I've often been heard saying that if you could remove the emotional element, it would be beneficial to a household to have two or three wives. I still believe this to be somewhat true. Of course, the obvious problem is that you cannot remove the emotional element. The wives will inevitably become jealous of each other, or all become angry with the husband and things will get ugly. The husband would also either develop some kind of superiority complex and start treating his wives like shit, or would become so overloaded trying to provide for his wives that he becomes depressed and takes his own life. I don't see how to make it work.
The Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints church figured it out. Keeping in mind that I only have a very basic knowledge of this group based on news reports and Wikipedia, I have developed a loose opinion on this group. They appear to be the ugly retarded stepchild of the benevolent Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that grew up to be a serial rapist. The LDS church used to believe that in order to reach higher levels of salvation, a man had to have three or more wives. When the leaders of the Church saw that polygamy wasn't really working out, and women were getting mistreated, it became obvious to them that they were mistaken. This couldn't possibly be God's plan, otherwise so much evil wouldn't come of it. the LDS church banned polygamy and started excommunicating anyone still practicing it.
The FLDS group (I'm not even going to call them a church) didn't like this. They branched off and continued the practice of polygamy. The way they make it work is to have a very much patriarchal society, which means that women are second class citizens. I'd even take it so far to say they're more like property. From what I've researched, they don't even really believe in courting the opposite sex. The women are simply assigned to the men by the leadership of the group. The leaders are reputed to have several dozen wives each, with over sixty children in some cases.
Now, in these communities, several problems have taken route. Of course, in such a patriarchal society, the men have no respect for women (the women don't even respect themselves), and dominate them. Domination of this type often leads to rape, beatings, emotional abuse, etcetera. In fact, one of the main leaders of this group is currently serving a life sentence plus twenty years for aggravated sexual assault.
Another problem I can see developing is that there simply isn't enough women for the men to have so many wives. This will lead to adultery, hard feelings between the men, blame falling on the women, and eventually major feuds between families or even murder of the offending women and less often, their lovers.
This way of life seems very backward and downright evil to me. I like to think that western society has moved past the concept of slavery, treating women as second-class citizens, and arranged marriage. This bullshit needs to stop.
How do we stop it? There's a few options, but I'm not sure how to enact it. The government has stepped in a couple times (in most states and Canada, polygamy is unlawful) and raided polygamist communities, but what are you doing to do? Arrest an entire town? Where the hell do you put them? What do you do with the children? Putting hundreds of children into the foster system like that would be a major overload and do more harm than good.
I think the best option is education. I think if the men and women of these groups could see the evil taking place in their communities, they would likely do something about it. However, a system like this is based almost entirely on power. The men are powerful because they own women. The most powerful of the group own more women. Feeling powerful like that is a terrible seductress, so many of the men would likely just scoff at changing and continue living the way they are because they like it. Getting the information to the women would be very difficult, because they likely can't access much information without the permission of their men. Men won't allow it. The men have brainwashed the women and broken their spirit so they can't function properly as individuals.
What's the solution? I don't know. If it was easy, someone would have done it already. You can't help someone who doesn't want your help. If anyone out there has a solution, please make it public knowledge so we can help the people caught in this lifestyle but are actually good people. While helping these people is the priority, it wouldn't hurt my feelings to see the evil bastards involved in perpetuating this lifestyle punished.
And for me: instead of finding a second wife, I think I'll settle for a nanny that works for free and occasionally rubs my back.
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