"[T]hat the book contains only four songs performed by women... is both grim and astounding...."

Writes Amanda Petrusich in"A Response to Bob Dylan’s 'Philosophy of Modern Song' There was something missing from the bard’s recent book" (The New Yorker).

Is it? Grim and astounding? Is it astounding because you'd think, in this day and age, that any informed writer would know you have to gender-balance your lists of favored works of art? That Bob Dylan didn't is a little astounding, but why is it grim? I think it's kind of encouraging that Bob didn't think he had to do that, and it can be a little grim to see other people's lists and suspect that's what they did.

In the book, Bob talks about women a lot, because the songs written about men tend to be about women — from the man's point of view. Why shouldn't Bob take the man's point of view? You want him appropriating what women think? He does that in his songs — "She's got everything she needs..." — but he's being the man who's imagining — maybe wrongly — what the woman is thinking.

Petrusich writes:

"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. 'Obergefell is a veritable encomium for marriage as both a central human right and a fundamental constitutional right,' Joseph J. Fischel, an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale, has written. 'We, as an LGBT movement, should be ethically committed to endorsing poly relations and other experiments in intimacy.' He argues for 'relational autonomy' without regard for 'gender, numerosity, or affective attachment.' The campaigns of both polygamists and polyamorists to have their unions recognized point to the larger questions that swarm around marriage battles: what are the government’s interests in marriage and family, and why does a bureaucratic system sustain such a relentless focus on who has sexual relationships with whom? Surveys in the past decade have consistently found that four to five per cent of American adults—more than ten million people—already practice some form of consensual nonmonogamy, and the true number, given people’s reticence about stigmatized behaviors, is almost certainly higher.... In the West, champions of polyamory have included Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Havelock Ellis, and Bertrand Russell. 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."

From "How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms/From opposite sides of the culture, parallel campaigns for legal recognition may soon make multiple-partner marriages as unremarkable as same-sex marriages" (The New Yorker).

At the Polygamy Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want. That's a bottle of porter bought at the Valhalla Café in Bryce Canyon National Park on March 8th. We were eating pizza after a long pre-dusk walk on the Navajo Trail, where I took this picture.



I encourage you to talk all night. Thanks for all your contributions to this blog in comment form and just by reading.

And remember to click on the Amazon link in the banner when you have some shopping to do.

A square look at signs.

Here's yesterday's discussion of the square format in photography. I'm shuffling through the mass of photographs from our trip. I posted a few along the way as we traveled across the country and back over the last 2 weeks, but I've got many left to pick through. I'm doing a bit of that now and experimenting with cropping to a square composition.

Here are 3 that Meade stopped the car for me to take. I love roadside signs and have missed so many over the years as I've thought of stopping but barreled past anyway. But I've gotten better at seeing how important these opportunities are — much more important than big landmarks like the Delicate Arch, which are pointed out for you and photographed so often. These roadside sights are something you find for yourself. The idea that this can be a photograph is your idea. And Meade has been a great companion, who not only does nearly all the driving and drives with professional care but who turns my idea that this could be a photograph into an actual stop and who also often has the idea that this is a photograph.

Here's something we stopped for in Orderville, Utah:



I love how generic and inclusive that big sign is. And I'm fascinated by the wacky jumble of points on the red shape. Is it Googie? Anyway, I love the contrast between the complicated, exciting red structure and the simple, bland words. But it wasn't that sign that caused the stop. It was that little yellow sign. "Buffalo Elk Gator Jerky":



It was Meade who spotted that sign and insisted that we stop and I take a picture of it. It's only as I process the photo now that I see that the requisite potshots have been taken at it. I pause to Google why do people shoot at signs? and find "The Dangers and Costs of Sign Shooting" at Outdoorhub. I'm shooting the sign myself, of course, but I don't leave my impression in Orderville. I put it here on the blog.

Now, I wasn't even sure this picture was from Utah, and I don't know if I ever knew we passed through a place named Orderville. I know it's Orderville because I swiveled around and took a shot at "Food & Drug" and saw that it did have a less than completely generic name: Terry's.



I found a Yelp review — one review, 5 stars — for Terry's Food & Drug — "Small town service for a small town" — and that's where I see this is Orderville.

Orderville. We didn't explore. We only stopped for some signs that charmed us, transitorily. I muse about the motives to name a town Orderville. I think of law and order. But that's the kind of thinking of a person who blows through town and takes in the surfaces. Gator jerky! A Sinclair sign! Numbers painted on the rocks! But Orderville is something else:

"So, how about polyandry?"

Hagar asks in the comments to "Jonathan Rauch doubles down on the supply-of-women argument for why polygamy is not like same-sex marriage." Briefly, the supply-of-women argument says that government may exclude polygamists from the fundamental freedom to marry because if some men marry more than one woman, there will be fewer women available to pair up with unmarried men thereby cure them of their dangerous destructiveness.

Hagar is suggesting that polyandry could solve the problem. Everyone's picturing polygyny, which Jonathan Rauch called "almost invariably the real-world pattern." Rauch also points to a map, showing the prevalence of polygamy in countries that where women are not equal. But, as I say in the earlier post, this is America, and the question is what will happen going forward. The supply-of-women argument asks us to worry about what will happen going forward.

So Hagar's question is apt. Why must we deny women the right to choose to be one of multiple wives in a polygynous marriage if the same interest — marrying up the unmarried men — could be served by empowering, encouraging, and even subsidizing — rampant polyandry? That ought to vacuum up the excess men that are screwing up the world (according to the supply-of-women argument!).

Jonathan Rauch doubles down on the supply-of-women argument for why polygamy is not like same-sex marriage.

Here's my earlier post, "I've got a problem with the supply-of-women argument for distinguishing polygamy from same-sex marriage," poking Rauch (and Richard Posner) for relying on the social interest in preserving more women for men. They seem to think women are "some kind of natural resource to be conserved for the benefit of males." Like there needs to be a bag limit.

Rauch now has another article, going on at greater length and still failing to take account of the problem:

[W]hen a high-status man takes two wives (and one man taking many wives, or polygyny, is almost invariably the real-world pattern), a lower-status man gets no wife. If the high-status man takes three wives, two lower-status men get no wives. And so on.

This competitive, zero-sum dynamic sets off a competition among high-status men to hoard marriage opportunities, which leaves lower-status men out in the cold. Those men, denied access to life's most stabilizing and civilizing institution, are unfairly disadvantaged and often turn to behaviors like crime and violence.

In this view, women are society's tools, to be used to tame men. If some men are successful in winning too many women — if, after getting one woman, they can continue to take additional women out of the pool of potential wives — then there are fewer women left over to do the dirty work of civilizing the less desirable men, men who, undomesticated, run wild and do destructive things.

Rauch does pause to look at it from the female perspective:

I've got a problem with the supply-of-women argument for distinguishing polygamy from same-sex marriage.

Yesterday, I put up a post about an argument I made 9 years ago about how to distinguish polygamy from same-sex marriage. This was an argument based on economics and government benefits (and I admitted that the #LoveWins aspects of Obergefell made my distinction more difficult).

I was only noticing my old argument because my son John had remembered it and blogged about it. But today I see that John expanded his blog post to add a different distinction that 2 very prominent commentators have made in the wake of Obergefell.

Richard Posner says:

[P]olygamy imposes real costs, by reducing the number of marriageable women. Suppose a society contains 100 men and 100 women, but the five wealthiest men have a total of 50 wives. That leaves 95 men to compete for only 50 marriageable women.

And Jonathan Rauch says:

[T]he case for gay marriage is the case against polygamy, and the public will be smart enough to understand the difference.

Gay marriage is about extending the opportunity to marry to people who lack it; polygamy, in practice, is about exactly the opposite: withdrawing marriage opportunity from people who now have it. Gay marriage succeeded because no one could identify any plausible channels through which it might damage heterosexual marriage; with polygamy, the worries are many, the history clear, and the channels well understood.

Well, I've got a problem with that! Talk about a male perspective! What about the women who want to choose to share one man? They should be denied to preserve a pool of marriageable women for all the extra males that would otherwise have scarce pickings? Are women some kind of natural resource to be conserved for the benefit of males?

As the old saying goes: Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. If women think they are better off as multiple wives to one high-quality male, why should they be cut off from that way of life so that some less-desired male will have better odds of getting a woman for himself? Is this everybody-gets-just-one theory of marriage some kind of welfare program for undesirable males?

I can see that society fears its renegade young males and would like to tame them through marriage, leveraging the power of their sexuality lest they expend that energy in acts of violence and dissolution. I can see the idea of using women for this purpose and rejecting polygamy because it takes women out of commission in that service.

I see the scheme. I see the mechanism. But if you use that as your overt argument, you're going to run up against ideas about women's autonomy and freedom. We're not society's tools. Why should we be denied marriage to the man we want, in a sisterhood with other women who want the same thing? You'd better have a reason other than your need to exploit us for the purposes of men.

And by the way, women pairing up with women also takes women out of the pool of women who are available to men. Rauch said "Gay marriage succeeded because no one could identify any plausible channels through which it might damage heterosexual marriage," but, ironically, he just made me see an argument for that damage.

And I wouldn't use the term "gay marriage," because no one will check whether the 2 women want to have sex with each other. 2 women could marry to obtain the economic benefits of the government's legal status of marriage. Why shouldn't 2 women marry to create a household within which they could manage childcare, file a joint tax return, and get better health insurance for the blended group?

The problem with what I said 9 years ago about how easy it is to distinguish polygamy.

The post I put up yesterday afternoon and left at the top of the blog until now links to something my son John wrote quoting something I wrote long ago. John was quoting the much-linked Politico article that went up on the day the Supreme Court announced its new same-sex marriage decision, "It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy/Why group marriage is the next horizon of social liberalism." From that article:

Now that we’ve defined that love and devotion and family isn’t driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals? The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy . . . 

9 years ago, I was responding to something Charles Krauthammer had written, which referred to something he'd written 10 years before that saying "it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights." The distinction I made — in "Distinguishing gay marriage and polygamy" — had to do with economics:

Legal marriage isn't just about love, it's an economic arrangement. Having the state authorize your union is not the same thing as having your friends and neighbors approve of you and your religious leaders bless you. It affects taxes and employee benefits -- huge amounts of money. A gay person with a pension and a health insurance plan is incapable of extending those benefits to his (or her) partner. He (or she) can't file a joint tax return. That's not fair. A polygamous marriage, however, puts a group of persons in a position to claim more economic benefits than the traditional heterosexual couple. That doesn't appeal to our sense of fairness.

The law doesn't assess how much two people love each other. Two persons of opposite sexes can marry for all sorts of reasons. If there were a device that could look into their souls and measure their love, we wouldn't accept the outrageous invasion of privacy it would take for the government to use it. Excluding gay couples from marrying does generate the complaint that society does not sufficiently respect homosexual love, and by harping on this point, proponents of gay marriage activate their opponents who think that's a good thing.

But it's not all about love and who respects what. It's also about economics. And in that dimension, it's easy to distinguish polygamy.

The problem I see today is that the Supreme Court stressed love, not economics. And the political spin coming off the case is #LoveWins. I would have decided the case based on equal protection and left love out of it. Constitutional law limits what government can do to people. Government has no positive obligation to boost egos or bestow dignity. But government chose to use the status of marriage as a basis for many of its actions in the realm of things that properly belong to government (like taxing and spending). At that point, equality is required.

But the Court didn't take that route. It said something about Equal Protection that no one — as far as I've seen — can even understand. I'm going to reread the majority opinion, and I'll get back to you, but it's plain to everyone who reads the opinion in any depth that it rested on ideas about substantive due process. These ideas were not clearly expressed. There was a lot of windy verbiage that I want to parse. But the public's consciousness is off and running without any careful parsing from me or anybody else. It's flying under the flag #LoveWins. It's love, love, love, love, love.



We're not on the economics slope. We're on the love slope. That's more slippery. Who knows where that might go? And who knows why the majority chose (what we're perceiving as) the love concept? Maybe economics didn't seem to have the heft to justify unsettling old beliefs. Maybe the Court wanted emotions to soar, wanted to spark contagious empathy, and government taxing and spending seems too grubby to pull us away from the traditional meaning of marriage. Profundity could only be traded for profundity. That's not how I would have done it. I would have stressed that we are only talking about the limits on government, what government can do to individuals.

But that's not what the Court did.

It's easy to distinguish polygamy.

John remembers that I showed how to do it 10 years ago.

"Mormon leaders have acknowledged for the first time that... Joseph Smith... took as many as 40 wives, some already married and one only 14 years old."

The NYT reports:

Elder Steven E. Snow, the church historian and a member of its senior leadership, said in an interview, “There is so much out there on the Internet that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history. We need to be truthful, and we need to understand our history... I believe our history is full of stories of faith and devotion and sacrifice, but these people weren’t perfect.”

The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church....

Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives. The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers....

"Adultery, including adulterous cohabitation, is not prosecuted. Religious cohabitation, however..."

"... is subject to prosecution at the limitless discretion of local and State prosecutors, despite a general policy not to prosecute religiously motivated polygamy. The court finds no rational basis to distinguish between the two, not least with regard to the State interest in protecting the institution of marriage."

Says federal judge Clark Waddoups in Brown v. Buhman, a case about the Utah anti-bigamy statute, which makes it a felony "when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person." From the first time I noticed this issue, I've thought the answer was obvious. You can't punish people for the ideas they happen to have about why they are living in a household with multiple sexual partners. Call it a marriage or call it a sandwich. Imagine that God blesses your relationship or imagine that your kitty cats brought you together. It's no proper concern of the government's.

Now, if you want to legally register your marriage and qualify for various marriage-connected benefits and privileges, it's a different matter, and Judge Waddoups makes that clear. This case was not about that. It was about people who live together and perform private marriage rituals and call themselves married. Prosecuting these people, while other married people are left alone when they commit adultery, is criminalizing their speech and beliefs. If you understand the issue, I think you'll see this must be the answer.

This does not lay the groundwork for finding a right to marry multiple spouses any more than it compels the government to prosecute adulterers.

"High-strung right-wingers who say, for example, that the country might as well embrace polygamy if it’s going to have same-sex marriage..."

"... are not doing themselves any favors. More seriously, this would be a good time for conservatives to take supporters of SSM at their word and insist on stronger cultural as well as legal affirmations of monogamy for everyone. Somehow, though, I suspect that rather than using this as an opportunity to build new coalitions against promiscuity or divorce, we’ll just see a redoubling of resentments."

Writes Daniel McCarthy at The American Conservative.

"A lot of people think [polygamy is] just about sex but... sex goes out the window after a while."

"If you don’t want your husband marrying someone else, what would happen to these single mums, then, and these divorcees? Is it fair that they just stay on the shelf? We should be looking after our community. Islam is all about community and society and we should look after our brothers and our sisters equally, otherwise it’s every man for themselves."

... Khola Hasan of Leyton’s sharia council believes that forcing mosques to register all nikahs, and thereby banning polygamy, will only make Muslims feel more persecuted. “The Muslim community in Britain already feels victimised,” she says, and it will inevitably force the practice underground, leaving women more vulnerable. She argues that, rather than banning polygamy, which she views as a “solution to many complex and difficult situations,” the practice should in fact be recognised by British law.

(Via Instapundit.)

"[P]rohibiting polygamy on 'feminist' grounds — that these marriages are inherently degrading to the women involved — is misguided."

"The case for polygamy is, in fact, a feminist one and shows women the respect we deserve."

Here’s the thing: As women, we really can make our own choices. We just might choose things people don’t like. If a woman wants to marry a man, that’s great. If she wants to marry another woman, that’s great too. If she wants to marry a hipster, well — I suppose that’s the price of freedom. And if she wants to marry a man with three other wives, that’s her damn choice...

The definition of marriage is plastic. Just like heterosexual marriage is no better or worse than homosexual marriage, marriage between two consenting adults is not inherently more or less "correct" than marriage among three (or four, or six) consenting adults. Though polygamists are a minority — a tiny minority, in fact — freedom has no value unless it extends to even the smallest and most marginalized groups among us. So let’s fight for marriage equality until it extends to every same-sex couple in the United States — and then let’s keep fighting. We’re not done yet.

I'm not endorsing this. Just anticipating that many readers will want to talk about it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Salamandyr said:

Am I right that her argument is that something is only bad if it hurts women?

Leo said:

@Salamandyr wasn't feminist grounds the example used in the supreme court when Sotomayor asked about this?

I'll answer that: Yes.



And for those who want to know my position: I note 2 completely different questions. 1. Should the state be able to criminalize the activities of more than 2 adults who engage in private rituals proclaiming that they are married and then claim to be married? and 2. Should the state recognize marriages with more than 2 adults for the purposes of tax laws and benefits programs? As to #1, I think this is a matter of individual autonomy, a combination of free speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion, and the state must leave these people alone. As to #2, I think the state can limit marriage to couples. Here, I think there can be a limit across the board: Everyone can have one spouse. You can combine #1 and #2 and have one legal marriage and additional members of the household that you can call whatever you want. It's none of the government's business.

Mitch H. said:

Polygamy is everywhere a marker for poverty, instability, and edemic social disorder. It encourages social inequality, and generally results in the trade of women like cattle, such that big men collect and stockpile wives as status symbols, while surplus and marginal men turn to violence and crime in order to "get theirs."

As a social ill, it's not worse than adultery and fornication. Some men get multiple women and some men are on the outs. Why should the people who believe in polygamy be denied their version of the same thing? If your answer has to do with how they think about what their relationships are — that they think in terms of "marriage" — that shows why there is a freedom of speech/association/religion problem.

"I'm amused that right after 'potato, my penis droops' up pops Quayle."

I say, in the laughing-in-bed first-post-of-the-morning. 

Quayle is a regular commenter here, but — who knows, on the internet? — it might be Dan Quayle.



Quayle responds: "I carry the blood of polygamists in my veins. So one should expect that sort of thing, I guess." He adds: "I took the name from my great grandfather, pictured here surrounded by some new friends."



That's a photograph of taken at the Utah Penitentiary in 1889, showing men arrested under the Edmunds-Tucker Act, explained here. Included in the photo is John C. Bennett, who "taught a doctrine of 'spiritual wifery'":

He and associates sought to have illicit sexual relationships with women by telling them that they were married "spiritually," even if they had never been married formally, and that the Prophet approved the arrangement.

That wasn't the correct doctrine, and Bennett got excommunicated, and then he "toured the country speaking against the Latter-day Saints and published a bitter anti-Mormon exposé charging the Saints with licentiousness."

Here's John C. Bennett in happier days...



... posing like Napoleon:

"Why I Love Mormonism."

An essay — in the philosophy column at the NYT by — Simon Critchley a philosophy professor at tthe New School for Social Research in New York.

But every now and then during one of those New York soirées, when anti-Mormon prejudice is persistently pressed and expressed, and I perhaps feel momentarily and un-Mormonly emboldened by wine, I begin to try and share my slim understanding of Joseph Smith and my fascination with the Latter-day Saints. After about 45 seconds, sometimes less, it becomes apparent that the prejudice is based on sheer ignorance of the peculiar splendors of Mormon theology. “They are all Republicans anyway,” they add in conclusion, “I mean, just look at that Mitbot Romney. He’s an alien.” As an alien myself, I find this thoughtless anti-Mormon sentiment a little bewildering.

I'm pretty sure Critchley has no intention of helping Mitt Romney. Read through the interesting twists and turns and you'll arrive at the line: "Of course, for Christians, this is the highest blasphemy." That's just peachy for Critchley, but maybe you Republicans — you Christianists — ought to flip out.

"Five 'jealous' wives rape Nigerian man to death."

They were — according to this news from Nigeria — jealous of the 6th wife. (Via Drudge.)

"Head of polygamous cult pleads guilty to murder of 4-year-old boy he bizarrely believed was gay."

The Daily News reports:

Peter Moses... marked the little boy for death after he decided his father was gay. When Jadon struck another boy in the buttocks, Moses concluded it was a sign of the child’s homosexuality, and decided to “get rid of him,” prosecutors said.

The bipolar cult leader — called “Lord” by his followers — took the screaming boy into a garage and shot him in the head with his mother’s gun while speakers blared music with The Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew, prosecutors charged.

He had members of his harem put the boy’s corpse in a suitcase and stash it in his suite — until it started to smell.

"Mitt Romney’s father was born in a small Mormon enclave where family members still live, surrounded by rugged beauty and violent drug cartels."

"This state of feeling in between, I would soon learn, defines nearly every aspect of Mormon life in the old colonies."

The settlers’ descendants, numbering several hundred in all, keep alive a culture that’s always been caught between Mexico and the United States, between the past and the present, between stability and crisis....

The Mexican Revolution played a critical role in the history of the Mormon colonies. Were it not for that 1910 uprising and the years of war that followed, Mitt Romney might have been born in Mexico, and might be living there today raising apples and peaches, as many of his cousins do....

And disqualified from serving as President of the United States.

When the first settlers arrived here in the 1870s and ’80s, some were fleeing a U.S. crackdown on polygamy. (The practice ended after a 1904 LDS edict that polygamists would be excommunicated.) They dug canals to channel the flow of the Piedras Verdes River to their crops, though the river’s waters dropped precipitously low afterward. But lore has it that the Lord quickly provided: An earthquake triggered the return of an abundant flow....

Biographers of the Romney family have pointed to the “indomitable will” of the forebears. But this characteristic, it seems to me, is common to many of the Mormons of the colonies. Their shared determination is one of the things that has allowed a relatively small number of English-speaking people to keep their language and way of life essentially unchanged for more than a century, despite being surrounded by an often hostile Spanish-speaking culture.

Leighton Romney, Mitt Romney’s second cousin, told me he hasn’t met the former governor of Massachusetts. (They have the same great-grandfather, Miles P. Romney, one of the 1885 pioneers.) I met Leighton the next day, on a visit to the fruit cooperative, packing house and export business he runs.

A 53-year-old dual citizen, Leighton has lived in Mexico all his life. Four of his uncles and one aunt served with the U.S. military in World War II. He knows the words to both country’s national anthems. Like people of Latin American descent living in the States, he hasn’t lost his sense of “kinship” to the country of his roots. “We’ve got a lot of similarities to Mexican-Americans,” he said. “We’re American-Mexicans.”

I wonder if the Romney campaign has a plan to roll out this American-Mexican dimension of the candidate. How should that be done? And are Americans ready at this point to absorb the story of how the government of the United States persecuted the Mormons?

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor tells a joke about Romney and Mormons and polygamy and Gingrich.

"One is a practicing polygamist, and he's not even the Mormon."

That sounds like a joke that's just out there waiting for everyone to discover it. I find it hard to believe that she's the first person to say it... and also that she did say it.