Polygamy debate. Opposition Polygamy definition, the practice or condition of having more than one spouse, especially wife, at one time.       Monogamy and polygamy are the two distinguishing types of marital structures that exist in modern society, each having differentiating circumstances encompassing their views. Monogamy, universally accepted in the American culture, can be defined as when a single female and male come together, marry, and mate. Polygamy, more formerly accepted in the Arabic and African cultures, is defined as when one single male marries and mates with several single females. The rules of marriage are fairly well drawn out for monogamy, but polygamy is faced with the contrary due its complex nature. Religion plays a vital role in the determination of whether it is religious acceptable for a culture to partake in polygamy as well.              Polygamous marriages definitely face more problematic marriages than monogamous. A study of the Palestinian Bedouin-Arab community in the Negev region in Israel was conducted by Salman Elbedour, Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, and Mohammad Alatamin. In their attempts to find behavioral problems arising from polygamous and monogamous families, they were able to come to the conclusion that polygamous families face more interfamily conflict than that of monogamous families. “Uneven treatment of wives by the husband” (Hassouneh-Phillips, 2001, as cited in Elbedour, Onwuegbuzie, Alatamin, 2003). This is a problem that has naturally arisen from the polygamous marriage system. The husband can simply not evenly distribute their time to all of his wives. Naturally, this could occur by choice too. A husband can choose to neglect one of his wives and her children, thus creating more problems. The child may feel isolated and too distant from his father due to this conflict between husband and wife. In a practical monogamous marriage, the husband and wife will attempt to come to an agreement that would be positively suitable for the child. Due to the large nature of a polygamous marriage, the final agreements made by the husband... Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study of marriage around the world utilizing the Ethnographic Atlas "The reasons behind polygyny are sexual and reproductive rather than economic and productive" (1973:189), arguing that men marry polygynously to maximize their fertility and to obtain large households containing many young dependent males."[ The average American FLDS polygynist man has three or four wives. Wives average eight children. Men average 28 children.[15] If a man financially supports his families (most polygynous FLDS men don't), he has to work long hours, instead of spending time with his family. For men...any sexual motives must surely pall after a while, as the day-to-day pressures of plural family life cumulate-the financial burdens, the needs of large families, family tensions and conflicts, and so on....plural family life is not especially "romantic" for men.[16] —Irwin Altman and Joseph Ginat, Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (1996) By Jeanna Bryner, Live Science Managing Editor | September 6, 2012 11:20am ET Only 3 percent to 5 percent of the roughly 5,000 species of mammals (including humans) are known to form lifelong, monogamous bonds , Social monogamy is a term referring to creatures that pair up to mate and raise offspring but still have flings. Sexually monogamous pairs mate with only with one partner. So a cheating husband who detours for a romantic romp yet returns home in time to tuck in the kids at night would be considered socially monogamous. "I don't think we are a monogamous animal," said Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. " She added, "Monogamy is invented for order and investment – but not necessarily because it's 'natural.'" (Living Science Sept 6, 2012) From Salon Wednesday, Feb 4, 2015 11:28 AM EDT According to a team of researchers at the University of Oxford, human sexuality and mating habits — which, obviously, cannot be categorized as uniformly monogamous or polygamous, as with other species — fit fairly neatly into two categories. Instead of being a bell curve of sexual diversity (with general patterns in the middle and extremes on either end), as some scientists believed, researchers have found that humans either tend to be faithful (“stayers”) or promiscuous (“strayers”). Via AFP: “We observed what appears to be a cluster of males and a cluster of females who are more inclined to ‘stay,’ with a separate cluster of males and females being more inclined to ‘stray’ when it comes to sexual relationships,” said Rafael Wlodarski, an experimental psychologist and study co-author. Wlodarski and a team looked at two potential indicators of sexual behaviour. One source was an online questionnaire on sexual habits, completed by 585 North American and British respondents between the ages of 18 and 63, who on average were nearly 25. […] Put together, the datasets showed that 57 percent of men were more likely to be promiscuous, and 43 percent faithful. This balance inversed among women — 47 percent fell within the “stray” category and 53 percent in “stay”. From the official website of the church of latter day saints Today, the practice of polygamy is strictly prohibited in the Church, as it has been for over a century. Polygamy — or more correctly polygyny, the marriage of more than one woman to the same man — was a part of the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a half-century. The standard doctrine of the Church is monogamy, as it always has been, as indicated in the Book of Mormon (Jacob, chapter 2): Polygamous groups and individuals in and around Utah often cause confusion for casual observers and for visiting news media. The polygamists and polygamist organizations in parts of the western United States and Canada have no affiliation whatsoever with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, despite the fact that the term "Mormon" — widely understood to be a nickname for Latter-day Saints — is sometimes incorrectly applied to them. From Slate Jan 30, 2012 by Libby Copeland Is Polygamy so Awful? History suggests that it is. A new study out of the University of British Columbia documents how societies have systematically evolved away from polygamy because of the social problems it causes. Women are usually thought of as the primary victims of polygynous marriages, but as cultural anthropologist Joe Henrich documents, the institution also causes problems for the young, low-status males denied wives by older, wealthy men who have hoarded all the women. And those young men create problems for everybody. “Monogamous marriage reduces crime,” Henrich and colleagues write, pulling together studies showing that polygynous societies create large numbers of unmarried men, whose presence is correlated with increased rates of rape, theft, murder, and substance abuse. According to Henrich, the problem with unmarried men appears to come primarily from their lack of investment in family life and in children. Young men without futures tend to engage in riskier behaviors because they have less to lose. And, too, they may engage in certain crimes to get wives—stealing to amass enough wealth to attract women, or kidnapping other men’s wives. Children, too, appear to suffer in polygamous cultures. Henrich examines a study comparing 19th-century Mormon households, 45 of them headed by wealthy men, generally with multiple wives, and 45 headed by poorer men, generally with one wife each. What’s surprising is that the children of the poorer men actually fared better, proving more likely to survive to age 15. It’s consistent with other studies, including one from Africa showing that the children of monogamous households tend to do better than those from polygynous households in the same communities. Why? Some scholars suspect that polygyny may discourage paternal investment.  From Politico magazine By Valerie Hudson and Rose McDermott July 16, 2015 maternal mortality rates are five times higher in societies with the highest rates of polygyny compared to those with the lowest rates. At least partly as a result of increased risk of death in childbirth, women in societies with the highest rates of polygyny also have reduced life expectancies—rarely above age 60, compared to expectancies in the high 70s for women in societies with the lowest rates of polygyny. Not surprisingly, violence toward women appears endemic within the context of polygynous societies: Such cultures show rates of sex trafficking and domestic violence toward women that are twice as high as the rates in low-polygyny societies, while the risk of female genital mutilation in highly polygynous societies increases a hundred fold. And when it comes to children, both boys and girls in polygynous societies are at higher risk of malnutrition and also receive less education, making social mobility challenging. (source Emory Law Journal, Polygyny and Violence against women. Rose McDermott, Jonathan Cowden. Volume 64, issue 6) If each man takes more than one wife, it leaves other men, most likely poor men, without any wives at all. As a result, approximately half the boys in polygynous cultures need to be ejected from their primary community at puberty in order to sustain this imbalance whereby few—usually older, wealthier, more powerful men—claim a disproportionate share of women for themselves. Because these “lost” boys tend to come from the poorer segments of society and are often left with less education and little social support, few options are available to them, short of violence, to make their way in the world. No wonder researchers have recently found a significant association between the prevalence of polygyny and the  ease of recruitment into terrorist groups. In fact, the U.S. Department of Defense is funding research by one of us (Hudson) and her colleagues on this very linkage. In Psychology Today, by Nigel Barber Phd. Oct 12, 2012 The most important reason that polygamy is out of place in the modern world is that it works best in agricultural societies where children contribute to farm labor and care of livestock (4). Developed countries are highly urbanized and it is very difficult to raise large families in cities because children are a huge drain on finances that lasts for two decades thanks to the extent of modern education. In agricultural societies, by contrast, children defray the expense of raising them by contributing productive labor to the household economy. This could explain why polygamy is practised mostly in Africa today.