LDS Church’s polygamy – Speaking of Polygamy…

To be uncomfortable is not always wrong!

When someone learned that I live polygamy, I was told that “she” would never share a man and that it is disgusting. (Who “she” is does not matter, because more than one woman has told me that.) I’ve also been told, “I would never do that to my wife.”

I understand how uncomfortable polygamy is to live. I understand it because I live it.

It is interesting to watch someone react when polygamy is brought up. There are some small reactions.

And then there are some bigger, more dramatic reactions when it seems as tho I just presented a salty, lemony, and vinegary drink. If you can imagine the face someone would make drinking that, it is the same face I have seen when talking about polygamy.

To say the least, it is an uncomfortable topic for most people.

I usually do not mention polygamy; it usually is introduced from another source and then I feel like I should explain it better.

I want people to understand that I am not just playing with women and their emotions, but rather I am taking a woman on as a wife, companion, and helpmate.

I made an egg sandwich to eat for breakfast. I toasted the bread on a hot skillet, fried the egg, heated up some sandwich meat, and added cheese on top of the egg to melt. After putting it all together, I had a simple breakfast. I asked my daughter to try this sandwich and after one bite, she made a face and said, “It’s okay.” And yet, when I make the same sandwich for my wives, they are grateful and often say it was delicious and hit the spot.

What makes one person not like something and another person enjoy it fully? Is it that it tastes different? That cannot be because they both are tasting the same thing. However, it is that each person has different tastes, different preferences of textures, and different ideas of what is delicious in what they experience. I have found that my tastes have changed and broadened as I have gotten older.

Just because something is uncomfortable, does not mean it is wrong. Sometimes it is true that we are in a bad place or situation, and we are being warned to get out. It is uncomfortable for an appropriate and valid reason.

But not all uncomfortable feelings are bad.

There is a scripture that says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16)

If a leader tells you about a doctrine that does not seem right or is uncomfortable, it should be challenged but not outright dismissed. When Joseph Smith first introduced polygamy to the Latter-Day Saints of his time, it was introduced to a few persons at a time. It was done in an intimate setting where Joseph could explain to them more of the details of the doctrine, instead of dumping it on everyone and expecting compliance.

So, if some fruit is introduced, it needs to be tasted before it can be judged. So it is with an idea, a doctrine, a new food, we need to taste it first to see if it is good.

There is something to be said of the traditions of our fathers. In other words, sometimes we do things the same way our parents did, just because they did it that way.

There is a story of a woman who cut her meat a certain way to fit in her pan for cooking. Her daughter learned this technique by watching and helping her mother. As she became a mother, she cut the meat the same way, chopping off the ends. The granddaughter was then taught to cut off the ends of the roast. As the great-granddaughter learned to cut off the ends of the meat, she questions why it was done this way. They learned that it was because the first mother did not have a pan big enough for the roasts, so she cut off the ends to fit the pan. The women of this family continued the traditions even though the pan got bigger and could hold the whole roast.

My mother did not like the idea of polygamy. She was vocal about how it bothered her, and she would not be a part of polygamy, even if it were required to get into heaven. And yet, she was a descendant of polygamy. Her great-grandfather is Israel Barlow, a famous polygamist from the era of Joseph Smith.

In the LDS Church, the practice of polygamy has been banished, tho it was once embraced and taught by the leaders. Now when I talk with members of the LDS Church, they are offended and hate the idea of polygamy.

Members of the LDS Church receive a Patriarchal Blessing which states their lineage, connecting them to their fathers. This lineage links them to Israel and they are pronounced to be a part of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. And yet we know that Israel was a polygamist, having four wives.

How is it that we claim to be a part of a lineage that practiced polygamy and yet we do not want to accept polygamy as a valid form of a family structure? In fact, we often criticize it as a society.

If we are so critical of polygamy, we must also abandon the thoughts of our lineage through Israel and the blessings of Abraham. We, as a society or church or even family, cannot partake of the lineage God set up if we do not embrace the head of that lineage.

I have been told that polygamy brings about child marriages and child sexual abuse. As a law enforcement officer, I have seen children in bad situations without polygamy being involved at all. If we hear of any child brides, usually it is one group of people who have strayed from the path.

There are rules with polygamy that are based on the Bible. A man cannot marry a mother and daughter. A man cannot court a woman who is already married. A man can only marry as many women as he can care for (this is why royalty mostly did polygamy) without taking away from his current wife (see Leviticus 18).

In the media, we only hear part of the story and how terrible things are. As we all know, no one would watch the news if it was always roses, clouds, rainbows, and unicorns. As a society, we love to hear about someone else’s problems, faults, shortcomings, and trials.

So, when polygamy is brought up, they do not say how it helps single mothers have help with their children. It is not discussed how children grow up with siblings and a father. It is not discussed how financially it stabilizes the household when everyone works together.

Polygamy is not a comfortable concept.

Often, my family must re-adjust thought processes when we come into a new situation. We have to think about how it affects two or more wives, not just one.

We must have an understanding of how we are perceived and not personalize it. We must be open to how the world will not view the second wife as valid and often she misses out on the benefits of marriage.

It is easy to go back to ways we were taught growing up, when we believed in monogamy.

Society has been used to thinking about marriage as monogamy for multiple decades. When we must resolve an issue, we must change our way of thinking.

As we have learned thru experience, when we are willing to conform and grow, we have been able to grow together with a stronger unit than by ourselves. When we had to grow in our past marriages, it was often by ourselves as our spouses were not willing to conform and change with us.

So, what does the fruit of polygamy taste like? You will only know by tasting it.

So don’t judge polygamy if you don’t want to truly see how it works. You cannot tell someone who has tasted it that it looks weird and therefore tastes bad without being a bigot.

To say, “It is uncomfortable, therefore it is wrong,” does not do justice.

In his excellent post Dateonomics, our friend Taylor talks about the sociological argument for polygyny (one man having multiple wives), especially in the context of the mainstream LDS Church. Here I’d like to talk about the biological argument for polygyny.

If you assume that the main biological goal of a species is to reproduce, then – bluntly speaking – females are much more valuable than males. If a woman (or a female animal, more broadly) does not have children for whatever reason (early death, infertility, intentional childlessness, etc.), those 8 or 10 or however many children she could have had can never be recouped or recovered and the children those children would have had can never be recouped or recovered, either. It is a permanent loss to the species as a whole.

On the other hand, if a man (or a male animal) does not have children, that does not mean that there have to be any fewer children total. Any of the other males could step in for him. A man could have 1,000 children. Most women could reasonably have 10 or 15 at the most, and though there are some women who could have more, none of those outliers even fleetingly approaches the number of children an average man could have. A species is limited in its generations by the female members of that species. And yet there are a roughly equal number of men and women in the world. The result? Superfluous men. The women are not biologically dispensable, but most of the men are. You see this in other species, too. You only need one ram per some forty or fifty ewes¹, and only one rooster per ten hens².

Females being biologically indispensable is one of the reasons forced monogamy is such a tragedy. Ideally, from a biological perspective, every woman would have children. There are slightly more men than women world-wide (in the under 65 age bracket)³, and so you’d think that it would all work out just fine. However, there are more “unmarriageable” men than there are “unmarriageable” women, which skews the demographics of decent people under 65 in the other direction – there are more decent women than decent men.

Let me explain.

Men are much more likely⁴ to commit violent crimes than are women. If you assume that few people would want to marry a violent criminal, this takes many more men out of the running, so to speak, than it does women.

If we assume that not many people would want to marry someone with an abnormally low IQ, this takes more men than women out of the running, too. More men than women have genius-level IQs (seven out of every eight people who score in the top 1% on IQ tests are men), but there are also more men than women who have idiot-level IQs^5,6. The mean intelligence is the same or nearly so, but the distribution (or you could say, standard deviation) is wider for men than for women.

All this is to say that if you took all the decent men and all the decent women (mind you, in this case I’m using decent to mean marriageable – for the purposes of this post that means someone who is not a violent criminal and does not have a very low IQ – without any of the moral implications that the word decent often has) and paired them off, you would be left with extra women who, in a strictly monogamous society, would likely be doomed to spinsterhood and childlessness, thereby forever depriving the human race of the children they could have had, or else go and marry a low-quality man. They may feel forced into such a marriage for the sake of having children, but issues can (and often do) arise with the children of low-quality men, leaving us to conclude that this is also not ideal.

Additionally, from a primitive, biological standpoint, there are likely to end up being fewer men left than women due to conflicts. For the entire history of humanity, with a very few exceptions, men have been the warriors. This makes a lot of sense, as the average man is stronger, faster, and better mentally suited (more aggressive and better able to compartmentalize things) for war than the average woman. This works out just fine, as the women in a primitive situation would spend much of their time in a less-than ideal situation for soldiering due to pregnancy, breastfeeding, and/or needing to care for young children. However, this means that in conflicts (which have been around as long as we have), more men end up dying than women do. This can have significant, even drastic impacts on the overall ratio of men to women, such as in the Soviet Union after WWII, when there were only 4 men per 5 women⁷. (In Soviet Russia, proper, it was even more dramatic, with 3 men per 4 women⁸.)

The solution from a biological perspective? Allow some of the decent men to marry multiple decent women, enough to take care of the surplus of women and simultaneously maximize the genetic potential (and number of children) of the group as a whole.

This surplus of decent women is one of the reasons that polyandry (the practice of one woman having multiple husbands) is a biologically unjustifiable practice, in my opinion. There is already a relative shortage of decent men. Why exacerbate the problem by allowing one woman to hog limited resources when one man would work just as well, biologically speaking?

Another reason polyandry is biologically unjustifiable is the uncertain paternity of the children. A woman has the advantage of being able to be completely and utterly certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that a child she thinks is hers truly is. A man has no such privilege. He may be intellectually sure that a child is his, but there is no biological surety he can have. (Obviously now there are genetic tests that can determine paternity, but historically – and biologically speaking – that has not been the case.) People naturally want to take care of their own children. In a polyandrous relationship, on the surface it seems wonderful. The children can have a mother figure and multiple father figures. There’s much talk about how the lack of a father figure leads to all sorts of ills, so surely having multiple would be even better, right?

Except it doesn’t quite work like that. In polyandry, none of the men is sure that the child is his, (although there could be exceptions to this, such in the case of the male partners in the polyandrous relationship being different races) and so none of them fully act like a father. It is similar to the bystander effect⁹, which is when people are more likely not to act in an emergency (call 911, help someone who is struggling) if there are other people present, because they assume the other people will instead. Instead of the child of polyandry having multiple strong father figures, they are likely to wind up having none. An additional downside is that having multiple stepfathers is dangerous for children. Studies have shown that stepfathers are many times more likely to assault¹⁰, abuse¹¹, and even kill¹² their stepchildren than biological fathers are. This is called the “Cinderella effect¹³”. Although there does not seem to be much research on the “Cinderella effect” specifically in the context of polyandry, I think that it is likely present to at least some extent.

In contrast, in a polygynous marriage, the parents of each child are clear. Each child has one committed, invested father and one committed, invested mother, and additional mother figures who are not primarily responsible for the child but are still interested in their success.

The biological imperative for polygyny shows up in other places as well. A study done by the dating app OkCupid shows that women on their site rate 80% of men on their site as being below average in attractiveness¹³. Obviously that data could be skewed, but it is still reflective of the fact that women, as a whole, are choosier than men are when it comes to selecting a partner. (For comparison, in the same study, men rate 50% of women as below average and 50% of women as above average in attractiveness – exactly what you would expect.)

From a biological perspective, this makes sense. If a woman is going to invest 9 months of pregnancy and (in a primitive setting) at least a year of breastfeeding into one of her children, she’s naturally going to want to be choosy as to who the father is. In a primitive setting, she would want or need the protection of a strong, capable man while she is especially vulnerable during pregnancy and postpartum, and she doesn’t want to (nor does it make sense to) spend that much of her life on the offspring of a loser. Her best chance at long-term genetic success is to have children with a beautiful, strong, intelligent man so they (her children) will be beautiful, strong, and intelligent as well, thereby maximizing their chances for genetic success and so forth.

Hence women want the top 20% of men, and if polygyny is allowed, every woman can have a man in the top 20%, rather than settling for someone inferior. Biologically, 20 men to every 100 women is a workable number if polygamy is allowed, and this promotes many high-quality children, the biological goal for all species. The strongest, most capable men get the most breeding rights. They have strong children, and the species as a whole prospers.

To sum up: the biological goal of any species (divorced from any morality or ethics) is to reproduce as prolifically and successfully as possible, with a maximal number of strong, healthy children. In order to do this, you need to maximize the number of female members of that species who are having children, as they are the gatekeepers for the total number of children in any given generation. In a society where only monogamy is allowed, there end up being extra females who cannot have children due to the lack of a mate. The natural solution is to allow at least some polygyny so that the species does not shortchange itself in the coming generation.

And that is the biological case for polygyny.