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Category: polygamy

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The polygamy wars

I was called to jury duty yesterday. I can’t tell you about that, but I can tell you about a different case.

14-year-old Elissa Wall in her wedding dress.
I flunked voir dire. I always do, darn it, and I take it personally. Still, I’ve answered the summons and met my civic responsibilities in time to paint Ladona. She was expected to haul yesterday.
Jurors are not permitted to discuss cases outside of the courtroom. I won’t even tell you what court I was in, except to mention that it’s a long drive from my house.
Instead, I’ll tell you about a trial from the last decade, and how I came to be hooked up with a bunch of Texas hell-raisers. Texas women are not like women from the Northeast. They’re pretty blunt, Sugar.
For me it started with a devastating house fire in the Bronx in 2007, where nine children and one woman were killed. Apparently, few other New Yorkers were troubled by the open practice of polygamy in our state.  One was Dr. Susan Stickevers from Downstate Medical Center, who had professional experience with the damage to women that polygamy causes. We became friends.
Like his father, Warren Steed Jeffs liked ’em young.
Polygamy is antithetical to feminism because it denies women property rights. It’s miserable for men and boys, too. But the worst part is that, because a small number of men monopolize the available women, it inevitably ends up involving child brides.
In 2008, the state of Texas raided the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) Yearning for Zion Ranch. The initial response was a naive plea for religious tolerance. Oprah Winfrey, National Geographic, the New York Times, and other media heavyweights painted portraits of simple, gentle, homeschooling people who were being persecuted for their faith. Blonde, dressed in pastel prairie dresses or homespun cotton work clothes, the FLDS were nothing if not photogenic.
If you want to point a finger back to the advent of “truthiness”, that’s as good a place as any to start. 
One of Jeffs’ ‘wedding pictures,’ with a pubescent child.
The best coverage was in the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune, which is probably the only major American newspaper to have a section on polygamy. Inevitably, in those pre-Facebook days, battles raged in the comments. There was a pitched war between the supporters of polygamy and its foes. It included experts and it often spilled over into the news pages themselves. I ‘met’ many outspoken antipolygamy activists, including Carolyn Jessop, Flora Jessop, Elissa Wall, Sam Brower and many others.
One intrepid lawyer—I won’t share her name—anonymously published the court documents online. It was a wonderful corrective to all those rose-tinted reports from the mainstream press.
In April, 2009, Laura Turner invited a bunch of us—total strangers—to her cabin in Texas hill country. We spent a long weekend talking and drinking whiskey left over from the last session of the Texas legislature. Internet alliances became real-world friendships.
The turning point in public opinion came with the courtroom evidence brought by then-Attorney General Greg Abbott and his team. An audiotape of Warren Jeffs raping a 12-year-old girl resulted in the conviction of twelve men. Yearning For Zion Ranch was abandoned.

Texas had succeeded where several other states and the Federal government had failed. They exposed a child sex-trafficking ring that ran from Mexico to Canada. Sadly, only Canada acted on the information, and then only imperfectly.

Jeffs raped his victims in this cell in YFZ Ranch.
Meanwhile, in Utah, nothing much has changed. Just this month, the courts slapped the hands of nine defendants for misdirecting SNAP benefits to their FLDS bishop. I shudder to imagine the penalties had the perpetrators been a black, inner city church.
Last week I learned that one of my pals from the Polygamy Wars has died. She lived a good life, and she fought the good fight. I hope that she—and we—turned the tide of public opinion, at least just a bit. 
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The Empress Dowager Cixi

A tinted photograph of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Regent of the Qing Dynasty. Her portraits included a painting given to Teddy Roosevelt as well as extensive photographs. 
My friend K Dee recently put together a photostream of portraits of women to “help me remember, in case I ever start to forget, which sort of female image I find reflects a healthy civil society, and which I do not.” Today we’ll look at the story of a remarkable woman who prospered by being more toxic than her society.
The Empress Dowager Cixi was born in Beijing in 1835, an unimportant daughter of a mid-level bureaucrat. At 16, she was one of sixty girls in a cattle-call to choose consorts for the new Xianfeng  Emperor. Cixi made the cut.
 Concubines of the Xianfeng Emperor fishing at a pond, 19th century. The figure at left is probably Cixi; the one at right is the Empress Ci’an.
Despite the plethora of women in his harem, the Emperor had trouble producing an heir. In 1856, Cixi gave birth to his only surviving son, Zaichun. This propelled her up through the harem ranks so that by the time Zaichun reached his first birthday, she ranked second only to the Empress.
Unusually, Cixi could read and write. This granted her unprecedented access to the Emperor and an informal education in how to govern.
In September 1860, British and French troops attacked Beijing and burned the Emperor’s Old Summer Palace to the ground. The Emperor and his entourage fled Beijing. The Emperor turned to booze and drugs, became ill, and died.
Portrait of Empress Dowager Ci’an (co-regent with Cixi). Since Ci’an was an Empress and Cixi a lowly concubine, Ci’an had precedence, but this was a matter of formality, not fact. Her portrait corresponds with descriptions of her as good-natured and naive. 
An eight-member Regency ruled on behalf of his heir, who was then five years old. Balancing the Regents’ power were the former empress, the Dowager Empress Ci’an, and the former concubine, the Dowager Empress Cixi.
The Dowager Empress Ci’an was good-natured and naïve: the perfect tool for the former concubine. The situation was inherently unstable, and at the correct moment, Cixi staged a coup with the support of a coterie of princes. To demonstrate her compassion, Cixi executed only three of the eight Regents, eschewed torturing them, and refused to execute the ministers’ families.
Ruling from “behind the curtain,” Cixi issued an Imperial Edict on behalf of the young Emperor stating that the two Empresses Dowager were to be the sole decision makers “without interference.”  Her partner being malleable, Cixi had absolute control of the Chinese state by the mid-1860s.
Portrait of Empress Jiashun, Cixi’s daughter-in-law. It is speculated that Cixi poisoned her when she was pregnant with an heir to Cixi’s dead son.
In 1872, the Emperor turned 17 and was married to the Empress Jiashun. The relationship between Cixi and the new Empress was fraught. “I am a principal consort, having been carried through the front gate with pomp and circumstance, as mandated by our ancestors. Empress Dowager Cixi was a concubine, and entered our household through a side gate,” the new Empress said.
Foolish girl. Cixi ordered the couple to separate. The young Emperor—a man of weak intellect and weak character—began to act out his sexual desires in the brothels of Beijing. He contracted syphilis and died at the age of 19. His young pregnant Empress followed him into the grave a few months later, perhaps at Cixi’s hand. They left no heir. After considerable uproar, Cixi’s four-year-old nephew was tapped to become the next Emperor.

The Empress Dowager Ci’an died suddenly in 1881; rumors swirled that Cixi had poisoned Ci’an. Now the sole Regent, Cixi maintained her iron grip on power even after the new Emperor reached his majority and began to reign as the Guangxu Emperor.

As he grew into his role, the Guangxu Emperor began flexing his muscles, initiating a series of modernizing reforms. These particularly displeased Cixi because they would have checked her power. Once more, the Empress Dowager Cixi took over. The Emperor was never formally removed from the throne, but he was a powerless puppet from then on.
The Guangxu Emperor died suddenly on November 14, 1908. The Empress Dowager installed a new child emperor on the throne and promptly keeled over herself. Turns out that the Guangxu Emperor was poisoned; modern forensic testing shows he had arsenic levels 2000 times greater than normal. It appears that, knowing she was dying, the Empress Dowager’s last act was to prevent him from ever taking power in China.

In 1912, the child emperor Puyi abdicated, ending over 2000 years of imperial China and beginning a long period of instability that would result in the Chinese Civil War.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Talking about polygamy with Michelle

The Servant, 36X40, oil on canvas

This week I fasted with my pals from Americans Against the Abuses of Polygamy. Our fast took the form of unrelieved beans and water, because sources inside the FLDShave said that this is what the kids of that community are living on. The children are doing religious penance for their leader’s continued stay in a Texas prison cell, courtesy of his conviction on two felony counts of child sexual assault.
Talking about Polygamy with Michelle,
oil sketch on canvas, 24X30
By Friday, I was in a mental fog that made painting difficult. So when Michelle arrived for our semiweekly work session, I was quite ready to say “Sod it; let’s just talk.” So we did, and I painted.
People often assume my objection to polygamy is religiously-based, but in fact it’s primarily a feminist position. Polygamy is antithetical to women’s rights; for that matter, it’s antithetical to human rights. There’s never been a healthy democracy that has allowed it, and the benighted societies which have practiced it have also exhibited a sad tendency to tyranny and to dispose of their surplus males by sending them off to fight endless wars.
It seems to me that, worldwide, women’s rights have achieved a sort of high-water mark and are now sliding backward. Gender-selectiveabortion means that many women never even take first breaths. Child marriage imperils their youth. And something like a third of the world’s population live in countries where polygamyis legal.
Of course, we live in a nation of apologists who insist that my attitude is some sort of cultural imperialism, but I like living in a nation where women have the same civil and economic rights as do men, and that’s the future I want for my children.
An oil sketch from 2003 on this subject. I still like it.
These are easy enough issues to write about, but how does one paint them? I’ve spent more than ten years working on a series of paintings about abuse. They’re interesting; they may even be good, but on some level I understand that they’re also finished. So it made sense to just sit and talk Friday, and wonder where we will go next.