Question about polygamy and Mormans and the boys

conyat · May 27, 2007, 10:30pm

Oh boy, a sarcastic OP-ed from a person with an axe to grind. That’s original, HH. Always with the bitter insult over reason.

Frankly, your motives in trying to make people insecure about standing up for their country and its values are paper-thin. It’s like the abuser who goes around telling everyone his wife is a liar and having an affair so that no one will believe her if she comes forward to explain the black eyes.

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That op-ed suuuuure invalidates the teachings of D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and James Hagee–all of whom have called for Christians to have dominion over everyone else in America, as well as the party plank of the Texas Republicans that the separation of church and state is to be destroyed.

From the Texas Republican party platform:

Christianity is to be exalted over all other religions:

On destroying the separation of church and state:

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Here is something Kurtz said in the Op-ed that’s patently untrue. “They [the religious were right] were goaded into defensive action by the post-sixties secularist challenge to their way of life.”

It’s already been well established that they were goaded into action by the loss of tax exemptions for their schools that practiced institutional racism.

The catalyst was the Bob Jones U. losing its tax exemption, even after it agreed to admit blacks, for banning inter-racial dating.

I suppose you could consider the institutional racism of Jones and Falwell part of “their way of life”…fair enough…but it was more than just “secularists” challenging it. Plenty of religious people spoke out against discrimination too, among them Dr. King, and many, many Catholic clery and bishops.

In addition, there have been numerous examples of religious discrimination by government officials belonging to the religious right over the past few years, as most Catholic would be aware, given that Catholics have frequently been the brunt of it.

One small example: <a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/13/AR2007041302347_pf.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/13/AR2007041302347_pf.html</a>

Catholics serving in Iraq have reported pressure from superior officers to convert to Evangelical Protestantism, and Catholics in prison have been pressured to convert by government-funded “rehabilitation” programs.

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Another quote from Kurtz:

Kurtz is confused about who’s dangerous:

Pastor Hagee, who has the ear of many a Republican politician:

Hagee believes that 2/3 of the population of Israel will be killed in the resulting conflict, but it’s the price to pay for the true Christians getting taken to heaven in the Rapture. He doesn’t seem to have said whether he expects any Iranians at all to survive.

What do you call a pre-emptive military strike launched against another people for religious reasons, except genocide?

ldmom06 · May 27, 2007, 11:48pm

hh - To insinuate means to ‘hint around’ at something. I’m not hinting here. I’m flat out concerned a lot of the recent PR work by the Mormon Church is for the purpose of affecting a Presidential election. I don’t like it. I don’t like it when liberals try to register illegal aliens for the vote; and I don’t like it when conservatives try to control elections from the pulpit. I…don’t…like …it.

Have I removed enough of the dreaded ‘insinuation’ factor for you yet? I’m trying so hard to please you HH…but it just seems I can never make you happy (little tear… )

lealdragon · May 28, 2007, 12:28am

interesting quote (not sure who said it):

“The only difference between a religion and a cult is the size of its membership.”

Something to think about.

Princedog · May 28, 2007, 1:22am

I think this is a little chicken and egg…is the PR work so much “recent” as recently getting attention because of the controversy surrounding Romney? As far as I know the church of LDS has always been a very proselytizing religion. I haven’t noticed that much of a difference as of late, maybe they have been laying the groundwork for a really long time so we wouldn’t notice.

Though this was an interesting read: <a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050901770.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050901770.html</a>

But presidential politics in America encompasses a lot of games. Controlling the election from the pulpit, as you put it - is that really any worse than the other numerous smoke and mirror tactics? Probably not really. I suppose your real problem is any smoke and mirror tactics, but I suppose we’d need a very different culture and election system to avoid that, unfortunately.

I have several Mormon friends who are lovely people who I wouldn’t consider racist at all, although they are very conservative. Basically the gay marriage issue would not be something they were open to, which is a problem for me, but I have non Mormon religious friends with the same issues on that. I’m not bothered by the idea of a Mormon president over another religion per se, but I don’t agree with any of Romney’s ideas for the direction of the country, so beyond his religion, small problem. I wouldn’t vote him, but then again, hey, I would never have voted for our current president. Obviously someone did.

lealdragon · May 28, 2007, 10:24am

Wow, conyat, you ROCK! #121 great post!

lealdragon · May 28, 2007, 10:25am

I agree…

citygirlsmom · May 28, 2007, 12:14pm

HH, I started this thread because I was really curious, and when you study a religion, you study the country it was founded in, ie the United States

The history of polygamy, the lost boys, the young girls, the reasoning behind it has been twisted, covered up, denied, lied about, myths have been created, and even on this thread, with lots of smart people, we still don’t have a handle on the truth, because its been hidden

This is an undeniable part of our nations past, and we currently have some serious issues in certain parts of the country that mirrors what was practiced a hundred years ago

If the truth is covered up, and the motives are denied or convoluted, we have learned nothing

higherlead · May 28, 2007, 12:54pm

citygirlsmom - polygamy today in these small breakaway Mormon sects and as practiced in the 19th century are different critters in some ways. For starters 19th century Mormomism was a rapidly growing sect and the missionaries actively recruiting women and families into the sect probably cut down significantly on the difficulty of the young Mormom male had to find a wife. Afterall all he had to do was go out and convert one or even better yet convert her whole family.

The other aspects you focus on, the leaders taking other mens wives, how have things changed in the 21st century. Powerful men will always want women - just ask ill Clinton and women will always want to breed with the Alpha male even when they want the beta male for a spouse (which explains why 15% of kids don’t have the father mom tells them they have). Women in the 19th century had pretty limited choices in non-Mormom, non-plural marriage religions too and were married off to powerful men more or less against their will. Read Henry James if you don’t elieve me.

What happens today in these small breakaway sects is something else because there is not a big inflow of new recruits. Whatever our current Western Christian attitudes toward polygamy it is still widely practiced and accepted among many non-Western societies. As we become one world with relatively open borders we will eventually have to accommodate these different mores in the United States as an alternative lifestyle. Mormon history cannot be understood outside of the context of the narrowminded prejudices of the 19th century.

We as a society should probably stop prosecuting these polygamous sects for polygamy and accept the fact that because of immigration we will have to deal with new types of families. We should concentrate instead on the statutory rape aspects of it and begin to codify and regularize consenual adult plural marriage.

conyat · May 28, 2007, 1:42pm

“these small breakaway Mormon sects”

A common tactic of the right is to obscure the truth by trying to make something seem smaller than it is. There are probably 37,000 Mormon fundamentalists, with half of them in polygynous households. There are whole towns in the West that function as fundamentalist Mormon theocracies. Lest anyone say 37,000 is a small number, remember than in 150 years, the much smaller early Mormon church grew to 10 million strong.

At least higherlead’s contempt for women is out in the open now.

This is too hateful to even be worthy of discussion, other than to note that it shows up in the same post where as a rant against “prejudice.”

But not prepubescent girls the way the Mormons did.

We’ve already done that. Polygamists are typically only being prosecuted where there is fraud or child molestation. Nice way to again try to obscure the truth.

How deceitful to try to blame this on immigration, when immigration has nothing to do with it.

The cultures that are the largest sources of immigration do not practice plural marriage. Outside of the US, polygyny is most associated with Muslims in the Middle East and Africa; neither of these groups is well represented in immigration statistics. Indeed, Muslim immigration is becoming less rather than more common.

You would be a lot more convincing without all the false witness. Jes’ saying.

ucsd_ucla_dad · May 28, 2007, 2:22pm

I don’t see how any of this discussion has anything to do with the ‘right’. Do you somehow think the ‘right’ condones the practice of polygamy?

sjmom2329 · May 28, 2007, 2:28pm

ucsducladad, you have to understand that some people ascribe any and all negative behaviors or attitudes to the “right.” It’s like the boogie man – or communists during the 1950’s.

conyat · May 28, 2007, 2:33pm

I was referring to higherlead, who used the tactic. It wasn’t about polygamy; it was about the tactic that was used and the individual poster’s motivation for doing so. Please don’t take it out of context.

I guess I can expect no less than this kind of condescending insult from the person who on another thread misrepresented my position 180 degrees, then called me nasty names on the basis of a position she made up and attributed to me…then lamented how “political” the discussion had become.

If there’s a flaw in my argument, why not point it out, instead of the ad feminam attacks all the time?

ucsd_ucla_dad · May 28, 2007, 2:43pm

Since Higherlead is an individual and doesn’t represent ‘the right’ I assumed you were actually referring to ‘the right’ in your post since that’s who you referred to rather than HL. I wasn’t taking anything out of context.

conyat · May 28, 2007, 2:50pm

Let me break it down for you:

My assertion is that the right commonly uses this tactic.

My assertion is that higherlead is a right-wing poster.

My assertion is that higherlead used this tactic.

This is all that’s implied by the statement: “A common tactic of the right is to obscure the truth by trying to make something seem smaller than it is.”

Get it now? The fact that he/she used it to defend polygyny is incidental. Nothing in my statement implies that the right as a whole supports polygyny. He/she could have been posting in support of JiffyPop popcorn using the same tactic, and I would have made the same observation.

It’s making a huge leap to go from: “That tactic is used by the right” to “The right supports the argument that the tactic was used to support”.

I do believe that you made this leap in good faith, but it’s still an unfair assessment of my position.

ucsd_ucla_dad · May 28, 2007, 2:57pm

Conyat:

No need to be so combative. I merely asked a question based on your post - I wasn’t making any leaps. You could have simply answered the question or ignored it.

higherlead · May 28, 2007, 4:36pm

“A common tactic of the right is to obscure the truth by trying to make something seem smaller than it is. There are probably 37,000 Mormon fundamentalists, with half of them in polygynous households.”

Um yeah in a population of 300,000,000+ that certainly seems like a big problem to me. Lets jump right on it. Once we get it fixed we can start looking into the 20,000,000 illegal aliens in the country. [edited to remove ad hominem comment - Mod JEM]

citygirlsmom · May 28, 2007, 4:44pm

Again, when history is denied, as the Mormons have denied theirs to a large degree, sugar coating and justifying a practice that they stopped when external pressures came, not some “revelation” from God-

And still there is no real record of what happened to the males of the community who weren’t able to take a wife, and we see TODAY the practice of kicking out the young males in the sects.

nice stretch there higherlead to go to illigeal aliens, that is a right wing tactic right there, if the truth hurts, to change the subject

higherlead · May 28, 2007, 5:18pm

While there is no difinitive estimate of the Muslim population in the USA the estimates range from a low of 1.1 million to a high of nearly 7 million. Among reputable sources the CIA Factbook put it at 2.98 million in 2002 and the Encyclopedia of Brittanica puts it at 4.7 million.

How many Muslims practice plural marriage? That numer too is unknown but the percentage is probably very low. How many marry their 12 year old cousins from Pakistan? That percentage is higher though still unknown. Compare that to conyats 37,000 members of various LDS schismatic sects 18,000 of whom may be in plural marriages. How many of those are unhappy with those marriages is yet another question.

If you want to look for mistreated, exploited, and enslaved women you might want to start in any red light district in the country and if you bump into Bill Clinton down there tell him Hillary is looking for him. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t women trapped in ad situations and child exploitation going on in some of these groups, but it does mean that in the big scheme of things this is not a national prolem.

If a typical rightwing tactic is to minimize a problem to make it seem smaller than it is I guess a typical conyat tactic is to obscure the facts to make a problem seem way way bigger than it is. Then like every problem real or imagined blame it on the least popular republican you can find.

conyat · May 28, 2007, 5:31pm

Au contraire. Anytime a person’s civil rights are violated in this country, it’s a national problem. All the more so when it’s systematic, organized behavior. And there is no denying that at least some of the polygynous sects have practiced false imprisonment, forced labor, and sexual slavery of minors. They’ve also used violence to prevent people from accessing their civil rights, such as the right to petition law enforcement for help and the right to refuse consent to marriage or intercourse.

Our integrity as a nation depends on liberty and justice for ALL, not just some or even most.

higherlead · May 28, 2007, 5:47pm

Yeah my side is guilty of character assassination. Which conservative operative was it who said “you never know what you’ll find when you drag a $100 bill through a trailer park” and then in the next breath self-righteously decried the politics of personal destruction.

If conservative have any one notable political problem it is that they will not go for the throat or sink as low as the operatives on the other side. The fact is the only reason you are hanging on this thread is ecause Utah will never be in play for the Democrats but Mitt Romney might be. So try in some twisted convoluted way to tie him to some schismatic lunatic cult.

For my money I don’t even like Romney. Giuliani is the fellow I want to see get the nomination. This thread is not supposed to be aout politics ut rather about polygamy. If you want to talk polygamy fine otherwise I think I am done with you.

PS - got to get my “B” key fixed. Maybe I can get a new one from a White House keyboard if Barrack wins in '08.

Question about polygamy and Mormans and the boys

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