What exactly Is Wrong with Polygamy anyway?

[doubtingthomas]

Polygamy and polyamory are not equivalent

I would have to disagree. Real world polyamory typically looks like this




Or like this

The bolded part is about your topic.

Polyamory is usually the opposite of polygamy.

[doubtingthomas]

On the other hand, I have several friends who have had or are in polyamorous relationships.

See the pictures above.

[KevinSim]

So requiring Shirley Cook to give up her faith in order to have children of her own, is better than requiring a woman to share her husband with Shirley Cook?

If her goal is to have children, yes. Her faith is silly anyway. But she also could just go have a child and come back to the faith if she needs. many Mormon women had children out of wedlock. While it's a sin there is forgiveness, or so I thought. Marrying another married man would be an idiotic solution for her, I'd say.

Her goal is to have children and to do a good job raising them. I could be biased by my Latter-day Saint upbringing, but my impression is that people raised by two parents end up significantly better off than those raised by single parents. Are the results known for children raised by polygamous triples other than the FLDS and other Mormon splinter groups? My guess is that a child with both her/his parents actively involved in her/his life would on the whole grow up with more stability in her/his life than a child raised by a single parent, even if the former child's parents were practicing polygamy.
Furthermore, the way to achieve forgiveness from sins is to repent, which means turn away from the sin. Someone who sins, planning to repent later, isn't turning from her/his plan, so s/he isn't really repenting. The bottom line I think is that because women like Shirley Cook are devoted to Jesus Christ, they will choose not to get embroiled in sexual sin in the first place.

[IHAQ]

I ask again, who the heck is Shirley Cook?

[IHAQ]

“What exactly is wrong with polygamy?” is a question only asked by men. Why? Why aren’t women pursuing the idea of polygamy?

Do you have any suggestions Kevin?

[KevinSim]

It seems to me the most important rebuttals to Kevin Sim's arguments are these questions from Physics Guy, which Kevin has not responded to:

1) Nothing in First-World countries is stopping any number of women from cohabiting with any number of men today. If there are lots of involuntarily single women today who would rather share a man than have no man, they are free to do that. Do you notice it happening a lot?

Wait a minute! Yes I do! Every open marriage is an example of someone sharing a spouse with someone else. It's not an optimal solution, but we're not talking about optimal solutions here. The optimal solution would be each person in the world able to match up with her/his perfect soulmate. For who knows what reason, humans just don't function that way. So we're stuck with less than optimal solutions.

[KevinSim]

“What exactly is wrong with polygamy?” is a question only asked by men. Why? Why aren’t women pursuing the idea of polygamy?

Do you have any suggestions Kevin?

My suggestion, IHAQ, is that that is absolutely not true, as I have pointed out in previous posts. I don't think I had any interest in polygamy whatsoever before I met the woman in Seattle I mentioned who pretty much asked that same precise question.

[KevinSim]

I ask again, who the heck is Shirley Cook?

Oh, she's nobody worth caring about, IHAQ. Feel free to sweep her under the rug. She's subhuman, so her needs can be ignored. Okay, sarcasm aside, she's a woman in my ward who died a couple of years ago after a long life, and I found out at her funeral that she had always wanted to get married and have children. IHAQ, is that an unreasonable desire for her to have had?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I ask again, who the heck is Shirley Cook?

Oh, she's nobody worth caring about, IHAQ. Feel free to sweep her under the rug. She's subhuman, so her needs can be ignored. Okay, sarcasm aside, she's a woman in my ward who died a couple of years ago after a long life, and I found out at her funeral that she had always wanted to get married and have children. IHAQ, is that an unreasonable desire for her to have had?

> poor woman couldn’t find a man to marry and have children with

> she would’ve found a man AND woman to marry and have children with if polygamy were legal

[Marcus]

In my opening post I asked what was wrong with three adults of any gender combination entering into a polygamous marriage. If this was ever incorporated into a bill that went before Congress, it would need to have a provision requiring that all three participants be adults.

Aha. What you're describing is more like modern polyamory, which, as I understand it, consists of groups or people who are usually all in relationships with each other. I think there are sometimes exceptions, where one member of a polyamorous group may be involved with only one or some members of the group, but in any case, it's a much more fluid, and much more voluntary, arrangement than Mormon polygamy.

So Ms. Cook could have had children if she had been willing to enter into “modern polyamory,” with the requirement that it be legalized, so she wouldn’t feel like she was sinning.

A simpler solution would be for her to decide that manmade laws don’t govern her god, and if she received a sign, it would be the right thing to do. That fits right in with LDS policy, so we’ve covered all the bases.