Bigamy is no longer a felony in Utah

[Rev. Rye]

What kind of whackjob woman would think that's a good deal?


Think about it guys - would you really want to hook up with a woman who is mentally deficient enough to go along with this sort of arrangement?

Someone who's been convinced it's what God wants? 

Okay, fun fact, this is, by virtually all accounts, the origins of Mormon polygamy:  Sometime in the 1830s, some of Joseph Smith's early followers caught him with his pants down with his teenage servant Fanny Alger. He took a different track than a lot of preachers in his situations would, and one that A) squared with the lives of many of the Old Testament patriarchs, and B) can be very conveniently justified by a religion whose leader claims God talks directly to him: he did it, but this was not adulterous. This was polygamous, and God told him this was okay. And because this would be controversial, it was actually kept hush-hush at first, to the extent that the riot that ended up killing him was prompted by a public disclosure of his polygamy. Of course, after Brigham Young took over, he decided to just publicly embrace it for the next 38 years. And, surprisingly, despite what all these cults might tell you, the doctrine was NEVER mandatory. At its peak, only about 1 in 4 adults were actually part of a polygamous marriage. 

As for why people'd just go along with it, Last Podcast on the Left has quite a few series on cults (like Aum Shinrikyo, The Children of God, Scientology, People's Temple, Mormonism itself, and Heaven's Gate) and they routinely explain why cult members go along with everything, no matter how bizarre or morally outrageous, and the answer is simple: if you're already in the cult, to leave is to question every decision you've made since you joined. And bear in mind, groups like these routinely start off with more accessible beliefs to attract new believers, and once they get settled, then they get into the weird shit. The Mormons actually have a name for it: "Milk before meat." Scientologists also use the term "Gradient" for the same concept, and I personally call it "using the thin edge of the wedge."

For a good illustration, watching Going Clear, I can remember their talking about the Xenu myth, and Hana Whitfield had two very different reactions to it. First, she thought, "wait a minute, I studied geology, these volcanoes LRH is describing didn't even exist 75 million years ago, when this story supposedly took place." But this didn't stop her from the second reaction: that since, even after she went Clear, she STILL had to deal with the Thetans who are just going to be with her more or less eternally, there was no point in going on. She almost jumped off the roof of Scientology's HQ, and she only decided against it because of the bad publicity.

And to go on further from it, Whitfield was also a member of the Sea Org. If you're not familiar with the Sea Org, they're described as the monastic order of Scientology, and live under what is probably just a notch above slavery (50 cents per hour at maximum, about 100 hours per week average). If the cult leader is doing his job properly, he's succeeded in turning the cult into a total institution. You've got minimal links to the outside world, and leaving becomes tantamount to being thrust into the outside world with no means of support, financial or otherwise. That becomes a damn good incentive to stay even if you haven't been totally brainwashed. And, of course, the cults that make it mandatory are forced to do this to their boys anyway just to make the whole thing work.

That said, some people actually can handle polyamory responsibly. They're just very rare.