Is America's South turning into a hotbed of liberalism/bohemianism

Discussion in 'Politics' started by universaldistress, Mar 13, 2015.

?

Legalise Polygamy? (7 day poll)

  1. I want a hareem!

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  2. 3 wives/husbands max... please...

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  3. One wife/husband is too many as it is lol!

    1 vote(s)
    100.0%
  4. Hell no! That's sick!

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  1. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,468
    I can't believe what's going on over the pond. Now I realise mormons have been practising polygyny for years, despite the fact the unions are not ratified as in viewed as a legally bound institution... but now one small town has decided to--on the seeming whim of the Mayor--legalise (possibly not for too long) polygamy. Not only can a man take as many wives as he wishes, but women are now able to reap the benefits of multiple husbands. It beggars belief!

    http://newsexaminer.net/lifestyle/city-louisiana-makes-polygamy-legal/

    Sod it... I may just be emigrating... I knew my biological American grandad may come in handy lol!
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    Not true.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,468
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,738
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Why is polygamy a harbinger of "liberalism/bohemianism" here? In most places it signifies authoritarian, repressive governance, in particular theocracy.
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    The vast mountain and desert regions of the USA, between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast with its large urban areas, is very sparsely populated. Utah, the Mormon stronghold, is right in the middle of this area. It's not too difficult for a cult of Mormons to set up a colony in this region, although more likely in Arizona or some other nearby state rather than in Utah itself, where the Mormon hierarchy is careful to avoid pissing off the civil authorities. In any decade, there are probably a couple of Mormon splinter groups that have taken over small towns and turned them into polygynous "paradises."

    The most famous of these was the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas in 1993. They were everything that Mormon-haters have nightmares about, most especially men keeping harems of very young girls. Ironically, it was their arsenal of (allegedly) illegal weapons, rather than their sexual practices, that got the notice of the authorities. The federal government's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tried to invade the town and take down the leaders, but this turned into a fiasco with casualties on both sides. Their next tactic was a siege. I'm not sure what happened next, but it resulted in a huge fire that killed more than 70 people, mostly villagers. The compound was taken over, the girls were returned to their parents (the ones who weren't complicit in the kidnapping, anyway), and nothing like this has been in the news since then.

    With Mitt Romney, a Mormon, constantly trying to run for President, the Mormon community is doing its best to not make any waves.
     
  10. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,850
    None of this has anything to do with America's "South".
     
  11. TBodillia Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    159
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    Indeed. Since Universal is British, he may not quite understand our own terminology for the country's various regions.

    When we say "the South," we're referring to the eleven states that seceded and fought the Civil War. 150 years ago those eleven states (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas) did indeed comprise the nation's "south," because the USA did not extend any further west (except for California, which was not contiguous). This region is still the most conservative and reliably Republican. Its Euro-American majority is still trying to limit the rights of Afro-Americans.

    But today, that region would properly be called "the southeast." New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Colorado, Utah and Oklahoma are (more or less) just as far south as those eleven states, but they are not politically allied with them. New Mexico and Colorado, in particular, are solidly in the liberal, Democratic camp. Colorado, in fact, was one of the first states to legalize marijuana, and New Mexico has a large and politically active Mexican-American community. And of course California, home of the movie industry as well as Silicon Valley and the huge homosexual community in San Francisco, is generally regarded as one of the most liberal populations in the country.
     
  13. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,850
    That region is reliable conservative and generally Republican these days but when I was a kid growing up in that area it was largely Democratic (although still conservative).
     
  14. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,559
    This appears to be appallingly garbled.

    The "Branch Davidians" were not Mormons or off-shoots of Mormons. Their cult leader received his 'learning' in Hawaii and developed a following, and moved to the mainland. They were their own little cult. I don't believe they practiced polygamy. They hunkered down in their compound in Texas, when the ATF people surrounded their compound to arrest their cult leader, and had a stand-off lasting weeks. When ATF tried to force them out with tear-gas, etc. a fire erupted in the compound, and it burned down. There were no survivors (and no "villagers") other than a few who had left before the fire, and no "girls returned to their parents". Lots of innocent babies and children were killed in the fire. Janet Reno was the US AG at the time, and had ordered the attempt to take the compound. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
     
  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    I would advise against mistaking American fake libertarianism for liberalism.

    Second, I would add to our neighbor's note: Branch Davidian was not part of the Latter Day Saints, but, rather, a splinter from Seventh Day Aventism.

    Third, I would note that it's a laugh to suggest Louisiana is about to go liberal.

    Fourth, it's hard to take the article seriously; the two sources are yours and Inquisitr; both articles read like comedy jobs. Yet, on the other hand, this is Louisiana, where police really hate gay people, and that actually has something to do with all this.

    See, in Louisiana, they spend money and labor hours sending police out to hit on suspected gay men, and then ask them out on dates. Not prostitution, but just, hey, you wanna go someplace and fuck, and that sort of thing. And then they arrest the suspects for being gay.

    The other thing they do in Louisiana is figure out who's gay and HIV positive, then shake them down to steal their medication. The police in Louisiana have literally tried to kill people for being gay.

    And for some reason, as Christians stirred the Gay Fray to viability in the nineties, they were also obsessed with using homosexuality as an excuse to license all sorts of other behavior, like raping children, dogs, and corpses. Incest has always been on their list, too. And that's how the right-wing, including libertarian, argument goes: If it is legal to be gay, then it must also be legal to have sex with children, animals, corpses, and our sisters. Versions of this argument have made into Supreme Court briefs, and in at least one case a state attorney general who wrote such a brief was promoted to a federal bench. (Fifth Circuit Judge William Pryor was Attorney General of Alabama, which just about makes sense, but we should not be surprised to find that his university education was in Louisiana.)

    While the people of DeQuincy read like cheap satire in the News Examiner article, but they're also from Louisiana. Perhaps the strangest thing about this thread is the idea that someone can mistake Louisiana for liberalism. You might as well call a dead hooker a bitch because she won't haggle over prices.

    Look, it's been kind of apparent for a while now that incest was the next target for social conservatives in the U.S. And the way it works is that they pick a fight with something, call a lot of attention to it, and then lose. That's what happened in the Gay Fray. In the 1990s, that was the line: If you don't pass this ballot initative to disenfranchise faggots, next thing you know they'll want to get married! In 1992, that was laughable. But we won in Oregon at the box, and struck Colorado in the courts. So the conservatives came back for more, and over and over again through the nineties. One of the results of this was that gays threw in. If we were going to have this fight, we were going to have this fight, and we were going to win.

    And this is where that strange ritual called NCOD, National Coming Out Day, becomes really important. Many wondered and even complained that the queers were so avidly calling attention to themselves, but in the end, here's how it goes: After over a decade of fighting about the issue of gay rights in the context of whether homosexuals ought to be allowed to participate in society, the Supreme Court struck the antisodomy laws used to persecute homosexuals.

    Bigot states panicked, and what happened in Oregon is emblematic. A Multnomah County clerk, as the story goes, issued marriage license to a gay couple on the grounds that the law did not prohibit him. Now, ordinarily, this is a proper libertarian argument, except libertarians joined social conservatives in exploding. How dare a mere county clerk "subvert democracy" like that. And for nigh on a decade, gay marriage was smacked down by deliberately exclusionary laws; 0-33 or 1-34, depending on how you count the Arizona back-to-backs that first rejected and then adopted a marriage ban.

    But the whole time this was going on, the attitudes of the people were changing.

    See, because of NCOD and other actions intended to empower homosexuals and increase visibility, each time the right wing put the question before the people, the growing proximity of "The Gay" to individuals was having its effect. People had to look their friends, neighbors, and family in the eye and say it, and there came a point when they just couldn't do that anymore.

    And then, 2012.

    The quiet route to Article Four and Amendment Fourteen came through Amendment Ten. There is irony in that; libertarians love shouting about the Ninth and Tenth, but while there is, indeed, a "liberal libertarian" sector in the marketplace, most libertarians are simply conservatives who are either too angry or too ashamed to call themselves conservatives or Republicans. After Windsor, the decision in Kitchen seemed pretty much inevitable.

    But Kitchen hit Utah's supremacist law. That is to say, it hit Utah's marriage discrimination law.

    Utah.

    And, well, of course the breaking of their anti-gay law was enough to also break their superficial anti-incest laws.

    So now a bunch of conservatives who are too stupid to tell the difference between consensual sexual intercourse and rape have decided that since homosexuals get to be gay, heterosexuals ought to be able to get on their mothers, sisters, and kids.

    The coincidence of such an idea with Louisiana is hardly shocking.
     

Share This Page