Why Not Polygamy?Polygamy is a criminal offense throughout the Western world. Would making it legal be progress?
Cheryl Mendelson
28 May 2022
In the 19th century, Mormon polygamy shocked the American public, and Utah was only granted statehood on the condition that it prohibit it forever. Today, 80 percent of Americans still think it’s wrong according to a 2020 Gallup poll, but that number is trending downwards. In Canada, a 2018 Ipsos poll found that 36 percent of respondents approved of decriminalizing polygamy. Polyamory and polygamy are both gaining mainstream media respect, and are often treated as equivalent, but they aren’t. Legalization of polygamy has long been a cause aided by reality TV and TV dramas. A blog post at the Daily Kos in 2013:
Rarely does a reality TV show open your eyes to your own prejudices. Sister Wives is that rare exception. Kody Brown and his four wives are fundamental[ist] Mormons living a polygamous lifestyle. Over the past year I’ve watched the Browns marry wife #4, raise their kids, deal with police investigations, and move to Las Vegas. They’ve really changed how I thought about polygamy.
Court cases, including one brought by Kody Brown and his wives, have sought legalization. In 2020, Utah passed a law that decriminalized polygamy, but few voices have been heard wondering if Utah is meeting its obligation to “prohibit” it.
Legalization gets support not only from polygamous religious sects, but also from some scholars, lawyers, philosophers, and cultural critics representing a wide span of political, moral, and religious attitudes. Pop science lends credence to these views by describing monogamy as a bad fit for biological human nature and a potent source of personal misery. Supporters point out that men can have scores of babies by scores of women and walk away, while women can have only a small number of babies—as many with one man as with 20—and must feed and care for them.
Despite the keen interest of the commentariat, public debates about polygamy tend to be disturbingly fact-free, and driven by terminological and other confusions. “Polygamy” refers to any system of plural marriage, polyandrous or polygynous, but polyandry is so rare that for practical purposes polygamy is polygyny. For zoologists, “polygyny” means only that males of a given species mate with more than one female. But when we discuss norms, laws, and social practices, we’re talking about social polygyny. Social polygyny is a set of norms that permit men to be married to many wives at the same time, but restrict women to one husband at a time, as in fundamentalist Mormon practice.
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Arguments offered in support of polygynyMost of us believe that people should be free to live as they please, so long as they’re not hurting anyone else. This conviction is used to support arguments in favor of polygamy like these:
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Overall, defenses of polygamy tend to be heavy on doctrinal and constitutional argument, and light on—or dismissive of—facts. However, these arguments must be considered alongside an immense body of empirical evidence. Samples of that evidence can be found here, here, and here, but I will summarize the salient conclusions about polygyny’s effects.
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Polygyny treats women and children as means, not ends—means to men’s power, wealth, status, or heavenly reward. It violates the Golden Rule by denying equality to women and by creating one-sided power and privilege. It breaches or refuses the promises inherent in ordinary love between adults—promises to you and you alone. It deprives children and wives of the adequate care and protection that husbands (and wives) owe their families. And supposing even that some husbands could manage to give adequate care and protection to plural wives and many children, they would still act unethically to choose to participate in polygyny—because as a practice it’s harmful and cruel. Would slave-holding be fine for those slave-holders who were truly benevolent? No, because the slave-master relationship is intrinsically evil; and because, extrinsically, the practice engenders additional evils that would be inevitable and irremediable. Yet were self-enslavement rendered legal today in the United States, thousands would instantly do it in exchange for their families’ or children’s medical care or college funds. Even more would be coerced into it by blackmail, force, psychological manipulation, or emotional or mental illness.
More fundamentally, plural marriages lack the dignity of monogamous marriage—gay and straight—because they aren’t, and can’t be, full love relationships. Christian objections to polygyny—by, for example, John Chrysostom, William d’Auvergne, and Thomas Aquinas—rested on polygyny’s harms, not on lewdness, and point out many of the same harms as social scientists do today, from unhappy mateless men to poorly raised and deprived children. But they also focus on one thing that today’s social science usually ignores. They believed that marriage based on love requires monogamy because love requires equality. Polygyny undermines equality between mates, which in turn undermines love and the personal and social goods that flow from marriages based on love.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/05/28/why-not-polygamy/
