Pillar of the Community?
 
By Michael Weiss
Slate - USA
 
Latter-day Love: Next month HBO will premiere its latest drama Big Love, about a Utah-based polygamist family (Bill Paxton, his three hot wives, and all their children). The Mormon Church, however, is already fretting about pop-culture-exacerbated stereotypes and is quick to point out that it officially banned simultaneous marriages more than a century ago. Yet, some bloggers insist that such might be the de jure policy on Latter-Day Saints' "I do's," but it is not the de facto practice out West.

Latter-day Londoner Sarai at Anglofille grew up in the exact Utah town where Big Love is set. While she's none too pleased to see polygamy being made sexy (insert joke about fistfuls of Viagra), she's nevertheless "glad that the Mormon Church and the people of Utah will once again be shamed on the international stage for the disgusting and degrading practice [which] is still practiced by tens of thousands of people in Utah and the Colorado/Arizona border towns. Church leaders and government officials have done virtually nothing to put a stop to a practice that often sees very young girls (we're talking 12-year-olds) 'married' to 60-year-old men."

But at conservative Clayton Cramer's Blog, the opinion of the show's likely portrayal of marital multitasking is tilted more toward (single) family values: "Somehow, I rather doubt that this polygamous relationship will be portrayed like the Colorado City, Arizona, crowd — and of course, they couldn't show an Islamic polygamous situation. I doubt that either would create the right image of polygamy as cool and sophisticated."

Watch the trailer for Big Love. Read more about Mormon backlash and the church's official statement on the series.

Michael Weiss, a writer in New York, is co-founder and managing editor of Snarksmith.com.
 
slate.com
Originally posted Friday, February 10, 2006
 
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