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.Life was short,everyone was often bereft of his or her beloved, babies often died, and itwas important to be able to find multiple partners desirable and fecund.That enabled one to build new relationships and produce new progeny.98 SEX IN THE BIBLERecent experiments in polygamy in the Western world are interestingto study.By the end of World War II, Germany found itself in the desper-ate situation of having had two generations of men virtually wiped outin World War I and two more generations eliminated in World War II.The consequence was a nation in which there were eight women for everyable-bodied man in 1946.The prospects were virtually nonexistent forGermany to be a society based upon well-regulated families, with most ofits population coupled and able to produce children.I am told that whenthe West German Republic was reestablished with its own self-governmentin 1953, two of the members of parliament were women, and that thesetwo women proposed to legalize polygamy for 20 years.What a goodbiblical solution to a wretched problem.Of course, the proposal wasdefeated.Almost all the men voted against it.It is not clear to me if theywere voting their conscience or their wives command.However, it wasnot proposed again.A prominent experiment in polygamy was that of the Mormons, whoarose in the mid-nineteenth century.Their proposal was grounded uponthe same need to care for many women in their society who had beenleft without a partner because of the death of a husband or for other rea-sons.They argued for this social solution on biblical grounds, as well, andclaimed that it was a religious requirement in their faith.It was their wayof obeying the biblical command to care for the fatherless and widows,and the like.Their case eventually was challenged in the U.S.court systemand was taken all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.Thelegislature and the courts ruled against the Mormons in 1882 and forbadepolygamy in the United States.Unfortunately, both the legislature and the court system claimed thatpolygamy was against the constitution and, therefore, forbidden.That wasan unfortunate development because most thinking and honest peopleknew at the time that the matter was neither a constitutional issue, nor wasit in any way forbidden by the constitution.In fact, forbidding polygamyfor Mormons in the United States is a breach of their constitutional rights.It is an infraction of the Bill of Rights provision for the free exercise ofreligion, as well as a violation of the right to free speech and free assembly.There does not exist in the U.S.Constitution any provision that militatesagainst the practice of polygamy.One of the more obscene movements against polygamy by Westernershas been the behavior of Christian missionaries over the last couple ofcenturies.The international missionary movement was particularly strongin the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth.Missions MONOGAMY: MODELS AND MEANINGS 99were established in most of what we now call third world countries.Thesemissions have been severely criticized during the last half century for thefact that they intentionally or inadvertently imposed Western culture andvalues upon the established societies in the countries to which they min-istered.This tended to be motivated by misplaced benevolence, as thoughchanging the nature of African societies, for example, to more  civilizedWestern ways of life was a gift and benefit to the Africans.There was, ofcourse, no objective basis for forming this judgment.In many cases, thismissionary incursion into third world societies produced more destabiliza-tion than enhancement.This does not, of course, devalue all the spiritualand psycho-social advantages the missionaries brought to these societies,two of the more prominent of which were education and improved medi-cal attention.But then colonialism was better at both than were Christianmissions.However, one of the most destabilizing influences the missionarieswreaked upon third world societies was the insistence upon monogamyin what had been polygamous cultures.The net result was often thatconversion to Christianity meant the disruption of peaceful, establishedfamilies and the abandonment of former wives to lives of destitutionor ignominy.The motivation of the missionaries was grounded in theassumption that monogamy was required by the Bible [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]