THE RELIC OF BARBARISM -- legislatures must preserve one man one spouse

MISPLACED OBSESSIVENESS

Many Utahns obsess and fume over a federal judge’s recent ruling about same gender marriage in Utah, as if the judge wanted to redefine marriage so everyone had to marry someone after their own gender.    In fact, heterosexuals have through the ages corrupted marriage so thoroughly that amending the genders of matrimony hardly seems that major a deal. 

However, a few weeks before the Marriage Equality ruling, another federal judge made a ruling about Utah’s anti-polygamy laws that really does threaten cultural stability and the institution of marriage.

Sinister and unAmerican forces currently work toward a goal of invalidating Utah’s anti-polygamy statutes to reintroduce plural marriage into the American scene.  This must not happen.   Sound reasons required the end of Mormon polygamy in 1890, 1896, and 1904.  

 
DEMOGRAPHIC FACTUALNESS

Recently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on-line posted a study guide about polygamy.   It is, in some basic ways, inadequate but one of the notes features some usual information about polygamy in culture. 

This is the reference:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on-line
http://www.lds.org/topics/plural-marriage-and-families-in-early-utah?lang=eng&query=plural
16 December 2013
And the note:

“Recent calculations using a 3 percent growth rate and an average five-year age interval between husbands and wives at first marriage (reasonable estimates for the 19th-century Mormon population) indicate that the upper limit of sustainable polygamy in a stable society is 16 percent of husbands and 28 percent of wives. Davis Bitton and others, “Probing the High Prevalence of Polygyny in St. George, 1861–1880,” BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2012): 11–15.”

I admit I am frankly suspicious about the numbers.   However the concept, it seems to me, is strong.

1 Polygamy works only with the right percentage of women to men.

2 Polygamy works only in certain economic conditions.

Depending on the ratio of men married and unmarried to women married and unmarried, Same gender marriage probably will make polygamy more difficult, not less. 

Encyclopedias of Culture report that most cultures are polyandrist or polygamist.   None the less, the United States Constitution’s Amendment 14 would suggest that all men should have equal access to a monogamous marriage. 


 
THE CALL TO ACTION
Utah’s delegation in the U S Congress to work for A federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as monogamous and protected by the 14th Amendment.  

Utah’s anti - plural marriage laws need to be reworked to guarantee the rights of all men to one spouse.