Ever since Obama endorsed gay marriage earlier this week, so many celebrities have come forward to discuss their opinions about it. Most of the reactions have been pretty predictable – Kim Kardashian made a blog post about how it made her proud to be an American, and Bristol Palin made her illogical, backwards comments about how we don’t need to “change thousands of years of thinking about marriage” – but a couple were a little surprising. Namely, the reaction that the cast of that darling show, Sister Wives, had:
“I feel like we should be more enlightened as a society,” says Kody Brown, the 44-year-old husband to Meri, 41, Janelle, 42, Christine, 40, and Robyn, 33, and father of 17 children.
Kody said he doesn’t want legislators governing marriage.
“I married four women and I love them,” he said. “I chose this out of love and out of faith. I feel like I want to extend that to all people…Let individuals define their love and their marriage. I don’t want the government doing that.”
Asked if their beliefs extend to gay couples, Kody said, “Let individuals define their marriage and let individuals choose who they love.”
Christine added, “I think marriage is a wonderful opportunity to share your life with somebody that you love. I want all our children to marry who they love, too.”
Janelle praised Obama for his historic remarks yesterday. “He’s taking a lot of heat for it, but it was very brave of him,” she said.
And the Browns know a thing or two about taking a lot of heat. They’ve been shunned by the mainstream public and even fellow polygamists for starring in a reality show. (The third season of Sister Wives kicks off on Sunday—yes, Mother’s Day!)
“Polygamists are such a private society, culture,” Kody said. “It’s been very vulnerable to present yourself to the public and ask them to be OK with you. Sometimes its sad and sometimes it’s very rewarding, but it was scary because you feel like you’re standing in a football field naked and everyone is in the grandstand’s looking at you.”
Despite watching the first two seasons of Sister Wives on Netflix this week, I never really put much thought into what their stance on this topic would be. I’m glad that they’re supportive though, even if it feels like it’s mostly to support their own not-so-traditional views on marriage*. And just so we’re clear, this means that the Sister Wives are better than the Palins. Just in case that was ever a debate.
*They’re not as scary as the more traditional, creepy polygamists, and it’s obvious that the women are happy in their situation, but yeah, they’re wacky. There was this one episode where Kody took one of the wives to dinner for their anniversary, and she asked him to understand that she had some issues with jealousy over the new wife and to have patience with her as she came to terms with that, and he was like “I don’t understand why you’re jealous.” She tried to explain that while she chose this lifestyle and she was happy, that it was natural to feel a bit of jealousy when you see your husband courting a new lady, and then she asked him what he would think if she married another dude or two. Immediately he was like “that’s disgusting, that makes me ill to think about, it goes against the laws of nature, how could you even say that?” Wacky. As. Hell.
“then she asked him what he would think if she married another dude or two. Immediately he was like “that’s disgusting, that makes me ill to think about, it goes against the laws of nature, how could you even say that?””
I’m not at all surprised by that reaction. That’s the problem I have with polygamy. It just seems like another version of men get whatever they want and women don’t. As a lesbian, I have no problem with gay men or transgendered people marrying (as if it is any of my business anyway.) Maybe it is more difficult for him to consider polyandry because it could actually affect him in some way.
I do have a problem with one person marrying groups of people, just because it complicates the relationships between them in a major way. How can you have equality between one person and a group of people? How can the one person not feel like the most important person in the equation when several other people have to “share” them and vie for their time and attention? The power differential would always be shifted. It would always be unfair to the people that are in the group.
I know that on the things I have seen (I haven’t watched the show, but I have seen other things on TV about polygamy) the women always say they prefer it this way, they are perfectly happy, etc. But people say they are “happy” doing a lot of things when they are in denial or some other state and would not say that if they managed to realize their true desires.
As far as raising children in a group, I think that’s a great idea, but it could be a community of couples or mothers, it doesn’t need to be numerous wives of one person.
So although I’m glad of the Sister Wives’ endorsement of legalizing gay marriage, unfortunately I can’t give one back to them for the legalization of polygamy.
But there are loads of people who practise polyamory and are incredibly happy. I think just because we don’t understand something it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Um, I don’t remember saying it was wrong, I said I had a problem with it and I gave my reasons why. I also said that the people I have seen on TV (which I recognize is not a substitute for actually knowing someone in the situation) say they are happy, although I did question whether they were being honest with themselves. I do have to say that whether someone says they are happy or not is not always a good standard to judge a situation. And I still think that if you think of the give and take of a relationship where power goes up and down on either side throughout the course of the relationship, putting one person on one end and several on the other at least complicates the situation tremendously if not destroying the ability for some of the people to be heard equally. Do I think it’s wrong? No. Am I up for legalized polygamy? Say you will legalize polyandry at the same time and I’ll give it some thought. It might not be so bad. I often see women having a serial monogamy sort of thing where they have multiple children from multiple men over time. Maybe if they were married, it would be easier to get the men to contribute to the children’s welfare.