I've finally gotten around to understanding the hoopla surrounding the raid on a polygamist sect's compound in Texas. For the past two weeks the story has unfolded on the TV screens at my gym and on the front page of CNN.com but I've been too busy to really care about a bunch of crazy white people.
But the story won't go away and after reading a couple of articles on what looks like a frightening network of men raping and "marrying" their cousins, sisters and aunts, and siring children with their victims, I got to thinking how silly it would be to use this wanton abuse of women and children as an argument against straight people and their qualifications to raise children.
Yes, the Little House on the Prairie ladies we've seen on TV are creepy, but they don't represent straight people as a whole.
Funny, then, how when it comes to issues like gay marriage and gay adoption, gays are somehow accountable for every homo or two's misdeeds. Words like "gay agenda" and "indoctrination," along with references to the Folsom Street Fair and white parties, are thrown into the mix whenever we want to create our own families and integrate ourselves into society. When two guys want to get married it's suddenly part of a master plan to topple the country til the streets run pink with cosmopolitans. When hundreds of hetero-polygamists remove themselves from society to rape and abuse women and children, however, it just makes people go "hmmm."
Though not all polygamists are living in obscurity. Some of them are out, loud and proud and know how to use PR to their advantage. Check out a press release from the National Polygamy Rights Movement here.
I'm glad this story is continuing to get play, and I love that it's happening at a time when the airwaves seem to have been taken over by the Vatican. On the eve of George Bush's departure, and the end of the Christian Right's eight years of rule, it's spectacular to watch the lofty institutes of marriage and "Christianity" unravel.
I'll drink to that.
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