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Originally Posted by DirkFTW
I may be old-fashioned, but I think the state (along with parents and communities) has failed the non-Mormon community as well by allowing the current high level of teenage pregnancy and promiscuity. Maybe this is a great time to reevaluate what exactly we are letting our own children do.
Generally, laws and law enforcement aren't exactly the best situations to apply "let he without sin cast the first stone."
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you're touching on an aspect of this that actually bugs me the most, but yet it's an aspect I have the hardest time addressing.
any such discussion I may venture into usually ends with something like, "oh yeah, will what if they decide to boil their children alive and then barbecue them and then have sex with the boiled and barbecued remains of their children because it's part of their religion?" (as is if screwing the corpse of a barbecued baby is morally equivalent to a 28 year old male having sex with a 17 year old female)....but anyhoo....broadly speaking my terribly inchoate thoughts on the matter go something like this.....
1. mores regarding sexual relations are very, very dependent upon cultural context -- what is deemed appropriate sexual behavior in a largely lutheran community is plausibly quite different from appropriate behavior in a San Francisco bathhouse.....not that i've spent much time in any lutheran communties....
2. sexual mores are based by and large upon religious convictions -- at least in the West, the notion that thou shalt have one wife and one wife only (ie, monagamous relationships good, non-monagamous relationships bad) is a Christian sacrament going back to the earliest of times....even in bible times the dudes were fighting like cats and dogs over whether a woman could get a divorce.....they took their monagamy quite seriously, but I digress....
3. laws governing sexual relations are basically extensions of the predominant religious millieu....laws prohibiting sodomy, adultry, prostitution, etc., etc.... are all basically extensions of religious taboos regarding sex....and so too polygamy in the monagamous christian west. Point being, the only way I can say that polygamy (per se) is objectively wrong is to say that the Bible tells me so, and I don't know how I can reasonably expect everyone else on earth to see the soundness of that reasoning.
4. the age of majority, so to speak, is likewise a very culturally sensitive thing as well as a very individual thing. Presently in our culture we have 30 year old males who are not capable of providing for themselves -- they're basically large, hairy, 30 year old children. Through the ages men have fought in wars at 15 and younger -- women have married at the age of 14 or 15 (Mary the mother of Jesus as I recall was 13 or 14, and arguably impregnated by an older man).
Point being, when a male (female) becomes a man (woman) is hardly a static thing -- it's not like one day a person is a child and then the next day he is a fully formed adult capable of borrowing money and getting porn on the internet and voting. The process from childhood to adulthood is really a continuous and on-going process which begans at a young age and continues without end (well, until death). It is silly to draw a firm line and say with something approaching moral certainty that a girl who is 17 years 363 days old is not capable of consenting to a sexual relationship but a girl who is 17 years 368 days old has reached an age where she may consent.
5. I can hardly say that with any moral certainty that life as a thrice divorced, college-educated, childless accountant is a morally superior calling to life as a third wife of FLDS bishop and mother of five. Hence, it's hardly my place to say what these people should teach their children in this regards (and, as you may recall, it is this teaching by the flds that having babies is good is much of the basis of the CPS' complaint)...
6. So, to summarize, we have moms and dad telling their 16 year old daughters that they can and should get married, and I have a hard time saying that this is objectively wrong. We have 16 year old daughters agreeing to do this, and I have a hard time saying they are incapable of making this decision. We have 16 year old girls getting married and impregnated by (in some cases) men as old as 40 who may already have a wife or two, and I have a hard time saying this is criminal behavior (see, for instance, The Girls Next Door) which ought to be punished any more severely then the punishment commonly doled out for sodomy.
7. On the other hand, we have the State of Texas taking babies from their mommas, and if taking a baby from it's momma ain't wrong then nothing is wrong.
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addendum:
with respect to my earlier statement that "the 18+ year old males out at the compound ought to be strung up by their 'nads asap"--this was a) an emotional reaction based upon my prejudices rather than a more reasoned and thoughtful considerations; and b) why I qualify my opinions on the matter as "inchoate" in the first place.