I just watched a TV movie about polygamy that got me thinking… This, added to the fact that I recently went through the first season of Big Love and have read a couple posts about polygamy lately, has made for lots of food for thought or, as one person I know would have it, “blog fodder”.
It does seem that polygamy–OK, polygyny–is the alternate lifestyle du jour for Hollywood (and thus for us the consumers of entertainment). This is a trend that will probably peak and taper off, as has the taste for all things vampire-related (though a new TV show about vampires makes me wonder if that trend will be resurrected–or made undead, as the case may be). And it leads to some interesting questions about marriage, love, relationships, community, soulmates, cultural values, and extended families–things that we’ve been dealing with rather unsuccessfully in secular America for the past century or so.
It does seem that currently we’re preoccupied with the home-grown American variant of polygamy, mostly associated with fundamentalist Mormon sects (though they’re not acknowledged by the Church of Latter-Day Saints). But something else that makes the issue relevant is the fact that polygamy is an allowed practice (though not necessarily the norm) in Islam as well–and our nation as a whole has had to become a lot more versed in the practices and beliefs of Muslims, since 9/11.
I think we’re at a loss about what we think–or what we should think–about a practice like polygamy. On the one hand, there’s something that strikes us as inherently off about one man having many wives. That might be the result of cultural conditioning, though, and two thousand years of Christian monopoly on cultural values. Besides, some argue, there’s plenty of Biblical precedent for polygamous marriages–Rachel and Leah, the wives of Jacob, being the first obvious example that come to mind (then again, what a dysfunctional example of a family!!!). Oh, and Solomon’s 1000 wives… or was it 300 wives and 700 concubines?
The point is that in a society where we feel it’s wrong to make judgments about people’s cultural practices (except when it suits us, and we call it “human rights”), we are starting to realize that we don’t have a leg to stand on to condemn those who live in plural marriages. We can even see that their communities and families are more tight-knit than our own, and that’s something that we admire. After all, if we’re not going to fuss about other alternate lifestyles, why interfere with theirs?
Personally, I’m convinced that a person needs to apply critical thinking to this and other cultural values. Yes, in some ways their lifestyle seems to provide things that we lack in our society, but what is the result when a large community practices polygamy? We’ve heard plenty in the news about that–young girls forced into marriages often with very much older men, boys being forced out of the communities that they grew up in (because they were threats to the elder men), and other things like that. I think that if polygamy easily fell into being a consensual setup where all the adults involved made a true commitment to one another and to their children, we’d see more of that and less of the other.
Then again, living with “serial monogamy” doesn’t seem to produce any better results… For what it’s worth, it’s probably all part of the human condition. Yikes. Sometimes thinking about marriages and relationships (especially in these terms) makes me just want to swear off the whole thing…
Posted by Kjirstin 
