Mongol warrior Genghis Khan took so many wives that one-in men may be related to him Credit: iStock. This is where the system starts to become unstuck. In the FLDS, a large proportion of men must be kicked out as teenagers, shrinking the gene pool even further. In wild deer and sage grouse , as in Mormon cults, polygyny is associated with high levels of inbreeding, because it shrinks the number of males contributing to the gene pool and increases the relatedness of the entire community.
The fumarase deficiency gene has been traced to Joseph Jessop and his first wife, Martha Yeates 14 children. One of their daughters went on to marry co-founder John Barlow — and the rest is history. Today the number of people carrying the fumarase gene in Short Creek is thought to be in the thousands. The FLDS are not alone. Today polygyny is more widespread in Africa than any other continent. Polygamy has also been widely practised in West Africa - also leading to unusual clumps of diseases Credit: iStock.
In Cameroon, scientists recently reported a polygynous community with abnormally high levels of stuttering. Which brings us to the good news. To be meaningful to medical research, it must be linked to information about disease. In fact, more human disease genes have been discovered in Utah — with its Mormon history — than any other place in the world. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. The polygamous town facing genetic disaster. Share using Email. Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, the only remaining marital frontier—at least for the Judeo-Christian nations of the West—is polygamy.
This is no longer merely a theoretical matter. In February, , the Utah legislature passed a so-called Bigamy Bill, decriminalizing the offense by downgrading it from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Last week, the neighboring town of Cambridge followed suit, passing a broader ordinance recognizing multi-partner relationships. The law has proceeded even more rapidly in recognizing that it is possible for a child to have more than two legal parents. In , the Uniform Law Commission, an association that enables states to harmonize their laws, drafted a new Uniform Parentage Act, one provision of which facilitates multiple-parent recognition. Versions of the provision have passed in California, Washington, Maine, Vermont, and Delaware, and it is under consideration in several other states.
American conservatism has long mourned the proliferation of single parents, but, if two parents are better than one, why are three parents worse? Douglas NeJaime, a professor at Yale Law School who was involved in the drafting of the new parentage act, told me that the impetus for it was that many state laws defining family in binary, opposite-sex terms would be invalidated by Obergefell.
The trend toward multiple-parent recognition is not restricted to blue states. The folks on the committee understood the importance of protecting parental relationships, especially when they were not biologically related to the child. Much of the drafting of the law was done by Courtney Joslin, a law professor at U.
Davis who was previously a litigator at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. How can non-recognition not be held to harm children? For all the hate mail and burning crosses that Mildred and Richard Loving had to endure, the legalization of interracial marriage did much to moderate American racism. Gay marriage has increased acceptance of same-sex couples. Queer theorists have complained that Obergefell valorizes the family values associated with monogamous marriage and thereby demeans people who resist those values.
But others see it as the first step toward more radical change. Consensual nonmonogamy is hardly a new invention. Still, a particular ethos, rooted in Christian, European values, has created a presumption that monogamy is superior to all other structures. Immanuel Kant saw marriage as emblematic of Enlightenment ideals, claiming that it was egalitarian, because spouses assigned ownership of their sexual organs to each other.
At this point, monogamy is one person at a time. The first freedom was that we can actually, finally have sex with other people before we are together.
Now we want to have that freedom while we are together. The conversation about consensual nonmonogamy today is the conversation about virginity sixty years ago. Or the conversation about divorce twenty years before that. For years, they had told one another stories about the property they would build. At the end of , when Andy and Roo lost their lease, in Brooklyn, the time had come; Cal, who had been living in New Hampshire, was ready to move in, and Aida, a psychotherapist in Boston, planned to relocate as soon as possible.
They found a house with fourteen acres and some outbuildings in Ulster Park, on the Hudson. When I visited, last year, everything seemed to be a work in progress. Unfinished projects around the house gave a feeling of relaxed chaos. Andy, wearing a loose white dress, offered me drinks and snacks.
Their ethnic and religious backgrounds have prepared them for the marginalization they have experienced as polyamorists. Their pronoun preference, however, is mild. At present, some fifteen occupants can arrive at the house at any time and stay as long as they like. Some forty people stayed at the property, mostly in tents. Seventy more came for the day. As part of the service, they pledged themselves to the land as well as to one another.
There was no officiant, but there was a chuppah. She helped me pick out a dress. Andy grew up in New Hampshire. They had their first polyamorous relationship there, in a lesbian triad.
They went to law school in New York City. That led Andy to think about personal choices. Whichever linchpin gets pulled out first, it all comes falling down.
None of them is currently planning to have a child biologically. The group worked with a financial professional who specializes in nontraditional-family planning to set up the house as a joint tenancy with rights of survivorship, so that if one of them dies their interest reverts to the others.
The document also includes prenup-style arrangements for what will happen if any of them decides to leave. For a long time, Cal worked for a solar company that offers health benefits for one domestic partner, and they put Andy on their insurance because Andy needed it the most.
Roo co-owns a small tech worker co-op and gets less generous insurance through that. The question is: what does marriage mean? Andy talked about a watershed moment for gay rights, in —the case of Braschi v.
Miguel Braschi was being evicted from the rent-controlled apartment he and his partner shared, after the partner died, of AIDS. Braschi sued. That seems like a better plan. No family in America has done more for the image and legal standing of polygamists than the Dargers: Joe, his three wives—Alina, Vicki, and Valerie—and their twenty-five children, who live in and around Herriman, Utah. Their house is in a relatively new subdivision, with wide views of nearby mountains.
Joe, who works in construction, has built additional houses on the property for two of his adult children. I had previously met Joe, on Zoom, and he had seemed intimidating, with an unkempt beard and a forbidding manner, and he had stuck to facts that I was sure he had recited a hundred times before.
But, when we sat together on his back porch, I found him clean-shaven, relaxed, and forthcoming, and his wives greeted me brightly. As we talked there for the better part of a day, children, grandchildren, wives, and others whose identities were never completely clear to me came and went.
Joe and his wives come from fundamentalist Mormon families and have known one another from childhood. Some of their grandparents were jailed together for polygamy after the Short Creek raid, in which state troops arrested an entire community of four hundred people, including more than two hundred and fifty children. The chief sponsor of the measure, the state senator Deirdre Henderson, said the intent of the bill is not to legalize polygamy but to lower the penalties so those from polygamous communities who are victims of crimes can come forward without fear of being prosecuted themselves.
It also would make it easier for otherwise law-abiding polygamists to obtain access to critical services such as medical or mental healthcare, education or even employment without fear, she said. Opponents of decriminalization say the current law should not be changed because polygamy is inherently dangerous and harmful to women and children, particularly young girls, some of whom have been forced into marriages with older men.
Polygamy is a remnant of the early teachings of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members fled persecution over the practice to settle the Utah territory in The church disavowed polygamy in as a condition of Utah statehood, and today members of the faith found to be practicing plural marriage are excommunicated.
In India, Muslim men are allowed to marry multiple women, while men of other groups are not. However, in countries where polygamy is common, it often is practiced by people of all faiths. Polygamy usually takes the form of polygyny — when a man marries multiple women. Polyandry, which refers to wives having more than one husband, is even rarer than polygamy and mostly documented among small and relatively isolated communities around the world.
In Burkina Faso, for example, where polygamy is common, spouses must agree that a marriage will be polygamous at its outset for the husband to be allowed to take another wife in the future. One-in-five U. A Pew Research Center survey published in found that Muslims around the world are divided about polygamy: While majorities in several sub-Saharan African countries and pluralities in parts of the Middle East describe polygamy as morally acceptable, Muslims living in Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe tend to say that polygamy is immoral.
Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work.
President Michael Dimock explains why.
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