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It\u2019s perhaps a little unpopular to argue that Brigham Young<\/a> got anything right about polygamy, but one place where I think he was onto something was to point out the all-too-common hypocrisy of many vehement anti-polygamists (see full quotes below).<\/span><\/p>\n Mark Twain authored that famous jab about how ugly Mormon plural wives were\u2013but maybe that\u2019s because <\/span>the women he collected<\/span><\/a> were younger.\u00a0 Victorian-era Church leaders were indeed onto something about how people would preen about those awful Mormon abominations against public virtue and then visit a prostitute (<\/span>London alone had over 80,000<\/span><\/a> of them, and I assume they weren\u2019t just twiddling their thumbs in empty brothels).<\/span><\/p>\n Of course we all know about the infamous sexual hypocrisy of 19th-century American and English society, but there are more modern-day examples as well. Francis Mitterand, the French Prime Minister, had both a mistress and her daughter and his wife and their children at his funeral. People might make a big deal about technical legal distinctions and niceties, but Miterrand was a polygamist, full stop.\u00a0 To this you can add legion other examples. Pablo Picasso was a polygamist, housing one wife and his children with her in the same neighborhood as his This isn\u2019t to say that everybody who is anti-polygamist is a hypocrite, and this isn\u2019t a defense of polygamy itself, just that it\u2019s a bit odd that, in the spirit of Brigham Young, a society with polycules, throuples, and every relationship configuration under the sun would pearl clutch about polygamy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Cultural elite discourse notwithstanding, the artificial distinctions between polygamy and these cooler family forms are flimsier than many realize. At the same time we had an explosion in the acceptance of different family forms <\/span>support for polygamy tripled<\/span><\/a>, and some jurisdictions <\/span>are beginning to recognize polygamous relationships<\/span><\/a>. And yes, I know all the little desperate distinctions made between polyamorous and polygamous relationships, but at the end of the day my polygamist ancestors had the right to vote and no-fault divorce their husbands long before their monogamous foremothers did and the purposes of, say, the famous Sommerville ordinance polygyny is simply a subset of polyamory. I suspect that on some level the same people who think that Mormon polygamy is gross but San Franciscan poly relationships are vanguard are basing their attitude more on the fact that one group dresses funny and is weird and the other group is cool, more than anything consistent or well thought-out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n other wife<\/del> mistress and her children. Let\u2019s not forget Charlie Sheen\u2019s multiple homes for his multiple families. Ernest Hemingway’s relationship start and stop dates didn’t, shall we say, fit together like blocks, \u00a0and then of course there\u2019s the king of all polygamists Hugh Hefner. Of course, had he bothered calling them wives I doubt entrance to his mansion parties would have carried nearly the same cultural cachet. Even renowned libertine Dan Savage, advocate of all sorts of \u201cto each their own\u201d sexual lifestyles, engages in some creative anthropology about why polygamy is Just Wrong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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