The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 3 of 17)

Lorna Craig /p>

Mr. Tucker is right to notice a cultural elitist warming to polygamy, like the trial balloons that liberal elites float every few months in the press that teenagers need more sleep, therefore school should start later (instead of making the kids go to bed earlier, as people have been doing for five millennia). This past week there was a reference in the blogworld reminding (or educating) the world that the Republican Party was established in opposition to both slavery and polygamy. Guess those Republicans are much more current than the Democrats give them credit for.

As a practical matter, polygamy is a disaster and no coddled, comfy bunch of spoiled brat ivory tower film-makers should glamorize something that produces weak families, a hive of half-brothers and sisters who learn at an early age to scramble and compete amongst each other for scarce family resources and the patriarch's attention. How bizarre to have this other peculiar institution be suddenly attractive to well-fed and self-indulged women who have spent the last forty years whining about patriarchal societies!

Real women who live under polygamy must support their own offspring, competing against the other wives. First wives HATE the second wives and enlist the third and fourth wives against the hapless woman who spoiled the monogamous fantasy and dream that the first wife had, for a little while, with the man who'd promised her that she would be the only one.

At nutrition rehabilitation centers in Kenya, over 80 percent of children admitted with marasumus and kwashiorkor (in non-famine periods) were from second wives, rarely from first wives.

African woman have said that what woman invests much in a marriage if she knows her husband can ignore her concerns and come home with another wife? When one hears such heartfelt things, one understands just how important the marriage union -- as defined by the Bible -- one man/one wife -- is to the human spirit. Sons and daughters of mothers in polygamous marriages bitterly ask why their father took another wife, wasn't their mother good enough?

p>There is so much wrong with polygamy -- and so much wrong about the fluffy-headed and profoundly ignorant dismissal of polygamy as just another lifestyle. It's another lifestyle all right, but don't for a moment believe it's a good one. Go live in a polygamous society and witness its pathologies first hand. Polygamous societies do not produce families that work together and sacrifice together as monogamous societies do. Perhaps Hollywood and the liberal elite with too many multiple marriages and unhappy half-siblings considers polygamy not so far off what they are already doing. They would be correct, of course. br> -- Cameron Gressly /p> p> I would like to thank David James Hanson for his response to William Tucker's "Polygamy and Me." Armed with the word in Iraq. Outstanding! br> -- Martin N. Tirrell br> Lisbon, New Hampshire

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