Let me tell you how it shall be: There’s one for you, nineteen for me!
Most of you recognize that as the first couple lines of Taxman by the Beatles (off the Revolver album, probably their best single work). No no no, I’m not talking about taxes today. If you want to see me talk about taxes, you can hit the archives.I’m talking about polygamy.
By way of disclaimer: polygamy and polyamory are two different things. If three or more consenting adults decide to enter into a fully informed plural relationship with mutually agreeable ground rules, more power to them. And good luck! What they do in private is none of my business and none of yours either, just like your bedroom is none of my business. That’s not what we’re talking about today.
You haven’t been able to watch the news this week without hearing about that polygamist compound that was raided in Texas, supposedly to find a 16 year old mother and her child — they don’t even know who or where she is.
You might have noticed something. We aren’t talking about consenting adults. We aren’t even talking about legal adults. We probably aren’t talking about all parties being fully informed, and we definitely aren’t talking about mutually agreeable ground rules or she wouldn’t have called the cops. See, there’s some key differences here.
But here’s where the story gets weird in my mind. This article from the Houston Chronicle was published several days ago, and includes this paragraph, emphasis mine:
Authorities believe the girl, who has an 8-month-old daughter, was 15 when she was married. A 2005 change in state law, prompted by concern about the sect, raised the state legal age for a girl to marry from 14 to 16.
Alright, follow me on this: it took until 2005 for Texas to raise the marriage age to 16. Texas’s age of consent has been so low for so long that it was a plot point in Gypsy! Can’t you just imagine the legislators debating: “But now, we can’t have those polygamists marrying off their 14 and 15 year olds! That’s only for our own daughters! We’ll fix those polygamists by making them break two laws instead of just one.”
Then there’s this article from USA Today. Apparently there was what amounts to a group sex room in the temple. I’ll leave off the snarky comments, as this is strange enough to stand on its own.
And then there’s this item from CNN, where they admit that these 400 kids are going to need foster homes (hey, some of them can be fostered with their own child-parents!) and that is going to be a big culture shock. They should have seen that coming, since our missing child bride “said that sect members warned her that if she ever left, outsiders would hurt her and force her to cut her hair, wear makeup and have sex with many men.” Hmm, and this is worse than living with one man who “beat and raped her” regularly while the other wives held her baby in what way?
Oh crap, I better paint my face before the makeup police come and force me to come to the group sex room at the temple!
Oops, </sarcasm>
On a more serious note, right now the Texas Department of Family Services has information on their front page about what is going on (from their point of view) and what you can do if you want to help. If you look at the timeline, it is really remarkable how fast they managed to get this all in motion, and I don’t envy them the task of finding homes for 400+ children, many of whom are related to one another.
In closing: how is it controversial that the Doctor has a daughter when they introduced a grandchild in episode one?; if only he put this much effort into his job they wouldn’t have fired him; Krugman on home prices and men who aren’t working; on health care; on not having health care (thanks to Suzie); Bruce Schneier said everything that needs to be said about the lady who let her 9 year old take public transportation home; Expert Ezra on soaring food costs and what a girl (or any other worker) wants; “You are going to get back into that jury room and keep deliberating until you find these scumbag terraists guilty!”; and finally, a heartwarming story about a woman who decided the time had come to speak her mind… in English.