Last week marked the first time in the last hundred years that a woman has been brought up on polygamy charges in the United States. The arrest is valid and overdue and should be part of a broader investigation into polygamy in the United States, or at least into the abuse and neglect that attends it in a number of polygamist communities.
The arrested woman is accused of abetting bigamy and illegal sex because, according to an Associated Press report, she told her 16 year-old sister that God wanted her to marry the woman's 36 year-old husband and that if she did not, she would "burn in hell" ("Utah woman charged with aiding and abetting polygamy," Oct. 14). Her husband also is accused of illegal sex.
This case is made even more pertinent by its location and timing. The accused couple is part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, an offshoot of the Mormon church (which outlawed polygamy in 1890 and ex-communicated all bigamists). The Fundamentalist Church membership is concentrated in a community on the Utah-Arizona border and, according to an AP report, is alleged to be involved in rape, domestic abuse and welfare fraud ("Polygamy controversy roils Arizona race," Oct. 14).
Currently, an independent candidate for Arizona governor, Richard Mahony, is running political ads comparing Fundamentalist Church's Colorado City, AZ community to David Koresh's Waco compund -- claiming that their crimes are "worse than Waco" -- and claiming that his opponents will be too soft on the group. While this candidate's statements are a bit dramatic, the problem of multiple marriages, and the often attendant abuse, ought to lead to more arrests.
There have been multiple reports in recent years of young women -- 15 and 16 years old -- escaping polygamist communities and telling of the coercion that happens there. One 15 year-old who left the Fundamentalist Church community in 2001 said that she did so because she was afraid that she would soon be married to a man twice her age -- this was after her 18 year-old boyfriend was expelled for his relationship with her. At the same time, another 15 year-old was suing in a Utah court to be allowed to leave the community and a 14 year-old's older sister was claiming that the younger girl was being held there against her will ("Teen-age girls flee Fundamentalist sect to avoid polygamy," Star-Tribune, Aug. 24, 2001).
In response to Mahony's allegations, Arizona Attorney General and Democratic candidate Janet Napolitano points to one arrest made in Colorado City and adds that the Church's secrecy makes investigation difficult. If the girls' accounts are any indication of typical behavior within the Fundamentalist Church, the lack of further charges is frustrating at best, negligent at worst.
It is one thing -- albeit an objectionable and illegal one -- for a group of consenting adults to choose to call themselves "married" and raise their half-siblings together. It is another thing altogether to compel teenage girls to marry men their father's age. Avoiding prosecution, and denying these young girls the protection the law ought to give them when their parents -- numerous as they may be -- fail to protect them, is inexcusable.
One pro-polygamy Web site (www.polygamy.com), which provides a page for families to advertise for additional wives, lists the "benefits" women receive from polygamy. They claim that polygamy "extends practical security to a woman. She needn't worry about losing her husband and income as she loses her looks, because if her husband is attracted by a younger woman, he doesn't even have to think about leaving his wife." This repulsive claim suggests that marriage is simply about physical attraction and money, despite the fact that one "plural wife" told Sports Illustrated, "We're not in this for romance, sex, money or status. We're in it for the spirituality" ("Be careful what you wish for," Feb. 16). The use of spirituality as rationalization is hard to swallow when polygamy is promoted as a way to -- technically -- avoid charges of infidelity and statutory rape.
An even more repulsive "advantage" is that, "polygamy removes or reduces the seduction of innocent young women. If a man promises to marry her, he cannot use his existing marriage as an excuse for not fulfilling a promise." This both assumes that abuse is only possible outside the bounds of marriage and denies the fact that girls who are coerced into marriage by their older sisters are, in fact, being preyed upon.
Polygamy is illegal throughout the United States. It might be a largely harmless crime, were it not for the abuse and coercion it often entails. The arrest of a woman for her role in this abuse and coercion is timely and significant. It represents a refusal to treat women simply as victims in this system, and has the capacity to motivate other "plural wives" to take responsibility for the mistreatment of the real victims -- the young women of their community.
(Megan Moyer's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at mmoyer@cavalierdaily.com.)
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