Polygamy Essays - Mating Systems, Marriage, Family, Gender, Polygamy

Polygamy Polygamy is the practice of a man taking more than one wife at the same time. Polyandry is when a woman takes more that one husband at the same time. Polyandry is rare compared to polygamy, because it is only known to be inexistence in two parts of the world. One is among the Nair people who are inhabitants of India's Malabar Coast. The other is in Tibet, where a woman can take her husband's brothers as her mates. This paper will be focused strictly on the debate over polygamy. It does more harm than good and should be banned and enforced strongly within the United States' borders. Being married to more than one person at the same time has been illegal in the U.S. since 1862, but has not been enforced strictly. The Mormon Church is well known for practicing polygamy, but the church banned it in 1980. Over a period of forty years, the church endured serious federal efforts to crack down on the practice of polygamy. Dr. Irwin Altman, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City say, ?Today there are some twenty thousand to forty thousand people who are practicing polygamy in the state of Utah.? He also states, ?Some forty years ago, the numbers were within the hundreds or low thousands.? It has also been estimated that there is an equal amount scattered around the rest of the United States. This number is said to be as large as a hundred thousand people, just in America alone. Most of these people reside in the western states of the United States. The patriarch figure in these unions usually does one of two things when it comes to additional wives. He either marries his first wife legally and then is sealed to the other wives, in a religious ceremony or he divorces one wife (but stays with her) before he marries another wife and repeats this process. So these men seek a civil marriage license only once and the brides to follow are taken in private religious ceremonies. In other words, since they do not have legal marriage licenses, they have no right under the government to have these marriages. Also the husband has two choices when it comes to the living arrangements as well. He can keep the entire family in a single home, whereas other polygamy husbands may have each of his wives living under different roofs. When it comes to spending time with each of his wives and his children, there is a schedule that everyone follows, but it is flexible and can be moved around to fit almost everyone's needs. Carmen Thompson, a former wif e of a Mormon polygamist says, ?Depending on the number of wives a man has he usually spends one night out of the week with each wife and her children by him.? When special events come up everyone does their best to make accommodations. It is extremely hard for birthdays and anniversaries to fit into the schedule and so they are pretty much nonexistent. Carmen Thompson said that on her honeymoon one of the other wives came to visit. This other wife wanted to have another child, and her ideal breeding time just happened to fall right in the middle of the honeymoon. So the new wife had to watch the children while the other wife spent the night with the husband, in the bedroom. How many women would want this to happen to them on their honeymoon? Many polygamous groups believe that a woman should have a baby every year. The idea is that there are spirits in heaven waiting to get a body to come to earth in, and if they are not born into a Mormon family, they will be born into a bad family, one that is not Mormon. The fathers usually force their teenage daughters to marry once they have started their menstrual cycle. On an average these younger girls are about fourteen years old. The number has, however gone as low as the age of nine, when a girl is married off. Keep in mind that most of these girls have never known things to be any different. Most