The closest you came to answering was saying “not as a rule,” and then you said it was legal in Hawaii. The answer “not as a rule” does not quite answer the question of “is it EVER” and appears to leave that door open. Could you please just state clearly whether you personally believe it is EVER morally ok for a 40 year old to fuck a 14 year old.
Alright, since you keep dancing around the topic (why, if the answer was so clear, you couldn’t just repeat yourself. . . I dunno), here is your post in question:
I understand that you were saying NOTHING about WHO she agrees to have sex with, but now you are being directly asked to say SOMETHING about WHO she agrees to have sex with. That SOMETHING you have been directly and clearly asked to respond to is the morality of that act/choice. You have responded to the legality of that act, but not to the morality of that act. There are certainly times where the law and what is ultimately moral and in conflict with one another, you are being asked in rather simple terms to speak on that.
And that question, which has now been laid out for you for the 1000th time is a question that you have not answered.
(bolding mine)
How long will this debate about whether she answered the question go on?
That answer is pretty useless and still dodges the question, unless she specifies in which circumstances it’s ok and which it’s not.
This.
Until she answers it.
Actually, Dio, I think you should drop it now. You have to assume by now she’s not gonna do that.
While in theory, I agree that you’re right and she’s not going to answer, I suppose what’s most irksome about this whole thing to me is that she’s taking some position of argumentative authority here. Anyone who disagrees with her- you included- is being shut down as unintelligent and unable to properly debate. Fact is, she’s either intentionally being obtuse or just not bright enough to understand the errors she herself is making. I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt though, hence me suggesting she drop the obtuse act.
While I can’t speak for Stoid and she has declined to further clarify things herself, I think we are all in agreement that coercing a child bride is immoral even if it is legal in some situations. She has contended that polygamy among consenting adults does not necessarily lead to underage or incestuous marriages. And she is pointing to the Browns as an example of a healthy relationship.
I disagree with her on nearly every point in this discussion. But she has said nothing to imply that pedophilia (or whatever it’s called with post-pubescent victims) and incest are okay. So why must the entire discussion devolve into “answer me,” “I already did,” “no you didn’t,” “yes I did,” lather rinse repeat?
Because she did imply that child brides are sometimes ok with her bullshit about 13 year olds being as mature as 20 year olds and asking me who was I to say that a 14 year old couldn’t choose to be a wife.
** thinks back to who she was dating as a 14-year-old **
** shivers in fear **
I hate to break up the fun, but this thread is about polygamy, not the age of consent. I’ve given my answer to the (unrelated, designed to divert attention) question about my personal opinion of whether it is ever acceptable for a 14 year old to have sex with a 40 year old. (I’m gratified to see that people can actually absorb the words after 4 5 6 7 8 readings…) Not as a rule.
I do not have a set of of specific exceptions ready to present for everyone to review, judge, and demand more answers about, nor do I owe it to anyone, much less Dio, to spend the time to come up with some.
But because Dio has managed to play you all into thinking that this is worth spending time and energy on, I’ll clarify for you.
I can think of very few things that can be answered with an unequivocal yes or no 100% of the time. Very few. Human experience is infinite in its variety. It is my nature to always hold that in mind, therefore I rarely find myself thinking that the answer to a question about human behavior is absolutely yes or no. So the truest, most honest answer can only be “usually” or “most of the time” or “generally speaking”, because it’s very likely that there will be exceptions.
Furthermore, I could easily avoid all of this by skipping the truthful, grey answer and just giving the simple black and white answer. But I’m freakishly truthful. It is profoundly difficult and unpleasant for me to be false and it’s much too complicated. My integrity is everything to me. There’s no way I’m going to trot out a lie to keep things simple and find two years from now when some thread about a 14 year old having sex with a 40 year old comes along and the circumstances make it seem a tolerable situation to me someone digs up this thread and throws in my face the lie that I told as evidence that I am not truthful. (I guarantee you, someone would)
Now, I do think it’s unlikely that this particular topic would unfold like this, so I probably could have gotten away with answering “no” and leaving it at that, many people would find that simpler. But what really does keep my life genuinely simple is operating exactly the same way at all times, so I just tell the truth. And then, as Twain said, I never have to remember anything.
And the truth is that as a general rule, I do not think it is healthy for 14 year olds and 40 year olds to be in a sexual relationship. That’s the answer I gave, and it’s the answer I meant.
If you don’t like that answer, it’s your problem, because here’s some more truth: I’ve considered the question all I care to and no more detail is forthcoming because I have none and I have zero interest in manufacturing any. I find it the subject boring.
And finally: I am never embarrassed or ashamed of what I believe. Which is no doubt why I find it so easy to be honest. I have no secrets. I yam what I yam. So trying to make me squirm by demanding that I explain something I believe is a complete waste of time. I wouldn’t have any issue with sharing it. Why would I? Because other people would be shocked or disagree? So? I’m 52 years old, not 20 - I’m very clear about my values , and they are not dependent on majority approval.
Actually, I went even further - I specified that coercion was wrong no matter what the age of the woman involved.
[QUOTE=DiosaBellissima;13050992 That SOMETHING you have been directly and clearly asked to respond to is the morality of that act/choice. You have responded to the legality of that act, but not to the morality of that act. [/QUOTE]
As long as all parties are consenting and reasonably mature (let’s not go offroad on that again…) I don’t think that morality enters into sexual behavior.
The only genuinely immoral thing is to force someone (via threats, coercion, whatever) to do something they don’t want to do.
After that, morality is no longer an issue.
(Yes, I’m guessing my idea of what is moral is probably simpler than yours. It boils down to “don’t hurt people”. If I spent time examining it, I’m sure I could come up with some shading here and there, but that’s the gist.)
That’s all irrelevant to the question of what’s “excellent” for children. It’s not “excellent” for children to see their mothers treated as inferior. The end.
Just for clarification, Dio didn’t convince me that this argument hangs on the answer to this question, I just was curious as to what your answer would be. And it was fascinating, so it was worth it to me to hear what it was.
I wholeheartedly agree!
And I also believe that polygamy is an excellent family structure, assuming that the adults are happy with it.
Only 400 posts to agreement!
Always happy to provide some fascination! 
Thanks.
Exactly. And it’s too bad that this point, which has been repeatedly made by various posters, has consistently been ignored.
It doesn’t take that many polygamous marriages to create problems.
If you have a town of 2,000 adults with 1,000 each of women and men, and 100 of the men have 2 wives, 50 have 3, 10 have 4 and 5 have 5, so that of the 415 women are married to 165 men. That leaves 585 women for monogamous marriages, and means that 250 men are SOL. Obviously, these are made up numbers, but you can see that polygamy cannot be an option for the masses.
China is currently running into a problem with excess men because of the imbalance in the gender of babies being born. Indeed, what do you do with the extra men?
I hope people aren’t seriously attempting to debate a fundamental institute of human relationships based on one family in a “reality” show.
I bring my bias to the table. As I’ve said upstream, I grew up in a very conservative Mormon (capital M) family, believing that the world is 6,000 years old, that there was a flood and God and Jesus visited a young boy in New York in 1820 to restore the lost true church of Christ. I also believed that we Mormons had suspended the practice, but it would in heaven there would be polygamy.
My upbringing was less severe than the fundamentalists, but even so there were strong cultural and religious pressures to conform. I went on a mission, came back and was engaged to a woman after just a month of dating, which was very common. Fortunately, we both realized it was way too early, and didn’t go through with it, but I could very well have been a new grandfather instead of a new father at this age.
I reject the argument that 100% of all women in polygamy in the US are mindless zombies. I would assume that will be closer to the truth within the compounds, but there may be people who willingly accept the lifestyle. However, as I said earlier, the evidence from mainstream Mormonism was that, in general, women did not like it.
Quoting again from my relative,
Here, again, is the example of the first wife, someone who didn’t like polygamy, whose parents had a bad experience with it, but felt pressured into accepting it. In turn, the second wife pressured into acceptance of unpleasant situation.
It is notoriously difficult to get insights into closed societies, so it’s hard to ascertain what is happening within the various fundamental mormon churches and groups, but since these groups take their beliefs from the Mormons of the last century, then it’s reasonable to look at Mormon experiences of that period to see how the women felt.
Polygamy within the Mormon church exhibited all of the same problems which the fundamentalists have now. Joseph Smith married girls as young as 14, which I will unquestioningly denounce as wrong. He secretly married the wives of other men, and told other women that they were to marry him or an angel with a flaming sword would destroy him.
Many plural wives had to support themselves, and modern polygamy has replaced that with government assistance. Either way, I cannot see how this is beneficial to the children.
I cannot see how, on the whole, religiously based polygamy, as is currently practiced in the US, is any better than monogamy. Indeed, on the whole, I find it to be worse.
As I stated somewhere along the way, I’m pretty openly hostile to religion as a concept, so you won’t find me defending anything about the religious practice of polygamy, and I’ve repeatedly denounced the whole fundycultycompound thing…yech. Bad news on every conceivable front, polygamy being the least of it, incest and rape being the worst (That’s what “coercion” to force a woman or girl into a marriage is, just institutionalized rape.)
However, I don’t think it’s all that helpful to examine the feelings of women more than a century ago for clues about how modern women feel, because almost everything about the lives of women a century ago was radically different than the lives of modern American women, and powerlessness was a prominent feature of the lives of all women.