by TRACY CLARK-FLORY
A collective face-palm could be heard throughout the Western world when Libya’s interim leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil announced that he was overturning Gadhafi-era restrictions on polygamy. However, from a certain liberal American perspective, the idea of plural marriage doesn’t seem so outrageous.
As Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, argued in a New York Times Op-Ed this summer, “Regardless of whether it is a gay or plural relationship, the struggle and the issue remains the same: the right to live your life according to your own values and faith.” Indeed, the ongoing U.S. battle over marriage equality has highlighted the injustice that can arise when the state sanctifies certain unions and forbids others – all on religious and moral grounds. And while the Warren Jeffs trial brought attention to the dangers of cloistered polygamist societies in a major way, there are also normalizing examples at hand, albeit on TV via “Big Love.” In such a context, it can seem a basic issue of the freedom to define our families for ourselves.
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Moving from the specific to the general, it’s true that copious research has demonstrated the negative social impacts associated with polygamy (which almost always manifests as polygyny, a man taking multiple wives, and not the other way around). Many of these findings were summarized in a report that anthropologist Joseph Henrich presented in testimony during a Supreme Court case challenging Canada’s ban on polygamy. The chief problem introduced by the practice, at least when it is widely adopted, is that it creates “a pool of low-status men” whose potential wives go to “high status, wealthy men,” he argues. An unmarried male underclass is associated with greater crime – including rape and kidnapping of women — and generally leads men “to seek to exercise more control over the choices of women,” from what they wear to whom they date.
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