Letters to the Editor
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2nd Amendment
Someone needs to give these boys a little weaponry, and then they can settle the hash of ol' Methusalah, point blank. There are some issues that only can be settled directly.
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I believe in Karma
Or at least I used to.. I also like the word "humanity", it's supposed to get you all excited about humans and the human condition. At least somebody put forth the effort to help some of these kids and bring them some productive and positive structure. That wanna-be theocrat pedophile should be stuck on a pig pole, but would I then be sacrificing my humanity?
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the perils of belief
I've read Krakauer's book, and I was fascinated by it, much the same way a cobra would be fascinating, I suppose.
This is what happens when belief is unmediated by reality. Human beings have this lovely forebrain, that, in a perfect world, would mediate between reality and the primitive lizard-brain. This process often seems to work the other way round though. The lizard-brain uses that beautiful forebrain for its own purposes. A chief purpose, in males anyway, being absolute domination. The lizard-brain craves domination. Manipulating belief, yours and those of others, is as direct-a-path to domination as anything could be. Facts are tougher to manipulate. Better to banish them wherever possible.
Belief is a dangerous thing. The next time someone says they believe something, try challenging them with reality and see what happens...because most human beliefs are at some odds with reality. Truly sane people get their beliefs in line with reality, and, if you think about it, perfect sanity probably involves complete harmony between perception and reality...no belief AT ALL.
What a concept. Imagine a world with no belief. For starters, maybe Bill Frist would shut the fuck up and go crawl back under whatever rock he came from..along with all the other "believers."
Belief has allowed us to dominate the planet, and each other. And it is belief that will destroy us. Just as it is slowly destroying the people of Colorado City.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you...
...for this wonderful article. This is Salon journalism at its near-best.
Someone previously mentioned the Bountiful, BC colony of FLDS. They have their own sad collection of Lost Boys, proving what the gay letter-writer pointed out - this is a side effect of this type of systemic polygamy which puts it in an entirely different zip code from gay marriage.
An interview with some of Bountiful's "Lost Boys" is here:
http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/05/26/Bountiful/
and there's much more about the Bountiful cult on the website for CBC's "The Fifth Estate" (a kind of Canadian "60 Minutes") here:
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/bustupinbountiful/
Whoever said, "please let's see more of this and fewer boring lifestyle pieces" was right on! Kudos, Salon.
ronron
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Dirty Little Secret
First of all, thank you for this well-written and journalistically sound article. Having been raised (mainstream) Mormon, I think it's important to add something that often gets overlooked when the subject of 'plural marriage' arises. ALL MORMONS, MAINSTREAM OR OTHERWISE, STILL BELIEVE IN POLYGAMY. The church attempts to distance itself from its polygamist past by pointing out that the practice was 'officially' disconinued in 1890 (the US would never have admitted Utah to the union otherwise), but polygamous marriages were performed for several years after that. More importantly, current Mormons believe that a widower can be married ('sealed') to more than one wife. A notable example of this is current church Apostle Russell M. Nelson; after his first wife died, he has since remarried. He has been 'sealed for time and all eternity' to both these women, rendering him a de facto polygamist (I choose Mr Nelson for this example deliberately; he was recently the church's envoy to the Bush administration's failed drive to enact a contitutional amendment stating marriage = one man + one woman). Despite their ancestors' involvement in flesh-and-blood unorthodox living and sleeping arrangements, god forbid (literally!) today's Mormons from tolerating same-sex unions. The hypocrisy of this will be lost on the average believing Mormon. So while Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney attempts to crack wise about polygamy, I can assure you that growing up a privileged white male in the church-- a patriarichal, male-dominated organization if there ever was one--he and I both often heard serious, good ol' boy references to the fact that a man can be sealed to more than one one woman and that in the great mormon hereafter we'll be free to procreate and populate worlds to our heart's content with our harem of submissive beauties. To be fair, over the years I participated in the church these references diminished considerably, but this in my mind is directly related to the church's current obsession with favorable public opinion (an example of which is church officials' insistence that 'Big Love' producers run a disclaimer at the end of the first episode stating Bill Paxton & co. are not in fact 'Latter Day Saints', Mormons current preferred name for themselves). So there you go--a simple internet search can provide you with much more fascinating reading if you like--as for me, I'm off to rent 'Scary Movie' and hopefully talk to some Gentile women at the video store.
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Sad facts o' life...
The sad facts are that the many gay marriage proponents here are ranting in the face of what will be the future (and soon) if gay marriage activists have their way.
Once marriage ceases to be defined as "one man, one woman", then basically it is a free-for-all. Why only TWO individuals? Because of LIFE INSURANCE? that's absurd, you can (even now) divide a life insurance policy into as many portions as you can think of. Because of HEALTH INSURANCE? Ha, you think health insurers (barely willing to pay for the items they are pledged to cover NOW) are going to line up to reimburse multiple adults in the same household?
You can bet your last cent that the second gay marriage is the law of the land, it will take maybe ten seconds for a polygamist (or polygyny or polyamory or what have you) triad to show up and demand the same rights. While I decry the indivduals who compare any human relationships to bestiality, you have to admit that if gender plays no role in marriage (despite milennia of existence), then there really is no such thing as marriage....just multiple individuals, in varying degrees of committment, possibly raising unrelated children to whom they may or may not feel obligated long-term and all looking for some kind of tax break or handout from the government! In this instance, marriage as any kind of institution basically ceases to exist, so "good luck" trying to get various insurers to honor it with cold, hard cash.
Perhaps that is what some people want: loosely defined, ad hoc relationships that form and dissolve with no rules, children raised by non-relations, gender defined as some kind of "bad thing". HELLO! There is not a single human being on earth, even in this era of test tube babies and IVF who was not gestated in the womb of a woman. There are precious few human beings who were not raised by a woman, and the vast majority by the woman who gestated them.
We are tampering with something very precious and very intrinsic to human existence, all to placate a very small minority (roughly 3% of the population by the estimates of gay activists themselves, and fully HALF of that number are opposed to gay marriage themselves.)
Polygamy is the absolute, natural outcome of destroying our current system of "one man, one woman marriage". You can count on that.