Editor,
Yes to polygamy.
Why not other forms of marriage?
I agree with the '60s author Robert Rimmer that the law demanding that all marriage be defined as one man and one woman in sexual monogamy is unrealistic, unimaginative and typical of the hypocrisy of post-Victorian Puritanism, not to mention as an enforced tenet of the prevailing U.S. version of the will of God, which is completely unconstitutional.
If contractually defined with respect to such matters as property, tax and children, marriage should be permitted to any group of people who want it, without respect to their sex, age or number.
As for whether any particular church approves of or refuses to honor any particular form of marriage, that is immaterial to the statutorial position, and up to each church.
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The contract of marriage is, after all, a three-party secular contract involving the spouses and the state. No church is actually legally involved in that contract, though the state grants the church the appearance of being the principal partner and authority in the act merely by endorsing its definition of marriage by civil law.
Mormon polygamy does not technically violate the law, as long as there is no statutory civil bigamy going on - only one woman is legally married to the patriarch. The others merely agree to the circumstances of the relationship as an act of faith in their religion which, according to the Constitution, they should certainly be permitted to do. They may technically be practicing adultery in the legal sense, but not bigamy.
The Mormon structure - and the root-related way of Islam - is about husbandry, as an agronomist uses the word. It is about raising a line of people for the lord, like raising a line of cattle.
It is about family as an institution of breeding and upbringing; hardly about indulging oneself in petty lust. Unless you have some objection to parents having the right to raise their children in the faith of their fathers, as opposed to their being subject to the enforced pronouncements of a state-approved form of religion and child indoctrination, why should anyone presume to judge other right-exercising Americans and enforce his or her own opinion with state power?
James Nathan Post
Daily Lobo reader
