Glow
Active Member
Great article from USA Today
What gives me pause
What is clear, however, is that there is no objective justification for brushing off the mothers as a bunch of prairie-style Stepford wives, let alone for leaping to the conclusion that mounting an armed raid to take their children away was indeed proper to do on the strength of a metaphor grounded in a religious stereotype.
The feminist in me cringes at rising to the defense of a group so patently patriarchal as FLDS. But it isn't much of a stretch to defend the religious rights of groups with whom one mostly agrees, is it? I, personally, find the kind of spirituality practiced on the YFZ Ranch deeply troubling. I find the pop-romanticization of polygamy in HBO's Big Love equally problematic.
But, both as a feminist and as a scholar of religion, I also recognize that we as a society can applaud the YFZ raid and its potentially dire consequences for hundreds of women and their children, only if we blind ourselves to some other salient facts:
* Across the USA and across class, race, ethnic and religious divides, adolescent girls are becoming more sexually active, at ever-earlier ages. A recently released government study found that one in four teenage girls in this country has a sexually transmitted infection.
* Monogamy may be our societal "ideal," but given the American divorce rate, "serial polygamy" is closer to the norm often culminating in precisely the pattern practiced by FLDS, whereby the older a man gets, the younger his newest wife is, the pattern originally advocated by Joseph Smith.
* Historians acknowledge a pragmatic link between the revelation that led the Mormon Church to renounce polygamy, and Utah statehood. On this ground, in religious terms, FLDS members are as legitimate in claiming to be "true" followers of Joseph Smith as are, say, those traditionalist Catholics who reject the authority of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church.
* Gay marriage advocates have long pointed to parallels between anti-gay marriage and anti-polygamy laws: Both offer privileges to heterosexual monogamy.
* Meanwhile, polygamy and/or adolescent sexual intercourse are socially and religiously sanctioned in a variety of cultural contexts around the world, for example, in some Islamic communities, among the Maasai of Africa and in Papua New Guinea.
Maybe, rather than focusing on the family arrangements of an isolated Texas religious sect, we should be asking ourselves what was wrong with this picture: Even as CPS was herding the last of the FLDS girls off to distant foster care facilities late last month, American Internet users were so eager to see Annie Liebovitz's revealing Vanity Fair photos of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus that the magazine's website crashed.
Mary Zeiss Stange is a professor of Women's Studies and Religion at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
What gives me pause
What is clear, however, is that there is no objective justification for brushing off the mothers as a bunch of prairie-style Stepford wives, let alone for leaping to the conclusion that mounting an armed raid to take their children away was indeed proper to do on the strength of a metaphor grounded in a religious stereotype.
The feminist in me cringes at rising to the defense of a group so patently patriarchal as FLDS. But it isn't much of a stretch to defend the religious rights of groups with whom one mostly agrees, is it? I, personally, find the kind of spirituality practiced on the YFZ Ranch deeply troubling. I find the pop-romanticization of polygamy in HBO's Big Love equally problematic.
But, both as a feminist and as a scholar of religion, I also recognize that we as a society can applaud the YFZ raid and its potentially dire consequences for hundreds of women and their children, only if we blind ourselves to some other salient facts:
* Across the USA and across class, race, ethnic and religious divides, adolescent girls are becoming more sexually active, at ever-earlier ages. A recently released government study found that one in four teenage girls in this country has a sexually transmitted infection.
* Monogamy may be our societal "ideal," but given the American divorce rate, "serial polygamy" is closer to the norm often culminating in precisely the pattern practiced by FLDS, whereby the older a man gets, the younger his newest wife is, the pattern originally advocated by Joseph Smith.
* Historians acknowledge a pragmatic link between the revelation that led the Mormon Church to renounce polygamy, and Utah statehood. On this ground, in religious terms, FLDS members are as legitimate in claiming to be "true" followers of Joseph Smith as are, say, those traditionalist Catholics who reject the authority of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church.
* Gay marriage advocates have long pointed to parallels between anti-gay marriage and anti-polygamy laws: Both offer privileges to heterosexual monogamy.
* Meanwhile, polygamy and/or adolescent sexual intercourse are socially and religiously sanctioned in a variety of cultural contexts around the world, for example, in some Islamic communities, among the Maasai of Africa and in Papua New Guinea.
Maybe, rather than focusing on the family arrangements of an isolated Texas religious sect, we should be asking ourselves what was wrong with this picture: Even as CPS was herding the last of the FLDS girls off to distant foster care facilities late last month, American Internet users were so eager to see Annie Liebovitz's revealing Vanity Fair photos of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus that the magazine's website crashed.
Mary Zeiss Stange is a professor of Women's Studies and Religion at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
