Personally, I'm waaay tired of people defending polygamy with sweeping airheaded statements about peace/love/understanding & moral high grounds & "it's all pretty much the same thing." Well,
For the advancement of such (nothing personal) nimrods, I hear there's this Interwebs thing where you can look at some sorta
searching engine or like that, & get all kinds of information, much of it an accurate representation of general
consensus reality. But here's a brief summary.
It's not the gender proportions that bug us -- there's plenty of FMF triads & vees about.
It's not the crypto-slavery attitude that bugs us -- quite a few of us have friends who are to some degree happy in their master/slave kinkiness. Maybe there's women of sound mind who simply enjoy that sense of security that most of us would quickly find stifling & outright maddening... but my kinks aren't your kinks &
c'est la vie.
What bugs ME is that
institutional polygamy is creepy mind-control cultism, like Monogamism gone cancerous. Women are indoctrinated
from birth into
needing this sort of structure. Deprogramming them would be like taking a 19th-century Paiute tribesman & dropping him in the middle of today's Times Square.
And so we make it
entertainment.
And shows are produced that show
some of the hassles but generally whitewash the fundamental assumptions -- that would be
Big Love.
And people assume that's what
polyamory is all about. And they show up here demanding the secrets of how to get THEIR assorted HBB sister-wives.
IMNSHO, anyone who wants to say ANYTHING nice about polygamy ought FIRST to read up a little on the
FLDS.
I've yet to meet an apologist who independently realised that, with females (one hesitates to call 'em
women) a tightly contrrolled commodity within that community,
most boys are surplusage, useful for the work you can get out of them, but needing to be dumped before they can be competition with Dad's church buddies. Imagine being a (for lack of a better term) mother who's so brainwashed that she will readily exile her own son. They even have a word for it.
"Lost boys" is a term used for young men who have been excommunicated or pressured to leave polygamous Mormon fundamentalism groups... by adult men to reduce competition for wives within such sects, usually when they are between the ages of 13 and 21.
It has been reported by former members that the FLDS Church has excommunicated more than 400 teenage boys for offenses such as dating or listening to rock music.
Some former members claim that the real reason for these excommunications is that there are not enough women for each male to receive three or more wives. Six men, aged 18 to 22, filed a conspiracy lawsuit against Jeffs and Sam Barlow, a former Mohave County deputy sheriff and close associate of Jeffs, for the "systematic excommunication" of young men to reduce competition for wives.
While some boys leave by their own choice, many are ostensibly banished for conduct such as watching a movie, watching television, playing football, or talking to a girl. Some boys are told not to return unless they can return with a wife. One estimate is that between 400 and 1,000 boys and young men have been pressured to leave for such reasons.
Boys in these sects are commonly raised not to trust the outside world, and may be taught that leaving their communities is a sin worse than murder. These boys are usually left with little education or skills applicable to life outside of their community of birth, and must learn to live in a society about which they know little, while dealing with the consequences of being shunned by their families, and believing they are beyond spiritual redemption. The families of banished boys are told that the boys are now dead to them.
Warren Jeffs has repeatedly alluded to the 19th-century teaching of "blood atonement" in church sermons. Under the doctrine, certain serious sins, such as murder, can only be atoned for by the sinner's death. There was concern that one of the sins requiring blood atonement is apostasy.
Hint: "lost boys" are apostate.
Apostasy is the formal disaffiliation from, or abandonment or renunciation of a religion by a person.
They are sinners left to die, rather literally.
So, no, I will not roll over & "play nice" with defenders of polygamy.