It intrigues me greatly that mainstream American society, which is open to all sorts of ideas about sexual identity and different family types, is so intolerant of polygamy. I can understand, to some degree, where this intolerance comes from. Polygamy, as it has been practiced in the United States and elsewhere, has done its fair share to create rigid hierarchies, inequality and resentment within families. It is precisely the sort of situation that could facilitate exploitation and abuse, and in the case of Warren Jeffs of the FLDS Church, it has done just that. In sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, where polygamy is part and parcel of various communities’ traditional practices, there are many cases where the institution has been abused to force teenage girls into marriage to older men. However, it would be dismissive to run up a catalog of all the evils that have been committed in the name of polygamy and then say that was the full story about it. The truth of the matter is...
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