Making marriage a purely civil contract and then allowing churches to consecrate marriages according to their own rules is a great idea, I think. There should be laws pertaining to all forbidding child marriage and marriage between close relatives, and personally I shy away from the idea of polygamy. I just can't stand it. Interestingly, I have to admit that it is possible that my objection to polygamy may be slightly similar to the objections to same-sex marriage. I shudder to think that society would allow people to marry polygamously. The whole idea is just plain wrong, disgusting and horribly sexist to me (because, in 999,999 cases out 1,000,000, a polygamous marriage involves one man and more than one woman). I hate it. I guess, though, that you can argue against same-sex marriage for slightly similar reasons that you can argue against polygamy - because it upsets the balance between the sexes, and to a certain extent, it upsets the 'parental balance' between the father and the mother of a child.

I can see that these are emotional issues. Let me make a confession. Because I don't see same-sex marriage as sexist - since homosexual men and homosexual women would have the same chance to enter into homosexual marriages - I'm not offended by same-sex marriage, but I am offended by polygamy.

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One husband, six wives and thirty-two children?

Ann

P.S. I have seen a documentary about this particular family. At the time when the documentary was made, they had twenty-nine children, not thirty-two. But there had been one more child, who had, however, been killed in a fire. The mother of that child talked about the death of her son or daughter with tears in her eyes. But the father, who had twenty-nine surviving children anyway, shrugged it off as an unfortunate accident, nothing more. And I thought to myself, well, if you have fathered twenty-nine children by six different wives, several of whom are still fertile, why should you care about losing one child?