Facebook Wedding Photos Result In Polygamy Arrest In Michigan 267
An anonymous reader writes "Police in Michigan have arrested 34-year-old Richard Leon Barton Jr. on charges of polygamy, thanks to incriminating wedding photos on Facebook. The man unfriended his first wife on the social network before marrying his second wife, but unsurprisingly that wasn't enough."
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, concubinage isn't really that different from marriage. The difference was just that concubines, unlike wives, didn't bring a dowry into the relationship. Most societies that permitted multiple concubines also permitted multiple wives. It was just easier to attract multiple concubines, as they were generally poorer women who lacked the options available to dowered girls.
Re:Were the two women okay with this? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why is that a crime? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
>>The bible doesn't actually prohibit having multiple wives. However, it does say that monogamy is a prerequisite for certain roles in the church (deacon, bishop, etc).
Right (1 Tim 3:2 and Titus 1:6-9 address this). A lot of people don't know that.
Polygamy is never outlawed in the OT; in fact, Levirate marriage (basis for the ancient Jewish social welfare program) completely doesn't work in a monogamous society. Jesus uses Levirate marriage as an example in one of his parables on the afterlife (and doesn't say anything bad about it at all, to the contrary he treats it as a norm), and Paul said that you could be a polygamist and a Christian at the same time, even though he kind of hated sex in all forms. So people like Luther have grudgingly accepted polygamy as being Christian.
The bit about a bishop needing to be a husband to "one wife" (unius uxoris vir) appears a few times in the Pauline writings. Which the Roman Catholic Church responds to by plugging their ears and yelling loudly at the top of their lungs. (Read their convoluted explaining-away here: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_bfoun_en.html [vatican.va])
In a nutshell, the RCC reads the requirement for a bishop to be faithful to his wife to *really* be talking about them being celibate and married to the church. Which is quite ridiculous, since those same passages talk about the bishop also needing to be a good father to his children (http://bible.cc/1_timothy/3-4.htm), but I guess once you start in on a metaphor, you can ride that train as long as you want to.
St. Augustine, who is usually pretty good at theology, tried to explain why polygamy was fine *then* and not *now* with the following: "As the many wives of the ancient Fathers symbolized our future churches of all nations, subject to the one man, Christ, so the bishop, who is the husband of one wife (unius uxoris vir) signifies the union of all nations, subject to the one man, Christ." Which is certainly an interesting, though not particularly compelling explanation.
This is NOT polygamy! (Score:5, Informative)
Given that neither wife knew about the other, this is definitely not polygamy. Polygamy is defined as "a marriage which includes more than two partners", and as the "partners" were in separate, distinct, relationships, this does not count.
What we have here is a clear-cut case of Bigamy [wikipedia.org] on the man's part. Nothing unusual about that, as there have been many cases over the years.