Polygamy, evil du jour
Posted on April 11th, 2008 by Sterkworks
I don’t know much about polygamy, but what I do know, I am going to tell you here.
- My lines of Mormon family members always came through a first wife. So we are all legal and legit.
- A great-great- something grandfather of mine was the tailor to Brigham Young, and he made all of the cute striped prison outfits when a bunch of them were thrown in jail for polygamy
- I would so do Barbara Henrickson (Jeanne Tripplehorn) on “Big Love” in a second. I wouldn’t let the other wives watch. I would lock Bill Henrickson in the basement.
- The Mormon church denounced polygamy, which it still considers an eternal principle, in the late 1800s so Utah could become a state.
- The Bountiful, Utah Mormon community rallied around a polygamist after he bashed in my car windshield with a baseball bat when my step-daughter was driving and my daughter was in the back seat. My step-daughter was dropping off the polygamist’s daughter and he thought my step-daughter was a boy. Nobody ever asked how WE, the lesbian family was. The police wouldn’t even press charges. Tis better to be a polygamist than a lesbian in Utah.
That is about all I know. And that the women dress funny, but that would be shallow, because I dress funny. So hey, sisters in bad taste.
That is soooo wrong!
Apparently the state doesn’t have a problem supporting blackmailers either. Utah wouldn’t cooperate with Colorado’s investigation so no criminal charges could ever be pressed against the five who blackmailed me and my best friend.
I guess it is also better to be a blackmailer than an apostate!
www.lisaandmilhouse.blogspot.com
Polygamists make me angry…and not just because (historically speaking) my relatives were low-ranking wives. I hate that it’s blindly accepted as an eternal principal when it all started because the founding sex-offender couldn’t keep it in in his fucking pants.
It is truly hideous that the police refused to help you with that douche-plyg. Disgusting.
Who me, issues?
@Junipurr and @Pants, yes, I am still disgusted with the way the police handled my situation. And I always felt sorry for the children because they parents would not take the kids to doctors or the hospital for medical help. Fear of being found out? Not sure.
That’s funny about pointing out that the lines of your Mormon ancestry all came through the first wife. My family is the same way — we have a lot of polygamist ancestors, yet my mom (the genealogy buff) was careful to point out to me that we descend from the legal wife in each case.
That’s horrible about the incident with a polygamist damaging your car (and apparently threatening your step-daughter). Couldn’t you press charges yourself?
I realize that in my discussion over on Main Street Plaza I appear to be defending the polygamists, but really I’m just defending their right to be treated fairly by the judicial system, as I would for even the most brutal criminals.
Overall, I think there’s a real benefit to having this story (the raid) discussed openly as much as possible. There are a whole lot of people out there who are absolutely ready to vote away civil liberties until they’re the ones in the hot seat who need the Constitution to protect them. The problem is often a question of never having thought about it, and this highly questionable Baptist vs. Mormon incident in Texas will provide new motivation for a lot of people to think hard about separation of church and state and how it should work. (In this case it looks to me like the authorities didn’t have “probable cause” to seize so many children, and if authorities delegated part of the organization and logistics of the raid to the Baptist church, then it almost certainly violates the establishment clause in the first amendment.)
In a few posts over on MSP we’ve tried to explain to the Mormons that they need to stop thinking “the religious right hates feminism, science, and gay people just like I do, and the enemy of my enemy is my ally,” but rather realize that — as a religious minority — their true allies should be other minorites. I hope this will help gain a few more voices in support of the rights of even more unpopular minorities in Utah.
Anyway, sorry for the elaborate tangent. Cool blog!!! I’d like to add you to Outer Blogness if you don’t mind.