Apparently I don’t watch enough TV. I just heard by chance yesterday about the “Lost Boys†of the polygamous sects, who are quite simply, competition for the older alpha males of the group. The young men are thrown out of these groups under the slimmest of pretenses, and forced to live on the streets or whatever they can do to survive.
According to the Fathers and Families blog, the Texas authorities are, at least for the moment, shrugging off this question as it applies to their situation, but the numbers suggest otherwise.
The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) removed all children under age 18 – numbering 416 children – from the compound. Of these 416, only 27 are teenage boys. Demographics indicate there should have been about 65 teenage boys. Thus there are about 38 missing teenage boys—most of them likely expelled by sect leaders prior to the DFPS raids.
As indicated by our discussions with DFPS official Chris Van Duesen, Texas apparently has no plans to locate and assist these lost boys. According to Van Duesen, the lost boys problem does not exist in Texas. He offered no explanation for the preponderance of girls in state custody.
The Hope Organization is focused on helping victims of polygamy – both the unwilling child brides and the discarded boys. They have a history of the polygamy issue here.
From the number of blogs commenting on the issue, (495 at Google blogs alone) I suspect it won’t be long before the Texas authorities wake up. Even the feminists are noticing!
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Yep, the real hidden problem of polygamy is that men are more inclined to want this lifestyle than women are, for a variety of reasons, and if the practice is widespread the upshot is that you have a lot of surplus boys with no reasonable chance at having a woman of their own. Turning gay will help a little, and statistically males are more likely to be homosexual, but on the whole having a bunch of sexually frustrated young men with no strong hope for a future family is an ugly social problem.
The Chinese are beginning to experience their first waves of this as the disastrous “One Child” policy has led to the murder of so many baby girls and now a whole generation of boys who are substantially more numerous than girls.
Society can tolerate a certain amount of polygyny if it’s only a small minority of wealthy and powerful men who are able to practice it. Once it becomes widespread in a community, though, “lost boys” like this are only the beginning of the problem, as they eventually become lost men.
Trudy,
if you and the feminists agree on something it must truly be a real problem!!
You can also infer from the existence of this phenomenon that in a society built, in the long term, on polygamy, the lives of males not at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid can be reckoned might cheap.
Imagine what kind of effects that might have on such a society and its attitude toward killing and tactics such as suicide bombing.
Ron Coleman’s last blog post..Why they know it all
Ron,
undoubtedly true. but I think it’s a sad fact of life that the lives of people at the bottom of the ladder can be reckoned might cheap no matter what the social ladder is built on.
Yes, no question.
Still, there are matters of degree, aren’t there?
Even then, as I argue in the post linked as comment #4 above, people ultimately make individual moral choices.
Ron Coleman’s last blog post..The word and the thought
Ron,
absolutely. I think the fundamental mechanics of social and financial destitution and desperation are the same regardless of the society, but a society built on polygamy (as opposed to one where it is practiced, but rarely) certainly is an example of a society where the power is so concentrated in the hands of such a few, that the ranks of the destitute and desperate are artificially swollen by a manufactured shortage of supply.
Guilt is a trickier issue. Definitely each person is responsible for his own moral decisions. The man who straps on the suicide bomb is 100% responsible for his own actions. But in a society like the one we’re describing, the polygamous alpha male is also responsible for the situation in which the suicide bomber omega-male finds himself, even if he didn’t, metaphorically, pull the trigger.
I agree, Zach. We’re on the same page.
Ron Coleman’s last blog post..The word and the thought
Last Saturday I listened to a fascinating Ian Punnett interview on late night radio with a former polygamist wife now 71 years old and mother of 14 of her husband’s 58 children.
Irene Spencer.
Chapter one from her book.
A few excerpts:
As we were growing up, polygamy was the ruling tenet of our lives. This “Celestial Law†was so integral to who we were and what we were trying to accomplish that most often, we referred to it simply as “the Principle.†Everything else we were to do or not do, be or not be (a great deal, as it turns out) was ancillary to this: men were to have as many wives and as many children as they possibly could during the few years they walked this Earth. It was upon the conclusion of those trying, earthly years that we would all reap the divine rewards for our obedience to the Principle.
As children, we were not just taught to honor the Principle, we were taught to claim it as our birthright. We were born into it; no conversion was necessary. “You are God’s chosen ones, his special children of the covenant†we were told at home and at Sunday meeting, during visits to and from friends, and in all the literature we were allowed to read. We consequently viewed with great suspicion the few strange souls who occasionally tried to join our ranks from the outside. More likely than not they were mere deviants, men who got off on the idea of God-sanctioned sex with multiple women who were bound by oath to endure it. These were not children of the Principle. Children of the Principle understood that polygamy was all about future glory.
THE PRINCIPLE WAS NEITHER a license for male promiscuity (…) nor a gratuitous call to suffering (…). In harmony with our teaching that “as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become,†the Principle was, quite simply, the way of God.
…
While here on Earth, before he was sacrificed for the sins of humanity, Jesus himself had at least two wives, Mary Magdalene being one of them. When Jesus returns to resurrect the dead, he will exalt to the highest level of celestial glory all male children of the covenant who have succeeded well in living the Principle. They will become gods of their own worlds.
…
A man who acquires at least two wives in this life is thought worthy of being such a god, and one with seven or more (called a quorum) is practically assured of it. The wives and children sealed to a deserving man while on Earth will assist him in populating the world he is given to rule over in the next link of this godhood chain. The larger his family here, the better head start they’ll have there.
Look, let’s not sugar coat this. This is a freak show writ large. Polygamy is a bad idea for everyone involved.
HankB
The lack of clarity was never intended to convey any notions of sugar coating polygamy.
The mindset of the women of polygamy as promoted by the LDS and the FLDS is critical to understanding the religious teachings of mormonism and why these women remain under the servitude of the leader.
In the LDS and the FLDS, Jesus was a polygamist, Adam was a God and all the followers will become a god or goddess, and by the way don’t listen to anyone else. And it’s a good idea to ignore the bible and just read the Book of Mormon.
The spiritual leaders strive to become gods and the women goddesses and somewhere in future life everyone will get their own universe to control.
That seems to be the driving force for FLDS and LDS.
Polygamy is foundational to the LDS.
It was disavowed only when it became necessary for Utah statehood. That caused a bunch of LDS to go to Mexico…like the George Romney (Mitt Romney) people.
According to Irene Spencer, polygamy exists (under the table) in sectors of Salt Lake City.
I’m willing to bet the LDS Church will not come out publically to support the abandoned young men nor ex-polygamist wives.
I could be wrong.
McKiernan: LDS itself condemned the practice of polygamy well over 100 years ago, and practicing it is immediate grounds for being excommunicated from their church. Only a radical minority of Mormon groups still practice this, and they’re shunned by the mainstream church.
The standing doctrine of the Mormons is that under certain circumstances polygamy is mandatory and encouraged, however, we haven’t lived in such a time in over a century and no one believes we’ll be in that time again in the foreseeable future.
This is all standard LDS doctrine.
We don’t need to believe as mormons believe to try to avoid lying about them or ascribing to them actions or doctrines they don’t hold to.
Here and here are two very good articles from a Mormon perspective on polygamy. The whole site is about unfair things people say or believe about Mormons, and correcting the record, so it’s worth pursuing.
I myself don’t think Joseph Smith was a prophet and I think the Book of Mormon is full of false teaching. That doesn’t, however, make Mormons bad or dangerous people, nor would it excuse lying about them or their church.
Anybody contemplate this from the standpoint of organized crime, racketeering and federal RICO statutes? What if a case could be made that this religion and church conceal and facilitate a racket where an elite circle of insiders breed-out women and girls and in turn collect the welfare and government subsidy checks on the dependents, then pour the proceeds into the financial coffers of the FLDS church? It seems the money would all be controlled by a few select men. Is there governmental money involved? Is there a systematic racketeering to enlarge and divert federal and state handouts? On one hand, this is a throwback religious cult. On the other hand, this is a sophisticated financial and organizational system. Depending how these women are used to produce children and if the children are used to produce incoming revenue defaulted to the church, aspects of such a system might even potentially trigger sex trafficking and/or slavery statutes.
Imagine the potential amount of state and federal money that could be diverted into the coffers of such a church every month and thereby into the hands of a few select men. I don’t know if that particular FLDS location actually gets welfare, ADC or other outlays, but it seems like those men have a lot of time of their hands, and the church seems to have substantial assets and financial resources. Maybe they do it without any governmental aid or assistance. It would be interesting to know.
Believe it or not, Willem, the answer to your question is pretty much “yes” to all of the above. Although I won’t go so far as to say that the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in specific (they are one particular branch of the polygamous Mormon fringe) has benefitted as you describe, racketeering pretty much exactly as you describe does go on. And before someone goes after this as simply Mormon dirty laundry, stop: there are a number of fringe cultist Fundamentalist Christians who, using nothing but the Bible, assert that it’s absolutely biblical and desirable to practice polygyny, and who do everything you just described: “marrying” multiple women, then divorcing them, then having them go on welfare as “single” moms, and channeling the welfare money into their own or their tiny “church’s” pockets.
This is a serious issue, and it’s thorny as hell. If you’re not in a state where it’s happening, you figure it’s just a non-issue. But if you’re in states like Utah, Texas, Idaho, and a few others where these Christian and Mormon cults are active, it’s a *huge* headache for local officials.
Because here’s what it looks like: a bunch of conservatively dressed, apparently very religiously devout people, wearing clothes that make them look like old-time farm families and whatnot, are living together and claiming this is God’s desire for them. They’re very serious, including the women. Now: how do you think it looks on the 6:00 News when people all over the state see footage of cops dragging a genial-looking, white-haired farmer man out of his simple house in handcuffs while screaming and crying women and children beg them to leave Daddy alone?
You think cops are real anxious for that to show up in the news? No matter how people feel about polygamy, there’s just no way any cop wants to be part of that, and not many judges or prosecutors want to either.
This is why, when you *rarely* see this on the news, it’s because one of these cults has pushed it way too far; they’ve begun “marrying” 13 year old girls to 50 year old men (which they can, by the way, justify by quoting biblical verses literally), or making themselves extremely wealthy by being too ostentatious with how they use that welfare money they’re getting from their 10 or 15 or 20 wives.
All of this is happening, amongst both Mormon AND fundamentalist Christian cults, in a number of areas in the country. AND these folks are VERY good at pressing the case that they have a 1st amendment right to do this–which they may have a case on, which is *another* reason cops and prosecutors are *VERY* reluctant to go after these people; they might wind up being the test case for the courts ruling that polygamy is a Civil Right.
This is all why I grind my teeth when people pretend that there is no polygamy problem in the United States, or it’s only a Muslim problem, or even just Mormon problem. No, bullshit. Mormon, Muslim, and Fundamentalist Christians alike are all doing this, in the hundreds of thousands in the United States, and for mostly political reasons the authorities only go after them very rarely.
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