Polygamy in Primetime by Janet Bennion

Author:Janet Bennion [Bennion, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611682960
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Published: 2011-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

SISTER WIVES

Sister Wives is an unscripted American reality television series that began broadcasting on TLC in September 2010. It documents the life of a progressive polygamist family living in Lehi, Utah, comprised of AUB member Kody Brown (42); his wives Meri (thirty-nine), Janelle (forty), Christine (thirty-seven), and Robin Sullivan (thirty-one); and their sixteen children. Kody and his wives agreed to participate with TLC to make the public more aware of polygamy and to fight against discrimination. As Kody, an advertising salesman, said, “There are a lot of families much more like ours than what’s being perpetuated in the media.… To be transparent makes us more safe to [the American public]. We’re hoping that other fundamentalist Mormon polygamists will follow our example” (Episode 1).

Kody and his wives hope that their children will find the openness liberating. Surprisingly, his family even supports gay marriage, as long as it is between consenting adults. Unfortunately, this step toward openness has been publically criticized by Kody’s prophet, current AUB leader LaMoine Jenson, who chastised Kody for participating in the show without his blessing.4 Jenson says that he has twice asked the family to stop filming. Toward the end of Season 1, the Browns had problems with the local police as well, causing them to pack up their twenty-one-member household and move to Nevada. Kody tried to protect himself while in Utah using the same logic Mormon George Reynolds used in 1879 in Reynolds v. United States: he is legally married to only one woman and the other marriages are spiritual unions. That logic failed in the context of contemporary Utah Valley politics, where, as one local Lehi resident told me, any blight on the LDS Church could hamper proselytizing efforts and Mitt Romney’s run for president in the 2012 election. Local Utahns have criticized the show because it works on the incorrect assumption that polygamy is accepted by the mainstream church, putting the “real” Mormons in a bad light. In fact, the sentiment against nontraditional plural or gay marriages runs strong in the mainstream Mormon Church, which raised $25 million in support of Proposition 8 in California, which repealed the gay marriage law. The show also disparages the “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” an LDS document that validated monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the norm. The Utah attorney general’s office has not ruled out seeking criminal charges against the Browns, but stated they it does not have the resources to go after polygamists who are not suspected of serious crimes such as child abuse or child trafficking. In Utah, bigamy is a third-degree felony with a possible penalty of twenty years’ imprisonment. If the Browns were prosecuted and convicted, Kody might serve that sentence, and each of his wives might serve five years.

According to polygamy advocate Anne Wilde, “If it really goes to a court situation, then our people are going to go right back into isolation” (quoted in Telegraph 2011, 1). Over the past ten years, Utah’s historically insular polygamist community has worked

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