging for your help with, for years now? I am a Texan and a Southerner. I am a woman who believes in living in a free country, where I have rights equal with men.

Nobody is going to come down here to Texas and take away my right to be my husband's only living equal. I know many other people, straight, and gay, across America that feel the same way about protecting women and children from the cultural disaster of polygamy.

If we have to fight this alone down here, we will. Y'all just hide and watch how real Southern sisters take care of each other.

Don't, however, expect to own the words feminist or feminism when we get done, especially if you threw all your party invitations away.

P.S. Confidential to Phylis Chesler and Noni Darwish:

Help!

Like Rats in the Walls

"Like rats in the walls" was a phrase I read on a site dedicated to exposing the growing threat of Sharia law in the U.S. The writer posited that those concerned about the issue, rather than being out in the open with their campaigns, were often content to lurk inside social networking sites, like Facebook, where they chat among themselves, and in a way 'hide' from those who are opposed to their truth.

It stuck with me, because it reminded me of how I have felt personally since January of 2010, when an 18-wheeler came after me and chased me all over the road at speeds exceeding 90 mph. I spent that entire night sitting in a hot tub in the back yard, drinking vodka and shivering in the 20 degree temperatures. I tried several times to get out but every time I did, I was so overcome with shivering, even inside the heated house, that I found I could do nothing but return to the tub. I was in shock.

There have been less posts here in my blog since then. Some of it has to do with time constraints and some of it, no doubt, has to do with what happened that January day. The real action happens not here in the blog, but on Facebook. For anyone wondering about the long gaps between posts here, there are no such gaps on Facebook, and we do stay on top of it there. If you want to be kept abreast of the very latest developments in the situation regarding American Polygamy, that is the place to be. Friend me. At some point, I am sure I will have to make a Facebook page for Americans Against Abuses of Polygamy. In the mean time you can find me there on Facebook listed under k.Dee Ignatin. If you want to friend me drop me a note explaining your interest in staying abreast of the cases, otherwise I will have no clue who you are or what you may want.

I am getting ready to leave this phase of acting like a rat inside the walls, though. September should prove to be an interesting month.

Polygamy: A Matter of Consent

By Marion Munn
April 2011. Written for an Analysis of Argumentation Class at the University of Utah

Polygamy: A Matter of Consent

Over the past few years the media has been filled with high profile debates about same- sex relationships, such as the military’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, and the possible legalization of gay marriage. At the same time, another relationship controversy, that of polygamy, has been brought to both national and international attention in news reports featuring Warren Jeffs and his followers in The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or FLDS (Appleyard 48). This group is only one of several referring to themselves as Mormon Fundamentalists - all polygamist offshoots of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, or LDS) which abandoned the practice around the turn of the last century. Tenacious in its practice of polygamy, one of these groups has spilled over into Canada, precipitating a major debate there that will affect Moslem as well as Mormon Fundamentalist polygamists, as British Columbia’s Supreme Court decides on the constitutionality of its ban on polygamy (Wetzstein).

In the US, debates about polygamy take place in a society where grass-roots movements have promoted greater tolerance for alternative lifestyles, shifting away from biblical standards of morality towards a greater prominence for the bedrock American principle of individual freedom of choice. Because of this, some liberals who are pro same-sex marriage are now being drawn into support of polygamous unions. Society’s response to this issue is an important one, since its values are defined by what it condones, and some have identified problems inherent in polygamy, including “imbalances of power and psychological abuse” (Young 18). If this is so, responsible citizens would be well advised to withhold their support. As a 2006 Economist article states, “hardly anyone …is thinking about polygamy as social policy...” and that “for reasons that have nothing to do with gay marriage, polygamy is a profoundly hazardous policy” which includes implications of increased crime rates, male-female ratio imbalances affecting marriage prospects for men, and undemocratic processes (Rauch).

There are indeed multiple factors inherent in polygamy that should give cause for concern. One of these is the aspect of “consent.” Any factors limiting or compromising this vital facet of a relationship would certainly cast doubts upon its validity or desirability. Accordingly, this essay contends that polygamy, as typically lived in the United States, may violate accepted principles of informed consent. The term “consenting adults” has become familiar in the US, and implies freedom of choice, particularly in matters of sexual partners (Lawrence). To demonstrate the limitations of this term within polygamy, evidence will be presented including my personal insights as a past member of one polygamist community (the AUB or Apostolic United Brethren) for a period of approximately twenty years. It should be noted that the polygamy discussed here is more precisely termed “polygny,” i.e. one man with more than one wife, since this is the typical form (Valsiner 67-68). Additionally, the term “wife” or “husband” denotes a religious, not civil contract. Consent within these unions centers around two main factors: a woman’s agreement to becoming part of a polygamous union, and her consent for her husband to take more wives.

In considering a woman’s consent to entering polygamy, we will focus on adults, discounting the obvious abuses involving female children in sexual liaisons with adult males, which may not necessarily be typical. As Cassie Ambutter points out, “many of the women that opt for fundamentalism abandoned the mainstream LDS church in their later years, far beyond age of consent’s relevance” (14). This was true in my own case, and may appear to implicitly validate that choice in terms of free exercise of will, and to offer no grounds for challenge. However, there is an important qualifier to “consent” that has a bearing on decision making - even in the case of mature women not brought up or conditioned within societies where polygamy may be the norm, bringing into question even adult female compliance.

Definitions of informed consent include “Voluntary agreement by a competent person to another person's proposition” with ”competent” defined as “Able to act in the circumstances, including the ability to perform a job or occupation, or to reason or make decisions”(Nolo). In general it is conceded that an adult with no mental disabilities, not being physically coerced, usually has the potential of arriving at an informed decision. However a 2010 California Law Review article identifies another element relevant to this discussion, focusing on the word “imperfect.” It states that “imperfect consent… [is] where the ability of a person to consent to an act is questionable either because the act is arguably harmful to the person, or because social or cultural pressures compromise the person’s autonomy (Richards 200). Richards here identifies two important factors which he suggests may exist in polygamist culture– undue pressure, and compliance in spite of possible resultant harms to the individual - a view supported by others, writing on the subject of ethics (Arneson 42). It is important to identify these pressures and harms.

First, it should be recognized that within Mormon Fundamentalist culture polygamy is not optional. It is considered to be an essential commandment that must be followed to gain God’s approval and to enter the highest level of heaven (Walsh qtd. in Wetzstein par.6). Writings considered to be revelations directly from God to Joseph Smith (first leader of the LDS church) recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants, clarify this. One passage states that “all those who have this law [polygamy] revealed unto them must obey the same" (132:3). Even more compelling is the penalty attached to its rejection, which is that if a woman is taught polygamy by her husband and refuses to live it “she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord your God; for I will destroy her....” (132:64). Early Mormon leaders hammered home these teachings to those who were unenthusiastic about polygamy, warning that such people would “go down to hell and be damned if they do not repent" (Pratt). Such threats may not carry much weight with today’s average member of the public, but Fundamentalists take a very literal reading of these passages; and emulate LDS leaders who, in the past, have defied the law and have been willing to risk imprisonment over the principle (Smith). In this context, however incredible it may seem, there are women who do agree to polygamy even though it may be repugnant to them and cause mental anguish (D’Onofrio 383). This was my own experience, and the experience of other women in my circle. For instance, a young woman whom I will call “Sarah “confided to me that she was angry with her parents for teaching her about “plural marriage” because that meant she “had to live it.” She also admitted that she was afraid of “being destroyed” if she “rejected the law [polygamy].” The result of this kind of experience is often emotional pain exacerbated by diminished time with the husband, and a reduction in resources that are spread increasingly thin (D’Onofrio 380). Some of the emotional effects have been noted by Dr. Lawrence Beall, Utah trauma psychologist, (Summary) and are also paralleled within Moslem communities, as will be shown later.

Not only do some women feel compelled to enter a polygamous relationship, once within such an arrangement their consent may be compromised in another important way. This is demonstrated in the ability of a man to take on new partners without the consent of existing wives. A man may solicit a woman’s agreement and sometimes obtain it under pressures already noted. However, if she does refuse, this may have no bearing on the outcome since the Doctrine and Covenants justifies her husband in taking new wives without her compliance (132:65). This renders a polygamist wife potentially powerless in this aspect of the relationship, once again with the potential for stress, unhappiness, and feelings of helplessness.

Some may argue that these pressures, limitations and harms are centered solely in Mormon Fundamentalist polygamy, and are atypical of other forms, but it should be noted that in Islam many women also view polygamy as a religious duty against which objections are “haram (not lawful)”(Polygamy). Alia Hogben, Executive Director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women states that some women are sometimes fearful of repercussions, including “bodily harm” for shaming their husbands by non compliance (qtd. in Dhillon). They too are subject to radical changes within their marriages that do not require their consent. Dr. Susan Stickevers, expert witness in the Canadian polygamy hearings writes to me, “Too many Moslem women I have known had their husbands arrive home from trips to Pakistan, only to be informed that there was a new wife in the picture...” As a doctor in New York she was able to witness firsthand the negative mental and physical symptoms presenting in women subjected to such stresses, as was Professor Dena Hassouneh (736-737) a Moslem who studied the effects of polygamy on women.

It may be difficult to quantify the percentage of women who feel pressured into entering polygamy against their will, since repression of what is deemed to be negative emotion is expected (Beall par 9). Within the FLDS the dictum is to “keep sweet” (FLDS Beliefs) and for wives in the AUB, it is to be “in harmony.” Additionally, a woman’s “worthiness” is measured by her outward expressions of approval for the lifestyle, and women are “strongly dissuade[d} …from having or expressing alternative perspectives on plural marriage… creating the appearance of unanimous satisfaction with the polygamous lifestyle, regardless of any internal disagreements…” (D’Onofrio 391-392). Moslem women also face similar pressures not to shame their husbands by open dissent (Hogben qtd in Dhillon).

Although the pro polygamy lobby is attempting to appropriate the “consenting adults” argument in order to win support from liberal elements of society as a stepping stone to legalization, the consent problems discussed here are clearly not paralleled within gay relationships, where there are no external forces such as threats of “destruction” pressuring either party to be involved, no expectation of other individuals being introduced against the will of either partner, (with the accompanying potential for emotional distress, loss of time with a partner, or reduction of financial resources) and no pressure to give outward approval to an inwardly galling arrangement. A society that prides itself on the defense of the freedom of the individual to choose should also be intensely committed to ensuring that it does not condone practices and institutions that violate accepted norms of consent. Despite some outward protestations to the contrary, polygamy hurts many women, and for this reason liberals should not be seduced into confusing support for same sex marriage with support for a practice that embodies such inherent harms.

Works Cited

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