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"With the power of the scriptures, polygamy continues its enslavement of women who are manipulated into believing that to do otherwise is to reap eternal damnation; by believing, however, they make of their lives a hell on earth."
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Polygamy"As for my two wives, what can I do about it? They married me off at thirteen, to my cousin. I was thirteen and she was twenty-three. I didn’t even know what it meant to have a wife, and when they tried to explain it to me, I went out of my mind with rage. With fury. I didn’t want a wife, I wanted to play cricket. I was very fond of cricket. To calm me down, they had to give me two new cricket bags. When the ceremony was over, I ran off to play cricket. There are so many things I must change in my country! And I was fortunate. They married my playmate off at the age of eleven to a woman of thirty-two. He always said to me, »Lucky you!"
Polygamy is the practice of marrying multiple spouses. When a man is married to more than one wife at the same time, it is called polygyny. When a woman is married to more than one husband at the same time, it is called polyandry. In contrast, in sociobiology and zoology, researchers use "polygamy" more broadly to refer to any form of multiple mating.
"With the power of the scriptures, polygamy continues its enslavement of women who are manipulated into believing that to do otherwise is to reap eternal damnation; by believing, however, they make of their lives a hell on earth."
"The abusive nature of polygamous relationships often extend to women within one household vying with one another for the affections and attention of one man. As Vicky and Rowenna explain, “What is going on with a sister-wife, or wives, is that you are sharing one penis. That’s what it all revolves around.”"
"In polygamy, children are mere extensions of their mothers and normally are their fathers’ property. With so many children, they are thought of by fathers as a group rather than as individuals. Men, who believe they are the God of the home and who already live outside of societal norms, often make their children victims of ever more deviant and unimaginable abuses. Polygamy is patriarchy spun off into its furthest possible extreme."
"In the reign of James the Second, It was generally reckoned As a rather serious crime To marry two wives at a time."
"Perhaps no one else has seen and lived through more of the inner workings and daily lives of as many varied Mormon fundamentalist polygamist groups as Laura Chapman. Based on her firsthand experiences and observations, there is one message above all that she wants to convey about living in polygamy: incest, statutory rape, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, deprivation of education and forced marriages of young girls are endemic to all of the polygamist communities and not, as some have proclaimed, no worse than in the general monogamous population or isolated to only a few polygamous groups."
"So then if, while her husband is living she marries another man, she shall be called an adulteress, but if her husband has died, she is free from that law, so that she is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man."