His followers wear distinctive, historic-looking dresses, and he is now serving a life prison sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting girls he considered plural wives. The Utah attorney general has publicly declined to prosecute polygamists like him for years, but the bigamy law remains on the books.
The new proposal would significantly lower the potential penalties for consenting adult polygamists but keep harsher penalties for other crimes sometimes linked to polygamy, including the new addition of coerced marriage. Some polygamy advocates have pushed back, arguing that those enhancements create an unfair association with their communities.
Melissa Ellis grew up in the polygamous Kingston group and said she worries that leaders could consider it a victory if the state lightened penalties. To this day, polygamy is most common in places where people, and particularly men, tend to die young. However, the practice was disavowed by these groups in the Middle Ages, and polygamy generally has not been condoned by Jews or Christians in recent centuries.
Still, polygamy sometimes was practiced by certain Christian sects, including by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sometimes called Mormons in the U. Some Mormon splinter groups still practice polygamy. Religion often plays a role in how polygamy is governed and practiced within a single country. In Nigeria, for example, polygamous marriage is not allowed at the federal level, but the prohibition only applies to civil marriages.
Twelve northern, Muslim-majority states do recognize these unions as Islamic or customary marriages. In India, Muslim men are allowed to marry multiple women, while men of other groups are not. However, in countries where polygamy is common, it often is practiced by people of all faiths.
Polygamy usually takes the form of polygyny — when a man marries multiple women. Polyandry, which refers to wives having more than one husband, is even rarer than polygamy and mostly documented among small and relatively isolated communities around the world.
In Burkina Faso, for example, where polygamy is common, spouses must agree that a marriage will be polygamous at its outset for the husband to be allowed to take another wife in the future. One-in-five U. A Pew Research Center survey published in found that Muslims around the world are divided about polygamy: While majorities in several sub-Saharan African countries and pluralities in parts of the Middle East describe polygamy as morally acceptable, Muslims living in Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe tend to say that polygamy is immoral.
Say "Alexa, enable the Pew Research Center flash briefing". It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values.
Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. Fundamentalist Mormons, said to number more than 30, across the western United States, believe they are adhering to the truest form of Mormon doctrine, which promises polygamists glorification in heaven. Critics, however, say the measure wrongly frames polygamy as a human rights issue.
In , Kody Brown, the patriarch of the polygamist family featured on the Sister Wives television reality show, challenged the law after being investigated for bigamy by Utah county prosecutors. No charges were filed. A federal judge struck down the anti-polygamy law as unconstitutional. But a federal appeals court reversed the ruling and the US supreme court declined to hear the case. This article is more than 1 year old.
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