Why Not Multiple Wives?
by Donald Devine
Issue 109 - June 11, 2008

On April 3, 2008, hundreds of police raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado Texas and removed 460 children from Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints parents because officials determined that the "pervasive belief system" of the sect put the children at the ranch compound in danger of either participating in or becoming victims of sexual abuse and/or forced marriage.

Seven weeks later a Texas appeals court ruled the State of Texas Department of Family and Protective Services’ evidence was insufficient to warrant a lower court’s decision ordering the removal of the children from their parents. The seizures were instigated by a caller claiming to be a 16 year old at the ranch forced to marry an abusive older man but later believed to be an outside anti-abuse activist. The children, who had been forced into foster care around the state at a cost of $5.26 million according to the head of the Health and Public Services Commission, were ordered to be returned to their parents. TDFPS appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court and lost.

What was the “belief system” the authorities were concerned about? The 10,000 member FC-LDS (which had split with the central Mormon church when it abandoned polygamy in 1890) bought the 1,500 acre ranch in 2004. Because its 52 year old “prophet” of polygamous living had been convicted of accessory to rape for performing an under-aged wedding in 2001, the local compound had been under official scrutiny. Its members openly practiced polygamy but were not actually acted against until the spurious report of abuse. Subsequently, Angie Voss, an investigator with Child Protective Services, justified the raid because she had evidence that "more than 20 girls, some of whom are now adults, have conceived or given birth under the age of 16 or 17" (however, at follow-up hearings, CPS admitted that 15 of the girls were probably over age 18).

The initial public sympathy in the case was for the abused younger women and children. As columnist William Murchison noted:

Reflexive trust in the benevolence of the state's intentions (specifically those of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services) likely stems in part from the multifarious horror stories that have filled heads and minds in recent decades--accounts of child abuse by adults, of the reduction of the innocent to objects of prey by the powerful. Priests, day-care center operators, youth workers and, yes, parents--whom can you trust any more? We seem to have overdosed on these stories--some true but many constructed on flimsy evidence--to the point that child-adult relationships now invite almost automatic suspicion. We appear to sometimes no longer trust adults in general to do right by children in general. The flip side of too much trust--alas--is too little, which could be where we are now.

Soon, however, fears of abuse by public authorities took center stage. The 1993 Federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco Texas was the most obvious comparison since it occurred in the same state. That siege ended with 82 dead. In 1953, government officials had even acted previously against the same Fundamentalist LDS group, leading to its fear of future outside intervention, which its leader used to assert more control over them. With the Texas Supreme Court decision, sympathy had shifted decisively to the parents.

But what about polygamy? Certainly it rested at the heart of the state decision to intervene. It is illegal in every state and nationally. But why? It has been a widely accepted practice over the world since the beginning and the Jewish patriarchs practiced it or concubinage. It was not banned by an authoritative Ashkenazi interpretation until the 11th Century AD, and then first only in Christian lands, and still survives among some smaller branches Judaism. The second largest world religion, Islam, allows up to four wives to this day. Hinduism did not eliminate polygamy until forced by the British after they controlled India. Buddhism never forbad it, allowing consorts in addition to wives until various states limited it, mostly in modern times.

Of the major belief systems, only Christianity has consistently forbidden the practice and even there Martin Luther said he could not “forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture” and granted at least one ruler a dispensation to take a second wife, although he has been in a very small minority even among Lutherans. As long as Christianity greatly influenced Western nations, its views on marriage were law. But the advance of secularism and multiculturalism led to questioning its conventional marriage even within that tradition, leading to some denominations allowing first liberal divorce and then marriage of same sex couples. If the moral exclusivity given to the permanent union between a man and a woman is not absolute, why not more than one partner, or even more than one with other species? If serial polygamy is acceptable in divorce, why not real polygamy?

Secular morality on the matter has taken several forms. Beginning with a child custody case in Utah in 1991, the American Civil Liberties Union has opposed laws against polygamy, as does the U.S. Libertarian Party platform, under the logic that if people freely desire multiple marriages, they should be free to enter them. The left-libertarian Nation columnist Katha Pollitt reported that “every person I spoke to connected” allowing polygamy with supporting single sex marriage, quoting one famous ACLU director agreeing that polygamy is “the price” for logically demanding gay marriage. Pollitt, however, opposed polygamy even if done freely, comparing it to progressives not allowing people to work below a minimum wage. Polygamy is “radically inegalitarian,” she insisted, because the wife only has a part of the husband. Yes, monogamous marriage is unequal too so she was finally forced to the conclusion that “marriage itself has to go.” Apparently, the secular view is that either there should be no limits on marriage or marriage must be eliminated entirely.

The secular argument for monogamy is made by the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, Lionel Tiger, who reasons that:

One of the triumphs of Western arrangements is the institution of monogamy, which has in principle made it possible for each male and female to enjoy a plausible shot at the reproductive outcome which all the apparatus of nature demands. Even Karl Marx did not fully appreciate the immense radicalism of this form of equity…. The victims [of polygamy] are not only young women but young men too. They are reproductively and productively disenfranchised, and are in effect forced to leave the communities to become hopeless, ill-schooled misfits in the towns of normal life. No dignified lives as celibate monks with colorful costumes for them. Again, the issue is cross-cultural. Osama bin Laden has at least five wives, which means that four young men of his tribe have no date on Saturday night and forever. They may become willing jihadists, or desperate suicides eager to soothe their god by killing infidels and Americans.

So monogamy is a matter of national security! It is demanded by nature for reproductive peace. We will not have dates! “The fact is that,” he continues, “despite all the blather about faith and freedom of religion, the men operating the various compounds in question are behaving in virtually the same manner as countless dominant males in countless primate troops observed over the years.” But what can a Darwinist possibly have against that? Nature “demands” reproductive enfranchisement? If so, how did so many social systems survive so long with polygamy and, indeed, endure to this day, especially serial polygamy, with less attractive mates presumably also unequally distributed within the tribe? If all the apparatus of nature demands monogamous reproduction why have serial polygamy and declining fertility evolved as characteristic of the modern West?

When traditional morality and common understandings are eliminated as justifications, secular rationality comes to one of three conclusions: marriage is demanded by nature to be monogamous, marriage is the free union of any set or number of beings, or marriage must be eliminated. Apparently, secular hyper-rationality has no one conclusion. This is precisely why rational agnostics like F.A. Hayek believed that even the free society must base its predominant social assumptions on its accumulated traditions. The fundamental social paradox is that a free society must be based upon a tradition or freedom has no base of assumptions upon which to build and will end in chaos, even as Darwinists understand it.

The West has been built upon a particular tradition that has relied upon monogamy, which has undoubtedly partially explained its success. That tradition—our tradition—has given a high value to freedom but that very support for liberty led it also to support the traditions thought necessary to undergird it, including monogamy. As Edmund Burke put it, “ Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites...Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without."

One of those “chains” has been monogamous marriage and one must simply concede that the only reason polygamy can be considered wrong—especially given its popularity worldwide and historically--is because our tradition (and, contra Luther, its initiator) commanded it so.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.