Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • January 25, 2012 very good at catering to the mainstream prejudice against self-sufficient and successful Mormons, hard-working Chinese and Japanese laborers, and the original “pre-existing use” people of the Western Hemisphere. Congressmen supporting their persecution claimed they were sustaining the religion of the Bible. As usual, the Congressmen lied. What they were really doing was appeasing desperate wives who didn’t want their husbands to partake of polygamy and preferred to drive them to drink and pick up the paycheck. Salt Lake City was portrayed as a bastion of degradation and debauchery and responsible marriages were depicted as scenes from a fantasy of a Turkish harem. The Mormon elders backed off their stance defending their legal right to polygamy about the time that Paddy and Fritz were unloading the Gatling guns and Rodman cannons from the flatcars down at the railroad siding, and those Mormons who held the line and kept both wives went to jail. The Indians sometimes split up their families or sometimes kept their plural wives under wraps. Immigration laws took care of the Chinese in 1882, the Japanese in 1907, and everybody who wasn’t an Aryan in 1924. That’s why modern America is a land of deliriously happy marriages, stable families, and sensible alcohol use, and every kid grows up with two parents. Now let’s go to Brooklyn and take a look at that bridge they have for sale. Politicians are mountebanks. They justified their illegal action referring to the Bible, but the politicians lied. People opposed to gay marriage, which is a whole different issue, prate that “The Bible says marriage is one man and one woman.” The Bible doesn’t say that at all, though it certainly cannot be construed to endorse gay marriage. I’ve read through the entire Old Testament twice and the entire New Testament more times than I can count, and there is no universal ban on plural marriage between a man and more than one woman anywhere in the Bible. Abraham had his first son with Hagar, then his second son with Sarah. Hagar is seen as the mother of the Arabs and Sarah as the mother of the Israelites, and, by extension, the Jews. Abraham is the father of both tribes, which may be why Jews and Arabs got along until the politics of the 20th century destroyed what had once been mutual acceptance. Muslims are permitted to marry either Jews or Christians without requiring conversion, but may not marry kafir (pagans) meaning Hindu, Buddhist, or tribal religionists unless the kafir become Muslims – or Jews or Christians. Jacob, father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, fathered those tribes with four different women: two wives, Rachel and Leah, and two handmaidens. The sons of all four women were respected as rightful heirs. Samuel, the prophet who was the king-maker of the Old Testament, was the son of his father’s second wife. David and Solomon were epic polygamists. David sinned when he took another man’s wife and sent her husband off to be killed, but he was never condemned for those wives he acquired without adultery. In the New Testament, Jesus said nothing about the number of wives a man might have. He opposed all violence, especially cruelty to women and children, and shocked some of the people of his time when he healed the servant of a Roman centurion, the daughter of a Greek woman, and several Samaritans. (The Samaritans, who still exist, were a dissident sect said to be of mixed Assyrian ancestry who purported to be Jewish, but were not accepted by the Jews of Jerusalem.) Jesus said he came not to take away from the law, but to fulfill the law. The law – the Torah and the books that followed – contain a number of regulations for marriage that forbid bestiality, homosexuality, and incest. Monogamy is never exclusively mandated and polygamy is absolutely not forbidden. The Apostle Paul, who was educated as a rabbi, wrote in two of his epistles that those Christians who aspired to be elders or deacons should be men with only one wife. Paul probably wanted to facilitate mutual harmony between Jewish and Greco-Roman Christians, because he also mentions that men should keep their hair short, which was not a Jewish custom of the time, and says that converts could eat meat from animals sacrificed to idols if that did not trouble their consciences, which was definitely not a Jewish custom. When the Apostle John lists the people who are not going to heaven at the end of the book of revelation, he lists a number of moral offenders who would be recognized today – not polygamists. Across the board, in fact, the Classical Greek and Roman civilizations were just about the only civilizations in history that were exclusively monogamous. Men in both cultures kept slave girls – some Jews did also – and slave boys – absolutely not kosher for Jews – and trips to brothels were about on a level with visiting a sports bar. Roman observers reported that the Celtic and Germanic tribes recognized polygamy as an option. Julius Caesar tells us that Ariovistus, the first German known to history by name, had two wives, one Germanic and one Celtic. (Caesar and Ariovistus had their first conference in Gaelic, since neither spoke the other’s language.) The Persians, Chinese, Arabs, Turks, Asian Indians, and the Indians of Central America and South America were all polygamists, at least among the ruling classes. America will not fade because both candidates come from polygamous backgrounds. America may sink, however, if the person we elect doesn’t get a grip on global warming, may choke if we don’t ban cigarette production, and may starve if we don’t enact a fair minimum wage with a sliding scale for level of education or danger. American Indian children used to call all their father’s wives “mother.” Mothers are good. Having more than one mother a generation or two in the past should not disqualify an honest and intelligent man for the White House. Here’s a conundrum: This November, with “family values” certain to be an issue in the election, voters will most likely to have the choice between an incumbent whose father and step-father were both born into a religion that condones polygamy and a challenger whose recent ancestors left the United States for Mexico so they could continue the practice of polygamy. What would Ozzie and Harriett Nelson or Ward and June Cleaver do about a choice like that? Leave it to Beaver? Barack Obama claims his father was an atheist by the time he married Barack’s mother. Personally, I find atheism, the cult of Soviet and Chinese Marxists and most Nazis, a whole lot more lethal than Islam. Be that as it may, his parents gave him two distinctly Islamic names: Barack in Arabic means “lightning” or, poetically, “spirit,” which is not exactly an atheistic name. Hussein is not exactly “Huxley” – Thomas Henry Huxley, the English naturalist who pronounced “a crusade against Christianity” would have been a plausible name for an atheist’s child…but noooooo. I don’t doubt that Obama is a church-going Christian and I don’t doubt that he is a U.S. citizen by birth, but his deceased father’s atheism seems a bit of a stretch. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney descends from an immediate line of ancestors who fled the United States to set up housekeeping in Mexico when the United States illegally declared Mormon polygamy illegal. I say “illegally” because the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, the Mormons believed they had a religious mandate to take more than one wife into healthy households, and the Congressional acts that forbade men from having more than one lawful wife at a time was contrary to the Constitution – not to mention The Bible. In the crack-down on polygamy that followed, large numbers of Mormons were sent to prison for following their religious beliefs and refusing to cast off their second or third wives because Uncle Sam said so. The same persecution, incidentally, was extended to the American Indians of the Plains tribes, who were also polygamous. The story is told that a young government agent was sent to speak to an old warrior who was widely respected for his exploits in defending his people, as he was for a marriage that was happy three times in tandem. The agent came to the chief’s cabin to find the old chief sitting on his porch while his three wives sliced up a side of tough Agency beef so they could all invite the nervous young white man to dinner. “Chief, an order has come from Washington that all the Indians can only have one wife from now on. You’re going to have to pick one of these ladies as your wife and tell the other two that they have to leave your household.” The old chief peered shrewdly at the nervous man. “YOU pick!” he said. The chief and his three wives lived happily ever after. The attempted destruction of Mormon and American Indian and Chinese polygamy by an entirely white male Congress with a fair share of scoundrels on board was unconstitutional. Congress had never been much good at keeping its word to the American Indians, but proved it was A double threat to traditional values? Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Thank you for your splendid essay in the Villadom Times on Custer’s Last Stand and the late war in Iraq. Words do matter! What you wrote about wrongly named Words matter heroes, cowards, and warriors is right on target! Again, many thanks. Jonathan King Wyckoff Seltenrich added that Bakelaar will now oversee the operation of all the department’s squads, which includes a lot of administrative and clerical responsibilities while he, as chief, will be responsible for setting the mission, policies, and procedures for the department, and acting as the liaison to the community and the governing body. Some additional responsibilities will also be given to Detective Tony Pacelli in the day-to-day operation of the squads and Detective Jeff Jost, who will remain the department’s juvenile officer but will assume more responsibility for investigations. Conklin, who will be 65 in February, was a member of the borough’s police force for 38 years, having joined the department in 1974. He also rose from the rank of patrolman up to chief of the department, a position he held from 2000 until he retired in July 2010. He has been the borough’s public safety director since February 2011. When he advised in November that he would retire from the public safety director position when his contract expired on Feb. 1, he emphasized that he has been happy with the town. “I’ve always been treated fairly by the town. I like the town and I like the men here, but the time has come for me to retire from police service,” he said at that time. New police chief (continued from page 12) One of the highlights of his career, Seltenrich said, was his attendance in 1996 at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where he spent 11 weeks in a college semester and boot camp style program that included various types of police and management training courses and a great deal of physical fitness activity. “It was a great experience and I learned a lot from it,” Seltenrich said. Going forward, Seltenrich said the department will be undergoing some reorganization as a result of the resignation of the police director and the fact that his position as captain will not be filled. He explained that Detective Lieutenant Jack Bakelaar will assume the executive officer position, which is the next ranking officer after the chief’s position, but will continue to oversee the detective bureau. “He has been doing that for 30 years,” Seltenrich said, “and I don’t want to lose that experience.”