I find it utterly fascinating that Romney and Obama, who are so unlike in so many ways and yet both to the best of our knowledge good "family men," are both descended from polygamists.
Barack's great-grandfather Obama Opiyo had five wives and his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, had at least four. Such was the Luo tradition. Barack's father's bigamy was unlawful rather than traditional -- he left what used to be called a "grass widow" behind when he escaped Kenya.
Both of Mitt's great-grandfathers, Miles Romney and Helaman Pratt were polygamists. Miles had four wives and thirty children, Helaman had five wive and who knows how many offspring. Both families fled the U. S. en masse when a divine revelation and the enforcement of the Morrill Act ended polygamy in 1890.
And yet preachers and politicians continue to proclaim that "marriage is between one man and one woman, and always has been, since the time of Adam and Eve."
It ain't so. Nothing could be more ahistorical or more false. The biblical patriarchs were all polygamists and King Solomon himself, a model of wisdom, we are told, collected an astonishing, exhausting household of 300 wives and 700 concubines. Plural marriage was part of Jewish tradition way into the first millennium. Another Abrahamic religion, Islam, is notably polygynous even as it is furiously anti-polyandrous. Marriages over the world have taken every shape imaginable, sometimes formally, sometimes informally. The idea that marriage is permanent and unchanging is a canard belied by the immediate and symmetrical family histories of our two candidates.
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