The Associated Press’s Jennifer Dobner, via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says the recent raid on the “Yearning for Zion” Ranch in El Dorado, Texas, has prompted polygamists to start talking more to the press.

Plural-marriage families exist mostly in the shadows, said Mary Batchelor, a co-founder of Principle Voices, a polygamy advocacy group. She said families typically don’t speak publicly for fear they’ll be prosecuted for bigamy or lose their children to state authorities. “It’s scary, but ultimately, we decided to speak up and let the chips fall where they may,” she said.

Read the quote in context here.

Technically I believe they’re talking to the press because defense lawyers for their (sometimes literal) masters are instructing them to, but in all events it’s probably not a bad thing that they’re coming at least partly out of the “shadows” (a.k.a. closet) to talk about what, exactly, it is they do.

And can I just say I think it’s probably a good thing for the same reason I think prostitution should be more openly discussed? Because what happens in the shadows has this ugly, festering, stinking, soul-sapping, child-abusing, incest-begetting, human-trafficking, other-crimes-ignoring tendency to stay in the shadows.

Because there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with “plural marriages.” Assuming they’re really just plural — i.e. anyone can marry multiple people and not just privileged, overbearing, dictatorial child-abusing, minor-daughter-swapping “family patriarchs.” And assuming they’re really marriages, with all the restrictions — i.e. can’t be your 12-year-old cousin even if your brother owes you for that business loan; i.e. all partners have a right to affirmative consent to marriage; i.e. all partners are legally and socially completely equal in the eyes of both state and church, with full intra-family “votes,” full inheritance rights, full community-property rights, and so on. Oh yeah, and full legal recognition under the law.**

Instead, as we’ve seen with this 100-year-old cult that’s not just in Texas but all over the intermountain west, we see the same behavior we see with other pandemic forms of “victimless crime” such as illegal immigration, prostitution, and cannabis production: constant erosion of respect for other laws and mores, an inability to work with police to curtail that erosion, and a “big umbrella / inner sanctum” dynamic where practitioners can be swayed to tolerate increasingly egregious behavior as long as it’s in the approximate domain that unites them.

The point being that if “sister wives” were able to go to talk to police and child-services groups without having their own children taken away from them they might be less inclined to tolerate when their husband brings home “cousin wives,” “niece wives” and “early-middle-schooler wives.” Or when he starts beating them for not letting him “excommunicate” their middle-school age sons or swapping away their daughters to other men old enough to be their grandfathers.

(It’s the same with illegal vs. legal farmworkers who are more able to report illegal spraying, or illegal vs. legal street prostitutes who are in a better position to report when prostituted children, trafficked sex workers, or violent predators appear in their areas.)

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Oh, and since it’s very easy for readers to balk when someone talks about the benefits of legalized polygamy let’s make sure we clearly define our terms.

See, for instance, Dw3t-Hthr commented in an earlier post

The problems rest with exploitative patriarchal polygyny. And heavily with the ‘exploitative’, more moderately with the ‘polygyny’, with the patriarchal being one of them things.

The fact that every discussion of polygamy I’ve seen assumes that it will be polygynous, as if women are incapable of desiring multiple partners, is one of those things that I get Sarcastic about on occasion. There’s a lot of “women are the intrinsically monogamous class, only men will have an interest in polygamy if it’s legal, thus polygamy will exploit women by giving them all fractional men” subtext of a lot of these discussions.

Yet another area where the dominant paradigm elephants its way into the discussion. (And why do I suspect further contemplation of “plural marriages,” the idea of which still personally vaguely creeps me out, would yield further otherwise unnoticed paradigm-driven assumptions?)

[** In other words (sorry Rick Santorum) just like anyone else who wants to get married provided they’re of age and of legal “sound mind and body.” —fl]