A commenter to AR said that the MSM will make a big issue out of Mitt Romney’s great-great-great-grandfather’s polygamy, and say nothing about Barack Obama’s father’s polygamy.
Polygamy in America, outlawed in every state but rarely prosecuted, has long been associated with Mormon splinter groups out West, not immigrants in New York. But a fatal fire in a row house in the Bronx on March 7 revealed its presence here, in a world very different from the suburban Utah setting of “Big Love,” the HBO series about polygamists next door.
The city’s mourning for the dead — a woman and nine children in two families from Mali — has been followed by a hushed double take at the domestic arrangements described by relatives: Moussa Magassa, the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors. Both survived.
No one knows how prevalent polygamy is in New York. Those who practice it have cause to keep it secret: under immigration law, polygamy is grounds for exclusion from the United States.
Under state law, bigamy can be punished by up to four years in prison.
The trouble is, Federal immigration authorities and New York law enforcement and prosecution authorities will be loath to enforce anti-polygamy laws against non-whites. Don’t want to be racist, ya know.
But the Magassas clearly are not an isolated case. Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.
And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.
“It’s difficult, but one accepts it because it’s our religion,” said Doussou Traoré, 52, president of an association of Malian women in New York, who married an older man with two other wives who remain in Mali. “Our mothers accepted it. Our grandmothers accepted it. Why not us?”
This is just rich. The ultra-xenophilic New York Times is now complaining when recent arrivals from a polygamous culture bring polygamy to New York, and don’t exactly assimilate as planned.
Countenance Blog 