lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu (Louie Crew) (06/03/91)
John Clark (jclark@ucsd.edu) writes: >How do you feel about other non-traditional family arrangements, >such as polygamy (not implying one man many women), 'marriage' >groups if you will? Or do you only have diadic marital relationships >in mind, gender matching obviously not important. Polygamy was biblical sexuality for a longer period of time in the biblical epoch than for the portion that it was not practiced; and I do not know of any biblical record of any theological shift that reversed it. Is there one? If I met polygamists who wanted to tell me about the spiritual journeys in such relationships today, I would listen to them and move among them for a long time before I came to any final judgment. I particularly want to observe the justice dimensions in these relationships, even as I try to do in assessing diads. For example, does the male alone get to have multiple partners? Are the partners treated with economic justice? How do these relationship hold up when tested by sickness, poverty, and other stress?... The one occasion that I recently had to assess polygamy up-close recently, I was not impressed. A Muslim woman came to my friend who is an AIDS counselor and said, "I am one of five wives to the same man. We have all test positive to HIV, but we cannot get him to take the test." With no pleasure in his irony, my friend replied, "He has taken the test five times already, and failed." Imagine the terror that these five women face. Not one of them was brought up a Muslim. All converted knowing that they would cut themselves off from most of their family and friends, who would judge them crazy or stupid. Presumably they converted out of great faith and out of a strong sense of what this new community, especially this one husband they shared, would mean to them, and they discovered that he was not honest with them about something so fundamental as his history of risk to hiv infection. Many partners in hetero diads much trumpeted in Christian Churches are at similar jeopardy: many know that their husbands would rather wait out the health of their spouse than to risk telling of their secret sojourns into unprotected sex or drug experience before the union our as adulterers. That clock is ticking in the blood-streams all over the world, testing fidelity and marital honesty. I take no pleasure at all in the numbers who will be found wanting. Since Jesus is always on the side of the sufferer and always ready to forgive, I assume that the Episcopal AIDS ministry project is correct with its poster which proclaims, "Jesus has AIDS." Neither polygamy nor diads offers a fool-proof guarantee. Do you know of polygamists who are asking us to revise our laws to give them more justice? Louie Crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu Associate Professor . . . . . . . . . . . . . .lcrew@draco.rutgers.edu Academic Foundations Department . . . . . . . CompuServe No. 73517,147 Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey. . . . . . 201-485-4503 h P. O. Box 30 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201-648-5434 o Newark, NJ 07101 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201-648-5700 FAX Only a dead fish floats with the current.