Polygamy hurts everyone involved 


    WHEN I was a high school kid growing up in Salt Lake City, our family lived in an older neighborhood. 
    Down the street was a small enclave of polygamists. 
    There wasn’t anything real unusual about these folks. 
    They lived in a big old brick house, wore outdated clothes, had a very large garden, kept to themselves, and didn’t seem to have much fun. Oh—and there were a lot more women and children around than men. 
    Polygamy’s in the culture in Utah. Polygamists would turn up on local news from time to time. You can still drive down to the Utah-Arizona border and fi nd whole towns that practice it. 
    My Mormon friends despised polygamy. Yes, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced it long ago. But they banned it more than a 100 years back. Every Mormon I know considers it an embarrassment and wishes it had never existed. 
    I grew up with a very low opinion of the practice. 
Just entertainment 
    Years later, when the HBO television series, “Big Love,” showed up, it didn’t strike me as portraying anything remotely like the glimpses of polygamy I’d caught in Utah. 
    I got into a fi erce argument with some colleagues over “Big Love.” 
    “What did I have against freedom of religion and freedom of relationship?” someone asked me. 
    Another demanded, “If you don’t have a problem with same-sex marriage, how can you have a problem with polygamy?” 
    Well, for one thing, learning about social issues by watching “Big Love,” is just about as accurate as learning about history by watching old Errol Flynn movies. Or the movie “September Dawn,” for that matter, which is far more hysterical than historical. 
    If you want entertainment, you go to the cineplex or turn on your TV—including the History Channel, by the way. It’s all about pleasing audiences and sponsors, not showing what really happened. If you actually want history, go to the library. Or pay attention in class. 
Religious freedom 
    On religious freedom, I agree, the state shouldn’t tell people what to believe. I also agree, the state shouldn’t go around, peeping into people’s bedroom windows, yelling, “Hey, that’s not in the rule book.” 
    If polygamy were between equally empowered, responsible, consenting adults, I still wouldn’t like it. But I’d most likely just grit my teeth and say, “Well, alright. Whatever.” 
    But as we see down in Texas, polygamy’s not between consenting adults. All too often, it’s between adult men and teenage girls. Or between wealthy, authoritarian men and women who have no power to say “no.” 
    The fact that men and women have both been brainwashing one another for over a 100 years and most wouldn’t say “no” if they got the chance, doesn’t make it any healthier. Marriage should be about love. Polygamy isn’t about love; it’s about power. And the children pay the price. 
Hard to end 
    The state of Utah has struggled for decades with the problem. Closed cults—be they the Ramtha cult in Oregon, the Branch Davidians in Texas or Jonestown, Guiana—typically involve sexual and fi nancial exploitation of members and fraud against outsiders. 
    Utah’s polygamists are no exception. Neither are those in Texas, exported from Utah. 
    Cash and administrative power are concentrated in a few male leaders. Those same male leaders typically exploit underage females. Physical and emotional violence are a regular way to keep followers in line. 
    Since the government only recognizes one wife of a group, welfare fraud is also standard procedure. The other wives, after all, have no offi cial means of support. They commonly apply for welfare, which also gets passed along to the ruling males. Utah prosecuted this sort of thing regularly, but it’s very diffi cult to get a handle on. 
    I don’t know what I think about each individual polygamist in Utah or San Angelo. They were brought up thinking all this was good and right; that “God’s law supercedes human law.” 
    I’m sure they can cite Scripture to justify every facet of their practice. 
    But at some point, if we’re all to have due rights, justice and freedom of religion itself, then individual religion has to yield to the common good. 
    That is, each religion has to yield to laws that were passed for the benefi t of everyone. Not that the law is perfect, either. But law is subject to change if it doesn’t work. And religion needs to be subject to change, as well. 
The Rev. Dennis McCarty is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Columbus. His opinions are his own, and not necessarily shared by members of his church. He can be reached by e-mail at columnists@therepublic.com 


Dennis McCarty