Tuesday, April 22, 2008

An establishment of religion?

Now, we understand that the FLDS prayers are to be monitored by members of the LDS (Mormon) Church. This betrays the Court's absolute and oblivious ignorance of the faith and cultural idiosyncrasies of the families it is so forcibly displacing. It would be like having a Catholic priest monitor the prayers of the members of a Jewish synagogue. (The LDS Church doesn't want anything to do with modern day practitioners of polygamy, actively excommunicates its own members who practice polygamy, and has categorically denied that "Fundamentalist Mormons" even exist.)
From http://pluralwife.blogspot.com/

I'd say it is rather like requiring all Lutheran prayers to be supervised by a Catholic Priest (not that I haven't known some good ones, including my aunt's brother).

I think she has it right, one religious group ought not to be supervising the prayers of another.

I remain terribly conflicted.

4 comments:

Papa D said...

I was hoping against hope that the court and the judge would show some sense of understanding - and then this. What can you say, other than, "Lord, please protect these children as they are used as political pawns."

Christian Prophet said...

The LDS Church should help out, not protect their own image by hiding. Why is the state deciding who can get married and who cannot get married anyway? Maybe the children are heroic and Texas is the villain. See:
http://christianprophecy.blogspot.com/

The Pastoral Princess said...

If we, as Americans, don’t take some kind of stand on this, ALL OF OUR religious beliefs, rituals and traditions are at jeopardy! Clearly the constitution has just been tossed out to the hog lot! If they do not even allow these people to pray without scrutiny, we better all cling tightly to our Bibles or whatever our Holy Book of faith is…..this just opens the door to strip us all of our chosen beliefs!

Dana Seilhan said...

I am going to speak as someone who practiced something very close to polygamy even though I am not Mormon and there was never actually a marriage:

Polygamy sucks.

I don't know what it is that makes adult romantic relationships (for lack of a better term) different from, say, parent-child relationships or sibling-sibling. In both the latter cases you can have more than one and even do justice to all of them. For some reason, though, this does not translate well to long-term relationships or to marriages.

I thought the same as you people apparently do: Why is the law discriminating against religious beliefs? Why is it dictating who can marry whom? That's not fair!

Then I lived it.

Fallout: The guy I was "polyamorous" with watched his wife come to love her boyfriend more than she loved him. I came to watch him love some random stranger he met online more than he loved me, and I was carrying his child. I am no longer living with him or involved with him, and my daughter is growing up in what you would call a broken home.

Even though we were a bunch of Damn Liberals(tm) and were theoretically OK with the idea of women having multiple "spouses" as well as men having them, in practice what most people in the polyamory community PREFER is one guy with several female partners. The vast majority of the time, women can only have multiple partners if they're bisexual and those other partners are also women. The first partner is considered the "primary," and the rest are "secondary" and therefore more expendable, no matter how much propaganda is issued to the contrary. I have even seen poly couples advertising on poly personals sites for someone fertile to have a baby for them, and I wanted to vomit.

There is just something about multiple relationships going on simultaneously that brings out the worst in far too many people. I don't know if it's socialization or human nature and I don't really care. You have to work with what exists instead of sitting around whining that the world is not going the way you want it. I learned that the hard way and I am still learning. And what exists in this case is that people just don't feel right going with more than one partner at a time. Even when they put on a show of being OK with it, there's a casualness with which they approach their relationships that is just heartbreaking. I want to ask them why they are even bothering if they're just going to throw away the love interest in another year, or watch the love interest walk away without ever having worked on the relationship at all.

And in this case with the FLDS you've got old men marrying children, and you've got only the men allowed to have multiple spouses, and wives and children kept as virtual prisoners, and boys kicked out of the church because they're competition. That's just sick. It isn't even about the multiple wives anymore. It's everything else that's going on.

I don't agree with human sacrifice, even though that has been part of a few religions in human history. And I sure don't agree with this. If it is causing measurable harm then it needs to be stopped.

I was lucky. I was able to say, "I'm not participating in this anymore, you have hurt me far too much," and walk away. Anyone who can't walk away for whatever reason needs outside help. Period.