And *that's* just charming...
Jun. 15th, 2005 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenSect expels 1000 boys so men get more wives.
Washington: Up to 1000 teenage boys have been separated from their parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make more young women available for older men, Utah state officials allege.
Many of the so-called "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, were dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah by leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.
The 10,000-strong sect, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890 when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry at least three women to go to heaven. The sect appeared to be in turmoil on Monday after its assets were frozen and a warrant was issued in Arizona for the arrest of its authoritarian leader, Warren Jeffs, for arranging a wedding between an under-age girl and a 28-year-old man who was already married...
Unfortunately, 28-year-olds marrying under-age girls is only the start in societies like this where polygyny is mandatory and polyandry is forbidden. For a stable society based on male bigamy, the female life expectancy on first marriage needs to be double the male's... which means, if total life expectancy is around 75 years, your typical first marriage will look something like a 15-year-old woman marrying a 45-year-old man. (Where men are expected to have *more* than two wives, as in this case, the numbers are even worse.)
Of course, it's unlikely to reach that point; a society where men have to wait until 45 before marriage has other reasons to be very unstable, and will probably collapse before reaching that point, as seems to have happened here.
Washington: Up to 1000 teenage boys have been separated from their parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make more young women available for older men, Utah state officials allege.
Many of the so-called "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, were dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah by leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.
The 10,000-strong sect, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890 when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry at least three women to go to heaven. The sect appeared to be in turmoil on Monday after its assets were frozen and a warrant was issued in Arizona for the arrest of its authoritarian leader, Warren Jeffs, for arranging a wedding between an under-age girl and a 28-year-old man who was already married...
Unfortunately, 28-year-olds marrying under-age girls is only the start in societies like this where polygyny is mandatory and polyandry is forbidden. For a stable society based on male bigamy, the female life expectancy on first marriage needs to be double the male's... which means, if total life expectancy is around 75 years, your typical first marriage will look something like a 15-year-old woman marrying a 45-year-old man. (Where men are expected to have *more* than two wives, as in this case, the numbers are even worse.)
Of course, it's unlikely to reach that point; a society where men have to wait until 45 before marriage has other reasons to be very unstable, and will probably collapse before reaching that point, as seems to have happened here.
