[Author's note: My wording left some readers under the
impression that the modern Mormon church may endorse or practice
polygamy. It does not. I should have made clearer that I was
referring to certain people who claim to be Mormons, not to the
church or mainstream practice.]
***
"And now, polygamy," sighs Charles Krauthammer in a
Washington Post
column. It's true. As if they didn't already have enough on
their minds, Americans are going to have to debate polygamy.
And not a moment too soon.
For generations, taboo kept polygamy out of sight and out of
mind in America. But the taboo is crumbling. An HBO television
series called "Big Love,"
which benignly portrays a one-husband, three-wife family in Utah,
set off the latest round of polygamy talk. Even so, a federal
lawsuit (now on appeal), the American Civil Liberties Union's stand
for polygamy rights, and the rising voices of pro-polygamy groups
such as TruthBearer.org
(an evangelical Christian group) and Principle Voices (which
Newsweek describes
as "a Utah-based group run by wives from polygamous marriages")
were already making the subject hard to duck.
So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as
an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as
a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public
opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is
thinking about polygamy as social policy.
If the coming debate changes that, it will have done everyone a
favor. For reasons that have everything to do with its own social
dynamics and nothing to do with gay marriage, polygamy is a
profoundly hazardous policy.
To understand why, begin with two crucial words. The first is
"marriage." Group love (sometimes called polyamory) is already
legal, and some people freely practice it. Polygamy asserts not a
right to love several others but a right to marry them all. Because
a marriage license is a state grant, polygamy is a matter of public
policy, not just of personal preference.
The second crucial word is "polygyny." Unlike gay marriage,
polygamy has been a common form of marriage since at least biblical
times, and probably long before. In his 1994 book
The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary
Psychology, Robert Wright notes that a "huge majority" of
the human societies for which anthropologists have data have been
polygamous. Virtually all of those have been polygynous: that is,
one husband, multiple wives. Polyandry (one wife, many husbands) is
vanishingly rare. The real-world practice of polygamy seems to flow
from men's desire to marry all the women they can have children
with.
Moreover, in America today the main constituents for polygamous
marriage are Mormons and, as Newsweek reports, "a growing
number of evangelical Christian and Muslim polygamists." These
religious groups practice polygyny, not polyandry. Thus, in light
of current American politics as well as copious anthropological
experience, any responsible planner must assume that if polygamy
were legalized, polygynous marriages would outnumber polyandrous
ones-probably vastly.
Here is something else to consider: As far as I've been able to
determine, no polygamous society has ever been a true liberal
democracy, in anything like the modern sense. As societies move
away from hierarchy and toward equal opportunity, they leave
polygamy behind. They monogamize as they modernize. That may be a
coincidence, but it seems more likely to be a logical outgrowth of
the arithmetic of polygamy.
Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation,
they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries
no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't
marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't
marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by
contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that
some men marry at the expense of others.
For the individuals affected, losing the opportunity to marry is
a grave, even devastating, deprivation. (Just ask a gay American.)
But the effects are still worse at the social level. Sexual
imbalance in the marriage market has no good social consequences
and many grim ones.
Two political scientists, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den
Boer, ponder those consequences in their 2004 book
Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male
Population. Summarizing their findings in a Washington
Post
article, they write:
Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with
advantages-money, skills, education-will marry, but men without
such advantages-poor, unskilled, illiterate-will not. A permanent
subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest
socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example,
by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the
young adult male population.
The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and
sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is
concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their
book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely
than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they
"may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary."
Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they
"exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The
result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly
intersocietal, violence."
Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in
polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are
governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing
violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or
war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on
foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent
today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25
percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became
natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly
toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males
fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of
violence."
Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently
unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100
females: in other words, when one-sixth of men are surplus goods on
the marriage market. The United States as a whole would reach that
ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent
took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives-numbers that are
quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while. In particular
communities-inner cities, for example-polygamy could take a toll
much more quickly. Even a handful of "Solomons" (high-status men
taking multiple wives) could create brigades of new recruits for
street gangs and drug lords, the last thing those communities
need.
Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a
polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping
them on the street-literally. The sect,
reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than
400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the
older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off
in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and
homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of
suffering and darkness."
True, in modern America some polygynous marriages would probably
be offset by group marriages or chain marriages involving multiple
husbands, but there is no way to know how large such an offset
might be. And remember: Every unbalanced polygynous marriage, other
things being equal, leaves some man bereft of the opportunity to
marry, which is no small cost to that man.
The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a
polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for
granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes
brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with
resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won,
would fear losing. Although much has been said about
polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a
husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never
become husbands.
By this point it should be obvious that polygamy is,
structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not
its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples,
communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack
it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and
society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it.
As the public focuses on a subject it has not confronted for
generations, the hazards of polygamy are likely to sink in. In
time, debating polygamy will remind us why our ancestors were right
to abolish it. The question is whether the debate will reach its
stride soon enough to prevent polygamy from winning a lazy
acquiescence that it in no way deserves.