To tell you the truth, the idea of sleeping with a man repels me. I much prefer checking out women — adult women. But I accept that there are people who are drawn to their own sex and that it is innate to them, not the result of rape or poor parenting or whether they drink lattes at Starbucks. I do not accept marriage as a child-producing union, though it is probably a better idea that you have a partner when you start having children. This idea categorically places Lynn and I out in the cold, yet we have remained partners for 25 years.

Marriage is about choosing a person to be a relative that transcends blood relations. It cannot change facts of fatherhood: one DNA test can undo the presumption of parenthood. But what it does is ensure that my wife and I can form a financial corporation of a sorts together. It lets me say that Lynn can make medical decisions for me — recognize the fact that I trust her before most of my own blood relatives in these affairs. When I die, it ensures that my share of the wealth generated by our household goes to her. Where do there need to be children in this?¹

Why not let people of the same sex have these same contracts without resort to legal legerdemain? Homophobia — which is hatred and fear, nothing more — just isn’t a reason.

But let’s get back to the real issues: we have a candidate for office who is a corporate raider. To hide his moral depravity, he is trying to hide behind this issue. He has put people out of work, destroyed companies, and wrecked communities for the purpose of amassing wealth. Mitt Romney is a dangerous man and he is playing a dangerous game by playing the gay card.

Focus on him for he is the champion of the 1%, the man who picks your pocket and wrecks your home life with his financial manipulations and favors to the rich and corporations. ((And if you are religious, God does not like the rich. And He expects the state to protect the poor. Read the prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the minor prophets. To believe otherwise is heretical and unChristian/unJewish/unMuslim.)

1. Though marriage does help recognize children and preserve family wealth for them, too.

• First, my mother dies of a glioblastoma — brain cancer — the same disease that killed her father. The oncologist told me that he doubted it was hereditary. I am waiting for the announcement of a new hereditary variety any day.
• Drake gets into a fight with a larger dog.
• Lynn begins to bleed beyond her period. I talk her into seeing a doctor. She gets referred and referred until she is scheduled for a hysterectomy which is then handed over to an oncologist who tells us that only 2% of the patients her age presenting with her symptoms have cancer. He repeats this just before he performs the operation. It is only supposed to take half an hour. An hour and fifteen minutes later, I notice the time. He comes out with a grim look on his face and tells me that he found a malignant mass on her left ovary. Two days later, we learn to our relief that it is not ovarian cancer, but uterine cancer that has metasticized up the left fallopian tube. She spends nearly a week in the hospital. I tell people, with a sigh, that someone has to be the 2%.
• We skip my mother’s memorial service. This was supposed to be our vacation.
• We now need to make the condo readily cleanable. So we have to rip out the carpet and put in new flooring. Everything small in the condo needs to be brought into the garage.
• My favorite cat — Fiona — dies.
• The bathroom sink backs up.
• I hurt my back.
• I cut my hands and my knees.
• I gain weight and fall out of the great shape I was in in the fall.
• My other cat — Little Bo — goes crazy when I send her to board at the vet, so we take her out. I take her to a motel because the people Lynn is staying with don’t want a cat in their house.
• The floorers discover that our floor is not level. Either because of settling or because the builders screwed up 22 years ago or both, there are large humps all over the condo. We need to spend an additional $1000 to fix these.
• Lynn’s hair starts to fall out from the chemo. She is given a 75-80% chance to live.
• Drake runs away three times in one day from the house where we send him to stay during the remodeling. Turns out he is slipping under a gate, so we block the way. I resolve to visit him every day.
• My dentist informs me that three of my crowns need to be replaced.
• Weather report promises rain for two days, pushing back the time before we can move back into the condo.
• Painter discovers the reason why the previous owners covered the bathroom in wallpaper — there was damage to the walls that they were too lazy to plaster over. Plus they used white glue to hold it in place. (What kind of idiot puts wallpaper in a bathroom?) Add more money to the cost of the job.
• Our new maid asks for a cabinet. She puts it outside on the deck because the weather report says that it will only be cloudy and the weather report is never wrong. It drizzles heavily all night. I do manage to cover it and wipe down the wet parts before putting it in the garage the next morning.
• We put felt feet on everything except for one file cabinet which has a sharp lip that we can’t find a way of covering.
• We witness an accident when we come out of a local restaurant. One man hurt. I’m glad it wasn’t one more thing to add to this list, but I would rather it didn’t happen to these people, either.
• The dentist informed me that I needed to have a tooth pulled.
• The garbage disposal dies necessitating its replacement. (Yes, we pushed the red button, cranked the main rotor, etc. The repairman did the same things.)
• The tooth extraction will entail some painful digging around because the tooth has broken into three pieces. Plus I will have to undergo a sinus tap and bone graft three months after the first surgery. Plus insurance will only cover about $78 of the total. How about some dental insurance reform?
• Drake found a new way to get out by forcing his way through one of the front window screens.
• Just before we are to get the good news that Lynn’s treatment is going so well, they may end it before they had planned, the phone rings and someone tells me that my dog is out. “No, he can’t be out. We locked him up.” “No, your dog jumped out of the second story window….” Drake is fine, but I am angry with God about heaping so much crap and denying us the joy of the moment when we learned that things were going better than hoped for Lynn. Now we have to put out a thousand dollars for custom interior louver shutters.
• An old obsession with the number 13 has returned. If I check the time, it is 13 after. I haven’t gotten to the point of counting things to see if they add up to 13 as I do when the obsession is truly out of control, but it is getting there. I wish I knew how to break the cycle. This is not a good sign for my mental health.

YES I KNOW IT CAN BE WORSE AND THAT IS WHAT WORRIES ME!

She appeared to have pancreatitis and something that was damaging her liver in a big way. It was going to cost us $2000 to have a 50-50 chance of keeping her alive. We had already put down $2500.

I think the vet encouraged me because he did not want me to lose her in the middle of my wife’s cancer crisis.

I chose to stop trying. I feel bad.

Polygamy is one of those cross-cultural issues which causes the veins in some people’s temples to bulge up. I believe that this is mostly because it is different from what we do here in the West. Christ said nothing about having more than one wife (though he spoke out against divorce — see Matthew 19:1-12]. Paul said:

To want to be a presiding elder is to want to do a noble work. That is why the president must have an impeccable character. He must not have been married more than once, and he must be temperate, discreet and courteous, hospitable and a good teacher; not a heavy drinker, nor hot-tempered, but kind and peaceable. [1 Timothy 3:1-3]

It’s not exactly clear whether he is speaking against divorce or polygamy or both in this passage.

The Old Testament declares no limit on the number of wives that a polygamist may have. Many Old Testament heroes — Solomon being the most ambitious — had multiple spouses. The Koran stops believers at four. The belief that multiple marriages are sinful appears to come out of Western culture rather than the religion heritage that it adopted.

The feelings against polygamy run strong enough that it was invoked as a reason for going to war in Iraq. I have not heard, however, of American forces attempting to break up multiple marriages, nor would I approve of it unless the wives asked to be so liberated.

Western men do not keep multiple wives, but they dream about it quite often. In her book Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems, Morrocan feminist Fatema Mernissi reports being appalled by the lust Western men reported when discussing the institution. They talked of the harem as a kind of brothel where they could select the most delectable items from a silk-lined menu. Many confided their envy of Muslim men and the “easy lifestyle” they lived. To be a polygamist was to be the unchallenged master of a land of rippled skin forested by pubic hair.

Mernissi who was raised in a harem had bad news for them: most Muslim men dreaded the idea of having more than one wife. For one thing, you had to have the resouces to feed them and all their children. Few did. The husband was cast into an unhappy role as head of the household: it was he to whom the wives turned when they fought. He had to play no favorites, perform every night no matter how much the previous night’s lovemaking had exhausted him. When Mernissi talked to Muslim men about polygamy, they expressed relief that they had only one wife. No one wanted to deal with a household full of demanding women. Princes and kings married for alliance. The common man thanked Allah for allowing him more choice and reasonable limits in his marriage.

Marriages happen for one of three reasons:

• Love/Lust: This is the classic, romantic model. You see someone you like, you discover they like you, too, and you marry them. Polygamy seen in this light becomes a personal bordello, a sexual supermarket.
• Alliance: A marriage makes a tie to another family. Historically, leaders of state and economic leaders have sought to use marriage to develop such ties. Arranged marriages are based on this model: you build connections for your family’s betterment and place in the community. The spouses can get to feeling like prisoners of those who arrange the marriages.
• Charity: A man may take in a wife and her children because without him they are economically destitute. Of the three forms, this is the one with which I have the most sympathy.

All three kinds of marriage occur in polygamous units. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire found himself so trapped by arranged marriages with other country heads and officials within his own country that he became the principal prisoner of his own seralgio. The women fared worse, but it is important to remember that polygamy is not always the joy for the man that the Western porn industry and clientele imagine it to be.

I am writing on this topic for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to explore this after writing my piece about the morality of cultural relativism the other day. Polygamy is as good a topic as an avenue for exploring alternative moralities as any and, in my opinion, decidedly less brutal than other practices such as female c*rc*c*sm — if an appropriate morals and regulations are established to govern the exchange.

Second, Lynn and I have a game that we play from time to time where we consider alternative partnership styles. The question here was “are there any conditions under which Lynn might accept my taking a second wife?”

Third, I have in my family tree a Mormon polygamist by the name of Jorgen Smith. Jorgen had three wives. The first he married while he still lived in Denmark. She came with him to Zion when they converted to Mormonism. Jorgen worked hard and became an elder of the church which entitled him to marry a second and a third wife.

My ancestor Fidsel — Jorgen’s first wife — was none too happy when her man showed up with a 22 year old German girl. She announced that if he brought “that woman” through the front door, she would leave through the back with the children. Jorgen built a second house for Mattie and went back and forth between the two houses. It was the custom among the Mormons to give the wife who lacked the man the use of a feather bed. Jorgen preferred the younger Mattie to his first wife. Once he overstayed his time at her house. Fidsel showed up carrying the feather bed, threw it through the front door, and screamed “Here’s your damned feather bed! I want my man back!”

Jorgen married a third wife, a Swedish woman named Wilhelmina. If there was conflict between Fidsel and Wilhelmina, it is not recorded. Jorgen. Following her conversion to Mormonism, Wilhelmina left her alcoholic husband for the new paradise. When she arrived in Utah, she was one of the handcart women who moved their households across the Great Plains by pushing it in front of them. This was clearly a marriage of charity: Jorgen had no children by her. He simply accepted the responsibility of caring for her and her sons and daughters.

When polygamy was outlawed, Jorgen was legally entitled to choose which wife would continue with him in monogamy. He selected Mattie over Fidsel and Wilhelmina. Love/lust won out over previous engagement and charity.

When you have Mormon roots such as I have, you acquire through family lines a mythology suggesting persecution for the faith and intense feelings within the community over what behaviors seem right and wrong.

Utah is covered by hidden groves and canyons where polygamists hid out from U.S. Marshals. Cohab Canyon in Capitol Reef National Park is one such place. Many Mormons and nonMormons like myself with origins in the region have polygamous ancestors. (My Catholic mother likes to point out that I am descended from Jorgen’s first wife.) Rumors of polygamists lurking in the backwater towns and on remote ranches still pepper discussions. When we visited Moab on vacation two years ago, our guide pointed out a homestead where a notorious polygamist had settled with his dozen or so wives.

Today, the remote Arizona Strip is said to be America’s last stronghold of polygamous marriage. The Short Creek settlement was raided several times, the last in 1953:

The [Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] set up shop in Short Creek, largely due to its isolation. Buffered by the Grand Canyon and with a hundred miles of barren desert between them and the nearest law enforcement in Kingman, Arizona, they felt comfortable there. These polygamists also knew they were near a Stateline, which could easily be strategically crossed if there was trouble.

The Short Creek polygamists brought in more men with their wives by pickup truck to their growing kingdom, which they called “The First City of the Millennium.” A “charitable philanthropic trust” was set up called the “United Effort Plan,” which controlled much of their assets. But Short Creek was a burden to the welfare system of Arizona’s Mohave County. Many polygamist women and children collected welfare and whatever was available through government relief.

In justifying the 1953 raid of Short Creek, Arizona Governor Howard Pyle declared the end of “the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become mere chattels.” Pyle lost the next election and Short Creek merely changed its name to Colorado City. Word is that it is business as usual there:

“Brigham Young! Brigham Fast!”

The main criticism against polygamy is its sexism and the way that young girls are brought into plural marriages with much older men. The case of my ancestors suggests another problem: what if the present wife does not consent to this enlargement of the household?

These might seem simple to remedy. You could restrict marriages with young girls by age of consent laws. You could require spouses to approve any new marriages that the polygamist takes on. You could allow women as well as men to have multiple spouses.

Alas, polygamy cannot function nonsexistly. Either you allow husbands to marry several women or you allow wives to have several husbands as is the case with the Nayar of India’s Malabar Coast. What you get when both sexes enjoy polygamy is chaos, systems of relationship which could entangle courts in family litigation for years and years. Purely for the reason of utility, even a libertarian must rule out formal systems of polygamy though informal ones may continue to thrive unpersecuted.

If polygamy were legal, would I do it? When Lynn and I considered the question in our bed last night, we both agreed that the most moral cases we could think of would be either the case where I marry two lesbians so that they could have a family relationship or the case where I would marry a single mother so that her children could have me as a father.

But then I got to thinking about the nightmare that Middle Eastern men report, where they come home to the multiple voices of demanding wives, the several children, and the headache of making peace. I sat up on the edge of the bed, stared at the digital alarm clock, and came to the conclusion that the vast majority of Muslim men have arrived at: No way! No way would I choose this insanity over the monogamy I now have with Lynn.

Some links to sites about polygamy in the West:

• Tapestry – an organization that rescues women from polygamous marriages
• Apologetics.Com – A well-researched index featuring links to sites and articles both for and against Christian polygamy
• Christian Polygamy - A site that argues that polygamy is a legitimate Christian practice: “Polygamy is legal! You can have many wives in Christian Polygamy simply by marrying one at a time in the traditional manner. You get a marriage license, and then civilly marry her. You then civilly divorce her. You then get another marriage license for the next wife, and then civilly marry her. You then civilly divorce her. You then continue to do this with each additional wife. If you do not provide any of these civilly divorced wives with a Bill of Divorcement, which is required by the Bible to be divorced, then the “civil” divorce will have no affect on your marital status. You will still be married according to the Bible to each of these wives.” – OK….
• Polygamous Groups - A listing by the Ross Institute for the study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups, and Movements
• Voices in Harmony: Contemporary Women Celebrate Plural Marriage – This book claims that there are 30,000 people living in polygamous households in Utah.

Everyone is rallying around her even though she is the least concerned of any of us. I am sick with worry and irritable. The main reason for this are my fears that this will prove to be a malignant tumor. Society is well possessed when a woman’s is faced with the prospect that her husband is going to die, but I have to say that few seem to understand or care about the reverse.

The Universe appears to have taken on the role of the Mafia in my life. Instead of striking me directly, it has gone after the one I love.

I am faced with the prospect of losing my best friend. You don’t come across these easily. I have to say that few measure up to Lynn’s level of compassion and confidence. Others might be my friend, but they do not possess the virtues I have come to crave in her. Then there is the matter of my life support. If something happens to her, I will gain a small amount of insurance and see the mortgage paid off. But I will not be well off, given that I will have to pay my own medical bills. This is the price I have paid for being a deadbeat.

Maybe that is why few have offered to talk to me about my fears.

Yet when we complain about the way the wealthy have manipulated our Supreme Court and our Congress to serve their ends above ours, we are accused of “envying” the wealthy. Let’s evaluate this:

• They don’t like it because we feel that everyone should have a vote. Wanting a vote for every citizen is envy. Only the rich should have a vote.
• They don’t like it because we feel that our office holders should care most about the people they represent and serve, not some plutocrat with a huge checkbook living in a distant state. Wanting fair representation is envy. Only the rich should have audiences with these.
• They have apoplexy when we declare that we want a say in what happens in our neighborhood. Saying that we want to control the quality of the air and the water that we breathe and that we drink is envy. Clean air and clear water is only for the rich.
• They don’t like it because we want health insurance for everyone. Giving everyone access to a doctor when they are sick is envy. Only the rich deserve to prolong their lives.
• They don’t like it that we can talk about our grievances and organize using the Internet. Having easy access to one’s peers is envy. The rich should control who gets to say what on the Internet.
• They don’t like our calls for a fair tax rate for those who gain wealth by stock market manipulations or the luck of having wealthy parents rather than hard work and the production of goods made in America. Only the rich deserve to have money.

Fairness is always envy in their book. Never mind that they envy gods and do everything they can to ensure that they become like them.

Mitt Romney stands for the top 1%. He appeals to those of the 99% who think they might become part of the 1%. Look, he hints. “They want what you have. They want your house, your car, your swimming pool. They will take it away from you if you don’t vote for me.”

He is another agent of the politics of Fear, as insidious as the Tea Party who he appeases.

And this message makes him the most divisive politician in America today, more than the racialists and faux libertarians. He is at best, no better than them. He represents greed and lies.

This is how I acquired him. My cat, a lovely calico by the name of Brandy Whine or Ms. Whine, went into heat. (Brandy had the talent of turning away when I tried to photograph her.) Several males from the Durham, North Carolina neighborhood — where I shared an abode with four room mates — gathered around the house. The most dominant of these was an orange tabby who I called William the Orange and a piebald Manx-cross who I named Wendell after a friend in high school.

Wendell didn’t leave once Brandy had had her fill of tomcat. He stuck around, mooching off me and my room mates. One day, I broke down, and decided to claim him as my own. I bought a collar with an ID tag and put it around his neck. Wendell, who’d been looking depressed in the weeks before, suddenly raised his head and strutted around. No more could you call him an alley cat. He was owned!

You might guess that given his street roots he didn’t take guff and he didn’t. I would often find him facing off with another tom. When I broke it up, he would turn to me and mew his deepest apologies.

As a father, he was amazing. We had heard that tomcats often kill kittens, so we took pains to keep him outside while they were growing up. One day, however, he sneaked in. I came into the kitchen to find him with kittens crawling all over him, purring happily. Afterwards, he helped Brandy watch the kittens when they were outside and helped me herd them back in the house when play time was over.

We moved around a bit, but when we did, we always followed this habit. A little before sunset, I would walk around the neighborhood. Wendell would follow me, huffing and puffing until he was out of breath. He would refuse to let me carry him and always made his own way back, though I had to stop frequently to let him catch his breath.

His other romance — beside Brandy who I had fixed to ensure that she would not grace us with more kittens — was with a room mate’s tiny tortoise shell named Friday. I cherish a picture I took of him lying with her on the bed after they had done it. My shadow catcher was a Champ Kodamatic, Kodak’s brief challenge to Polaroid’s hegemony in the instant photography field.

I brought him back to California with me, but he died two days later — the shock of the relocation had been too much for the little guy.

He set a high standard for my other cats, but most of them did not disappoint me. (The exception was a spoiled Persian Lynn and I nicknamed The Mad Cat. We quickly found her a home where she could be the only cat of the house.) Sometimes I dream of those summer nights, with Wendell following me and talking as he walked.

Oh the years. And the cats.

Models need to understand that they are part of the creative process and photographers need to treat them as creative peers.

I’ve gone to two photo-shoots with models in the last two months. It’s a new world for me, he who has practiced most of his photography on hiking trails in the Santa Ana Mountains. ¹ I’ve found the world of glamor photography to be quite different from what I have expected. The women are treated well. One professional photographer I know includes a morality clause in his licensing agreement. This prevents him from reusing the photo in venues that might harm the model’s career such as politics, religion, hate, and pornography. ² I think this kind of respect is essential, but there’s another kind of respect that needs to be practiced as well.

Models have a reputation for being dumb. I think that what we perceive as imbecility is often reserve and self-protection. Youth also plays a part. You don’t want to say anything that will irritate your prospective employer. So if you ask a model her opinion on a photo, she will either tell you it is wonderful or she will tell you that what is important is what you like.

Models have successfully dictated some reasonable restrictions on what their images may be used for. It’s disturbing when a photographer takes a picture of a woman and then grafts her head onto a nude body for use in the skin trade or when he uses a woman who agreed to pose in a bikini as a barker for more meretricious web traffic. No modeling contract should allow for that and no one should be held for ransom when they find their photos appearing in career-killing places.³

It is the timidity which is bred into models that disturbs me. I was taking photos of one young woman. I was having particular trouble because she was black and I don’t have much experience shooting that skin tone. Which was why I chose to work with her. But as I showed her my photos, her answer always was “Whatever you like.”

Now, I like to do justice to a person. I think the problem was she had been conditioned to always go along with the photographer. When one asked her for input, she didn’t know what to do except go into the broken record the modeling school taught her. Which I find tragic.

More experienced models have no trouble responding to this, at least the ones I have met. But this might be because they have been lucky to meet with progressive photographers who see their models as human beings. These models are wonderful to work with. I’d like to see more modeling schools and more photographers promote the idea of a creative interaction between models and the other creative persons who engage in a photo shoot. There’s this idea of photographer as mad genius who must be appeased that I think can and should be done away with. Working with a model should be something more than shouting out positions and moving her body around.⁴ It should be a synthesis of the kinetic and the visual.

1. Don’t worry. This will continue.
2. Note that just because a model does nude work does not mean she wants her image to turn up on a porn site.
3. Show up in a porn site and it is goodbye to Vogue.
4. You should never touch without the model’s permission, BTW, even if it is your girl/boyfriend.

So I am waiting, scanning negatives, cleaning out boxes. I don’t know how much longer this will go on.