thegreekdog, maybe it
seems to be ignorant bias, but that's it. It just seems that way because something inside you doesn't want to confront the reality of the issue, and if you look at the history of polygyny, you see the same pattern of violence come up again and again.
Also, regarding the crime, etc of the inner city, that has way more to do with poverty than anything having to do with race. And guess what, when you look at the cultural effect of poverty throughout history, you see the same pattern of crime cropping up, regardless of skin pigmentation, religion, etc.
(Player already mentioned it, and a chapter in
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell does a good job of explaining the problem of poverty in impeding success and how things like
KIPP have made great strides in ending the cycle by merely being honest about cultural differences -- and the cultural differences here aren't between "black and white", but between poor, middle class, and wealthy -- one of the best case studies in the book describes middle class parenting and working class parenting, and only at the end is it revealed that the middle class family is black and the poor one is white. Once again demonstrating that race is an artificial classification and reinforcing the notion that behavior is not.)
Just like with polygyny. I have great respect for many Mormons. I don't judge modern day Mormons by the history of their church same as I don't judge other religions by the history of their churches (or temples, etc).
However, it would be foolish to deny that polygyny now is any different from polygyny then just as it would be foolish to deny that human nature now is any different from human nature then.
And that's the crucial bit of information upon which everything turns. I'm talking about
behavior. Greekdog, you're talking about church. As long as you keep those two things separate, we'll be able to communicate our ideas and perhaps reach a consensus. The second you start blending the two, however, it gets mired in the whole "religious intolerance" thing.
So let's just not talk about the crimes of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in the context of religion, because we'll never agree on that. Mormons are raised with the religious belief that their religion's founders were holy men who were persecuted for no reason.
As a student of history, I have a different perspective. I see a religion that enjoyed kidnapping, raping and murdering in order to fulfill some bizarre sex addiction and covered it up with the faux outre displays of 'morality' like abstaining from drink or bad words. The societies that were preyed upon by the group (how would you feel if your daughter was kidnapped and forced into a marriage, i.e. raped daily?) had good reason to not want them around. If the Mormons had just stopped the
behavior of polygyny instead of using a persecution complex to explain it away, they may never have emigrated to Utah in the first place. They probably would have found a way to coexist just like every other religion that doesn't destabilize society eventually does in this nation.
I'm not attacking Mormons here. Don't take it that way. I'm attacking polygyny, which is a practice that damages society and thus cannot be legal, even in a pluralistic society. It only ever manages to flourish in a very restrictive and fundamentalist bubble; obviously because it requires the exclusion of much of the male population and the subjugation of women.
Again, I have nothing against Mormons or the Church of Latter-Day Saints as it exists today. Do not take honesty about history as a tacit condemnation of a religion or it's adherents as it exists in the modern day. At the same time though, let's not deceive ourselves about behavior and human nature.
