The Circle Game
September 08, 2006 D
A Nice Enough Man
The problems of rural Mormon Polygamous women and girls are not so different than those of women and children disadvantaged and marginalised societies elsewhere--stigma has complicated problems the intermountain West. The Jeffs families problems ought not to be an excuse for cultural genocide and further interference or rural development neglect.
I do not mean forceable development--taking traditional dwellings for flimsy square houses. Many prefer to keep to older ways. These Communities were scored by Atomic Testing, families have lost members to Cancer and to more common, less recognised rheumatic and multi-system diseases. These multiply geometrically from generation to generation in radiation saturated communities.
Do ignore boys missing from this debate--aren't they doing what Polygamy detractors want? Kicking back playing commuter games on town owned computers. Should you encounter one, give him honest work so they can pay for their educations. Educated They can send money home to marry, how, when and who they prefer.
Polygamy is not easy on men. The problem that men from these communities marry back into them in smaller numbers is ludicros as an issue. It stablizes their population. Again, I wonder what our photo journalists want.
Many have died or are weak or ill-downwind radiation survivors we used to call them. Jeffs--a supposed "Criminal" may not be physically, medically, able to stand trial for his family's criminalised Religious Practice though blood work has made expensive exclusionary diagnostic gauntlets unnessesary.
He was being propped up at his hearing by his guards, his eyeballs taught and drawn back into their sockets. He should have been diagnosed before he was questioned. With radiation induced exhaustion, bodies shut down. Physical assimilation of proteins is reduced causing protein entropy or cascade. The dark muscular tissues of the body which provide chickens and reduce bats ability for flights, have provided gruesome amusement to a century of medical weirdoes.
It would be nice, while we are chasing pedophiles (an honourable pursuit) that we do more to curb physically, psychologically, and sometimes, sexually joy-riding doctors and sponsored staff and patient rapists in hospitals.
They exist, I have had ample time to observe them from a vulnerable bed and have heard many accounts and complaints from others. Medical boards ''punish'' these doctors by restricting their practice to the most helpless. Female personnel are often complicit or co-dependent. Their jobs depend on their silence. After serving in and then admisnistering a Crisis Line in a Utah County (We got 60 dollars from the United Way as a budget, I can say abuse is worse, not better, in Utah.
If you look closely at the footage, Prophet Jeff is struggling to stand, to keep his eyes open, even to hear--possibly drugged with anti-psychotics in an attempt to fiddle with his biochemistry to render him an un-prophet.
If there is freedom of religion, this must be curtailed. The attractiveness of Civil Union Laws, discussed in the next article too breifly, to gays, to Polygamous women is easily explained. When an United Order disbands, these property laws could be used to make this an easier, earlier and fairer process. Families could then remedy problems earlier, forming sturdier new consensual groupings.
Polygamous wives, in the better functioning unions, while prefering to live together in a larger house, often break down into 19th Century style Romantic friendships--Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law are one much discussed example of this. These Victorians need the rights and protections that civil unions would offer.
When I was a girl there were two women in our ward who owned a house and car together and formed a girls club for the ward girls on Saturday Afternoons.
I asked my mother if they were married. She laughed and said "Of course not, dear." I was 10 or 11. You may remember paired PE or English teachers who were much like them, many celebite, who need the civil protection.
Protection for their relationships, affections, and property, medical rights to care for one another in the hospital, community recognition at both death beds and funerald are certainly warrented--it is a cruel society which denies them.
Constancy in Gay sons who are educated and without children are a great asset to their mothers, and United Orders a protection against poverty, illness and old age, they are scarcely "lost", or their friendships trivialized.
States which provide no public help for hard luck lives often cast out the needy--the Intermountain States do almost nothing to unburden even rigors of Love imposed by ionising Radiation. Traditional patterns of life only when honored can get by on a shoestring in this area.
What we are calling "Child Marriage" Sociologists are traditionally refered to as the "European Marriage Pattern." Girls marry at some time after puberty. This varies from culture to culture.
I was one who married later to a man my own age after a long relationship with a widower two months older than my mother. He and I still are fond of one another and get in touch every few years.
Some monogamist extended Mormon families have family Orders economically similar to the Jeffs.
One of my Grandmother's sister's family found oil on their land. Not knowing what else to do, they reverted to the formation of a family United Order much like the Jeffs--this Family economic plan has been practiced continually by families continually for 150 years. An unwise steward may be removed.
I do have some slight knowledge of the Jeffs themselves. Rulon Jeffs developed an impacted colon at the same time that my grandfather developed a clot in his eye.
There was not room for the Jeffs' large family in the common areas of the hospital and so one family of older children went to stand on a little hillock in the hospital lawn, easily visible from my Grandfather's room. We turn on the lights only when we needed so it was lighter outside in the summer gloaming. It was a stiff and uncomfortable display. No one brought them chairs--the hospital may have run out. My grandfather, his roomate, said he was a nice enough man. I sat across from him on Rulon Jeff's bed.
Traditional Polygamy is not so much illegal or in the closet as cloaked for the protection of those who are vulnerable and have suffered enough. Outsiders ought not to condemn or destroy what we do not yet understand.
We display this arrogance through out the world and are not loved for it. The Polygamous and Polyamorous community may become America's next painted bird. I think that, in Iraq, where the Shiites are monogamists and the Suni's polygamists, we may see how dangerous such primitive urges are and how they can escalate into Civil War when goaded. That we have done, and our predjudice against traditionally polygamist cultures may fuel the flame.
In my view, the very serious and solemn problem of Saadam war crimes, heinious prisons, and public torture of opponents should have been resolved in the Hague, while we were still propping him up actively and by neglect of those in need of releif, many, many years ago. Thou laudible, we have let this go until it now suits us, abandoning the Nueremburg, Geneva, and other conventions and accords, keeping them set to a very low profile. The Iraqi people suffered, and those, like Medina who ordered the Mi Lai massacre, went unpunished.
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Friday September 8, 2006
September 08, 2006 C
Polygamy,
a Sister's Response
Polygamy IS the current battle. It has little to do with Polygamy in the American West. Consider-- Sunnis practice Polygamy, Shiites do not. We have declared them our enemies in Iraq setting them against one another in as calculatingly as we might fighting dogs or cocks. The border paranoia has brought polygamy into the limelight because most large polygamist families left the US when polygamy persecution became unsupportable around the
turn of the century and the decades that went before and followed afterwards.
Women in polygamous marriages missed out on the Transition/Displaced homemaker movement that thrived in the late seventies. Largely because of government prohibitions that were traded for Federal favors, including Statehood and an end to insulting and intrusive Federal Marshalls. Women have not been able to avail themselves of targeted Women's Services as elsewhere underpriveleged, abused women sought shelter and education.
Mormonism is not a Cult, particularly when it is seen as a Culture as well as a religion on it's original turf and the polygamists' numbers are figured back in--it is a variety of Mormon ethnic religious practice.
Once reserved for the well to do by Cannon, many families have descended into real poverty. Ethic Mormon Polygamy is no mere behavioral phenomenon, while, as some have suggested, those who aspire to homosexual lifetime Unions involve deeper levels of the brain.
I lived next to a couple who had a little girl named Annie--they made a documentary. I remember the day she came home from the hospital--her Daddy and his friend spent the day putting together a oversized swing set.
Gorillas, I read some years ago, drive off most males and live in poltgamous groups of women and children when famine or stress befalls. Nearly every Native American Tribe practiced polygamy. Wives might have more than one husbands in the larger.
This practice was adapteive because of the number of men in the families who were involved in trading and herding and so were away from home for long periods of time. The brutal means employed by Chinese Soldiers, who were entered into the Army forcibly, as punisment for Revolutionary War Crimes following the First Purification at the Gates underscores what I do not know of a case where it was untrue. The crushing of original societies, and nearly all were polygamist societies, as well as societies where gay and trangender marriages were not uncommon, were broken by deprogramming white education, such as the infamous Carlyle School to which many Southwestern Indian Tribes were forced to send their children.
While not universally loved, access to education through a system of fosterage during the school year and family life with traditional families for the summer months did not involve the level of Cultual Genocide of schools admistered by deprogramming
boarding schools. Language was maintained informally, through sleepovers, where, as was common in my Mormon Stakes, Native girls in particular, spent weekends together, speaking their native tongue.
I cannot remember any instance of Collegiate Native Young people had not spent their Winters in what was called the Indian Placement program. They often did not mix with the white students but this was not discouraged.
Girls and boys from outlying communities in general, might often live in town with a family.
It was the denial of this custom to a academic and ambitious teenager that touched off the Jeff family fiasco.
The Larry King program did not comprehend this custom and its importance to poligamous young people throughout the Intermountain West, in my day the migration of bright girls to school in larger towns was ubiquitous.
Jeffs' priciputous marriages of 16 year olds without regard to their own plans, hopes or ambitions, or affections ignited this scandal and most shocked their communities.
He also recalled girls living in town for arbitrary, often arranged and pressured marriages. He did this at the rather typical age of 16 without permission of a judge as girls in the main LDS church, though I know of no time after towns were settled, and set up with schools, when early marriage was promoted or socially condoned or approved.
26 was the encouraged target marriage age for boys when I was a girl. with younger girls marrying after college or Junior Collage. I was an early reader and read most magazines that passed through the house--I graduated from the Readers Digest Condensed Books. I thought marriage in the early twenties rather overshot the mark.
The problems of Mormon Women are not different from those of women in other disadvantaged and marginalised women and children--the social stigma, our government funded civil war in the middle east, all have been made poor Tristate womens problems worse--the Jef's families problems ought not to be an excuse for continued cultural genocide. After 150 years of persecution high spending Government sponsored deprogramming programs simply continue a old and ineffective abuse. More regular programs which promote self esteem and education, regardless of tribe or subgroup are less expensive and more liikely to be of benefit.
These Communities were deeply impacted by Atomic Testing--most families have lost members to Cancer and to the more common but less recognised rheumatic and multi-system diseases.
The incidence of geometrically growing radiation saturated communities who do not practice amniocentesis or get abortions makes the cost of compensation phenomenal and underscores the grave impact of the fix everything everywhere high end spending of the Bush Administration.
Friday September 8, 2006 - 03:02pm (PDT)
September 08, 2006 B
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 17, 2006,
The Washington Post Online
With the sweetly titled HBO series "Big Love," polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline "Polygamists, Unite!" Newsweek informs us of "polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement." Says one evangelical Christian big lover: "Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle."
Ginnifer Goodwin, Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Chloe Sevigny in "Big Love." (Courtesy Of Hbo Via Reuters) Foreign Policy by Report Car John R. Hamilton The tolerance of other societies for being publicly judged by the United States has reached its limits.
Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With "Big Love" it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.
As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights.
After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.
This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. [unless family, of course--KW]
But I'm not the one who put them there. Their argument does.
Blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when it was considered pretty crazy, has called this the "polygamy diversion," arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically different because polygamy is a mere "activity" while homosexuality is an intrinsic state that "occupies a deeper level of human consciousness."
But this distinction between higher and lower orders of love is precisely what gay rights activists so vigorously protest when the general culture "privileges" (as they say in the English departments) heterosexual unions over homosexual ones. Was "Jules et Jim" (and Jeanne Moreau), the classic Truffaut film involving two dear friends in love with the same woman, about an "activity" or about the most intrinsic of human emotions?
To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?
What is historically odd is that as gay marriage is gaining acceptance, the resistance to polygamy is much more powerful. Yet until this generation, gay marriage had been sanctioned by no society that we know of, anywhere at any time in history. On the other hand, polygamy was sanctioned, indeed common, in large parts of the world through large swaths of history, most notably the biblical Middle East and through much of the Islamic world.
I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage has needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you. Astronomical rates of divorce and of single parenthood (the deliberate creation of fatherless families) existed before there was a single gay marriage or any talk of sanctioning polygamy. The minting of these new forms of marriage is a symptom of our culture's contemporary radical individualism -- as is the decline of traditional marriage -- and not its cause.
As for gay marriage, I've come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is a mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy.
On the other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their relationship with a loved one that I'm not about to go to anyone's barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by judicial fiat.
Call me agnostic. But don't tell me that we can make one radical change in the one-man, one-woman rule and not be open to the claim of others that their reformation be given equal respect.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
[km--it is the ballooning housing prices that are fueling the return to polygamy in the Nutmeg region
and Northern regions of the American West--poverty in short, thus fulfilling the biblical profecy "And in that day, seven women shall take hold of one man saying 'we shall eat our own food, only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach'-- kw]
Friday September 8, 2006 - 02:56pm (PDT) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
September 08, 2006 A
Well, I'm writing about polygamy--my cultural background. I'm annoyed to have to do it, but I realize that there are only a few copy worthy journalists who are friendly both to the practice and practitioners, though there are many 19th century holdover attitudes and practices to which I am hostile. These include the notion that a woman need ask permission for anything at anytime with a single exception--you need someone responsible to know where you are and who with at any age--even if it is a note tucked in a private place not to be opened unless you need to be found.
I mean deviations from the norm. If you always come home at 5 and you decide to take off for the Bahamas for a week, or if you have kids you need to make arrangements to be contacted.
It's easier to just keep to set patterns, I used to find, anyway.
Now I'm over-predictable and hate it, but unless I need to vanish, in which case, of course, the people I'm with know where I am. California is good about treating adults like adults.
When we had the big flood my worker called and asked if I was up for a visit. Everyone was home and we visited. He is a very large man, so if I needed a third person for a lift out he looked more than up for the task.
I take my own risks generally. I have a theory that tom-boys attract the ordinary companionship of the semi opposite sex and gender through life--it's pheremones I think, or pheremones given off by a microbe, which can happen. The microbe is then attracted to biochemistry which can be geneticly determined by ph, blood sugar, presence and absence of bacteria with excretions, alone or in symbiosis, which encourage various precursors. I may be getting a little scientific for awhile here because I'm going to be taliking about poligamy.
I think Larry King may have not known that by baring his teeth
at the polygamous women of America's sisters, daughters, grandaughters and so on back through the genetics of Celts and Africans, Native Americans--all of whom are likely to be offended, not by our good girls who are all likely to go off their nuts when protocals are not followed regarding their marriages--all at once. This with and through their male relatives and girlfriends male relatives. Not that these kids did not have the right, but....does he want to spend the next year on this when we do our best for them. Did he want to go back and start at square one. I told one of my male connections that I would settle for nothing but Larry King's head on a stake.
I prefer to write my novels and am already annoyed by the Chinese persecution of the Fa Long Gong--traditional Chinese people who are being beaten to death and then kept alive on life support waiting for a rich recipient for their organs. Hideous stuff, all packaged and turned in to the UN already. If that were enough you'd know about it, wouldn't you? Do you?
Yes, a full scale system of hideous and systemic torture which has killed as many middle aged people as the war in Iraq has killed Americans or Canadians.
Bombs have killed far more which for racist reasons are not
noted as often by men such as our Mr. King. I just wondered a wonder--might our Larry King be related to the singing Kings who used to be on prime time weekend TV? My Lawyer is a singing King. If so, Larry has the right to set it all straight in his lifetime--even perhaps, he may feel an onerous responsibility. And our girls do go on screen so well. They also dance well--I remeber my sister's age group and their competition.
Out of the darkness come a V of tall blonde girls in indigo dresses like great indigo birds and the music--they mean business. They took the stake, they took the region, they were unsurpassed.
We need money for Women's Services in Southern Utah, not confined to one Social Group. If these girls and women can find it and put it to good use, all well and good, but we need much, much more. Forced marriage is reprehensible. Bravo for these girls who were the first to say so. Send them money. Build them High Schools with resident MSW. My grandma's childhood best friend used to be the midwife out that way. She died in the epidemic that killed many just after the war.
Some of the mad posting that was going on just post war said that plans were found, just post war, for spraying cattle herds with enhanced viruses. Since m Aunt died of Encephalitus in that epidemic (I have her Death Certificate) but I had been pulling Abu-Girab shots off the web, some Falun Gong, some WWII. I had to rest, as I do now.
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