Polygamy — Should We Let It Be?

Polygamy is a confusing issue.

Is it a religious practice? Is it an evil thing?

Are we prudes to reject it, or naive to accept it?

As more high profile cases hit the courts, we are being asked to pick a side.

Warren Jeffs had his conviction overturned on a technicality, and the Supreme Court of British Columbia is deciding whether outlawing polygamy violates religious rights.

The law, by necessity, has a myopic view of the world and can only see it through a jurisprudential lens. The issue of polygamy is a wider one and it affects society as a whole, not just the couples involved.

Generally speaking, there needs to be a good reason that a government intervenes in the decisions that adults make about how to live their lives.

But polgamy is associated with a lot of terrible things, such as domestic abuse and the rape of children. Is there something about the practice that leads to these terrible outcomes?

Joe Heinrich, an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia thinks there is. He filed a brief with the court against decriminalizing polygamy.

He said that polygamy turns women into “valuable objects rather than loveable people” which makes men “control them more carefully.”

The men who fail to get wives will be driven by competition that it increasingly dangerous to society and to themselves. There is good data to show that unmarried men are more violent and more generally criminal than married ones, other things being equal. The worst affected are the poor and uneducated who are also the least likely to prosper in a free market in women where the winners can collect as many women as they can handle.

But the winners, who get wives of their own, find their own behaviour distorted by polygamy. Because the competition for women is so fierce, making them valuable objects rather than loveable people, men, whether fathers, husbands, or brother, must control them more carefully. The same dynamic places pressure on the recruitment of younger and younger brides into the marriage market, because in a polygynous society you can never have enough of them. Finally, the men will reduce their investment in any particular wives and children, partly because their resources will be much more widely spread; partly because they will increasingly spend their efforts on getting more wives rather than looking after the ones they have.

The original document is available here.

He is likely not a Mormon, or a Muslim. So here is Asila Rasool, who makes the case for polygamy being a feminist act. She says:

In my view, the ideal feminist loves and respects human nature; both feminine and masculine. She neither chafes at the reality that most men are polygynous by nature, nor does she condemn this behavior as immoral or boorish. While most women cannot give their hearts and affections to more than one male, men can love and commit to more than one woman at a time. A confident feminist realizes that her husband’s natural bent toward polygyny will not damage her self-worth, and she possesses empathy for the women who are looking to marry, yet, for a variety of reasons, have not found a worthy single man with whom to unite in marriage.

However it is worth it to note that attitudes in the Islamic world are changing. A recent study by the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates found that over 70% of Emirati women would not accept a polygamous marriage.