Letters to the Editor
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do the math
Hello,
I read your article with great interest. However, as someone for whom marriage is impossible under the law - my "marriage" to my same-sex partner of 20 years has no legal status - I was hoping to read more about that other danger to the definition of traditional marriage: polygyny. Your article was about the progeny a fundamentalist sect where the leader married 30 of his late father's youngest prettiest wives. Whenever I read about these polygynous sects the numbers never add up: if one man gets to marry 30 women, what do 29 other men get? The article answered this question though I wish the real reason for the banishment of these surplus males had been made more explicitly. That reason, in addition to that other prickly issue - the virtual enslavement of women and girls in polygynous sects for the purposes of sex and childbearing - is why same-sex marriage and polygmamous/polygynous marriage are worlds apart. Yet, the defenders of traditional marriage have been getting away with putting same-sex marriage just inches above polygyny on the slippery slope that leads straight to a future where marriage could be one man married to his goldfish.