Polygamy is one of those gray areas for me. I don’t really care what consenting adults do. If they want to live as a large family with one husband and a bunch of wives, that’s fine by me. It might not be legal, but I don’t think it is amoral. Where it goes awry is when cult like religious behavior warps the boundaries of propriety. From what I can tell (in my limited reading), this is the norm with polygamy, and it is normally wrapped in religious dogma.
Mormon offshoot cult member Allan Eugene Keate of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints is a good example. He raped a child given to him as a wife. Apparently, the giving of children as wives is a common practice.
The prosecution witnesses included a DNA expert who testified Keate had fathered a baby born to the teenager.
Some of the most dramatic testimony came Monday from Rebecca Musser, who was once married to Rulon Jeffs, the FLDS prophet. She told the jury she and other younger wives were ordered to marry Warren Jeffs after his father's death.
Who really cares what adults do with older consenting adults? (Except for Christians, who seem preoccupied with that question.)When a religious authority figure abuses children in the name of his religion, it is not hard to make the call on abuse. It’s like when Justice Potter Stewart commented on pornography by saying, “I know it when I see it.”
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