DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

                I’m not talking about homosexuality, I’m talking about polygamy – but there is a parallel.  In both cases a more accurate statement would be, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Flaunt.”

                I served aboard a “tin can” in the early fifties.  Back then if a gay guy flaunted his homosexuality and started hitting on some old salts, he would have been tossed overboard. 

                There is wisdom in keeping your mouth shut and Don’t Flaunt.  Most everyone in Utah understands that it is economically unfeasible to launch a campaign to imprison all polygamists.  Law enforcement is aware that in all probably half the Mormon polygamist women are consenting adults placing bigamy in the euphemistic victimless category.   

                These women consent for various reasons:

·          It is the only life they have ever known, the only place they are comfortable.  (Culture bound)

·                 They are true believers – adherents of Mormon doctrine.  Joseph Smith is their prophet and savior.  If he says God wants women to be plural wives, then so be it – they stand in line.  Such women cling to the principle of plural marriage with the tenacity and recklessness of a hillbilly Baptist wiled by the notion that carousing with rattlesnakes brings him closer to God.  (Doctrine bound)

·         And there are the women who consent because they are struggling moms made more secure and welcomed in a defiant, adventurous lifestyle.  For some women, also men, Mormon polygamy symbolizes rebellion - a subliminal mutiny against LDS Church authority and government – synonymous with, but not as audacious and conspicuous as a tattoo, tawdry attire, a rhinestone studded nose, heretic pedantry and a long-haired Casanova.   (Defiant, destitute and adventurous bound)

                Is, Don’t Say, Don’t Flaunt, hypocritical?  Maybe.  Is Mormon polygamy nothing more than mistressism with a religious stamp of approval?  Could be. 

                Homosexuality has been an abnormal part of the human condition since practiced in ancient Greece and is not apt to be corrected by legislation or genetic manipulation.  Just don’t get in my face with it or try to convince my children it’s normal and okay.  And don’t try to teach it in the schools unless it is at the college level in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. 

                Polygamy has been part of the human condition since biblical days.  But in the past it was the domain of the rich and powerful.  Brigham Young, like Henry Ford, made his product available to the common man.  But to make polygamy work for the Mormon bourgeois and proletarian, Brigham reinforced eroticism with religious coercion, fear, asceticism, dependence and fanaticism.  

                Don’t try and fertilize me with the claim that Mormon plural families are bonded by love, respect and commitment when women hop from man to man and prophets take a wife from one man and give her to another.  Priesthood authority is the bonding agent along with the illusion that God will reward you after you die.  Of course there are exceptions – I know of cases where love and commitment are triumphant in defiance of priesthood hegemony.    

                The Constitution allows one to teach women that God wants them to be subservient plural wives.  It will even allow you to teach that it pleases God if you handle and curl around your neck venomous snakes.  The Constitution also allows me to rebut those idiotic, unnatural assertions as being really stupid and dangerous.