Category Archives: Polygamy

- Nigerian politician and wealthy lawyer Ned Nwoko has spoken on his taste for young wives

- The billionaire, in an interview, claimed that he marries to save young women from going into prostitution among other things

- According to him, marrying more than one wife can also help the economy and he explained how

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Popular Nigerian politician and husband to actress Regina Daniels, Ned Nwoko, has shared some insights on why he has more than one wife and prefers to marry young women.

Ned Nwoko has explained why he is a polygamist with many children.Photos: @princenednwokoSource: UGC

In an interview with BBC Igbo, the billionaire explained the economical reason behind his choice of polygamy.

According to him, the average northerner has at least two wives and they are helping society by preventing these women from being promiscuous.

He also said the polygamist nature of northerners has helped to increase their population in the country and made them the majority.

Nwoko also complained about how enlightenment has encouraged monogamy even though it is not the country's culture.

He said:

Just recently, TUKO.co.ke reported that the flashy man bought his young Moroccan wife Laila an expensive Range Rover for her 30th birthday.

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The Moroccan beauty had a huge lavish party thrown in her honour which was attended by family and well-wishers.

She also left fans pleasantly stunned when she showed off the Range Rover car her husband got her.

She also revealed the expensive Rolex she was gifted by her hubby, which looked the same as the one he bought his first actress wife.

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Excerpt from:

I marry women to save them from sleeping around, Billionaire Ned Nwoko says - Tuko.co.ke

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Seventy years ago, if you were a Catholic and got divorced, your church could tell you that, despite Gods love for all his children, the fact that you got divorced meant you had sinned against God and were going to hell. They could excommunicate you from the church. My grandmother, who divorced her violently abusive husband to save her life and the lives of her three children, experienced exactly this. Im sure the church leader who turned away wholeheartedly believed he was adhering to Gods Truth. He may even have felt terrible turning a devout woman away. He may have done his best to let her down gently. The experience shattered my grandmothers heart though, and she never attended church again.

I recently came across a Facebook post in whicha popular Christian mom blogger noted that if any of her children ever came out to her as gay, she would love them, she would not reject them, but she would tell them the truth. She said that as a follower of Christ, it was her obligation, her duty, to tell them the truth, even if it was hard. She didnt specify what the truth meant, but it was easy enough to infer that she meant shed tell her kid that homosexuality is a sin. That if they acted on their feelings, they would be committing a sin and risking burning in hell for all eternity.

This kind of bigotry the I love you but you aredefinitely going to hell bullshit is absolutely the worst kind of bigotry. Personally, Id rather you just tell me you hate me. Just tell us queers you think butt sex is nasty, ladies going down on each other is icky, and that you think were freaks and wish we didnt exist. At least theres honesty in that message. At least its clear. Theres no contradiction there for us to untangle, no cognitive dissonance for our brains to struggle to rationalize. Its easier to be hated by someone who isnt confused or hypocritical in how they feel.

When you tell me you love me but add a footnote that the way I love is a sin, when you spout this bullshit as you donate to the poor and bake casserole dishes for your sick congregation members, I question the motives for your kindness. Are you trying to be a good person for the sake of being a good person, or are you collecting points for your ticket to waltz through the pearly gates? Youre going to hell, but Im not, because even though the Bible says youre a sinner, I still love you. Look how good and virtuous I am! If all youre doing is trying to impress Jesus by pointing out peoples sins to them, sorry, but your heart aint pure.

I also question your intelligence. I question how much youve really analyzed the system of morality you claim to hold so dear. Think about this for a second: you are saying that, because of who I love, I am literally literally going to burn in hell for all of eternity. As in, engulfed by flames, my sizzling flesh melting off my bones as I wail in agony for all of eternity. Burning. Forever. Because I love a body that has the same genitals as I do. Because of love. You believe this wholeheartedly, and youre able to tell it to me with a beatific smile on your face, that (even though Ill roast on a spit in hell for infinity) you love me.

This is the most narcissistic bullshit I have ever heard in my fucking life. I know God is supposed to be a mystery and unknowable and stuff, and Christianity tells you not to question his laws or to attempt to understand his motives and all that, but like if you believe that, you also believe in creation. You believe God deliberately endowed us with brains capable of questioning and analysis. What kind of psychopath would deliberately be like, So, Ill give them the ability to recognize contradiction and hypocrisy and cruelty, but then Ill demand they unquestioningly adhere to this book that is full of contradiction and hypocrisy and cruelty, and the test of their faith is to see how committed they can be to pretending they dont see all that contradiction and hypocrisy and cruelty.

There are a hundred rules in the Bible that people break every single day. The second half of the Bible basically says, Oh, oops, actually, ignore most of the first half, ha ha. The Bible speaks of spousal abuse, rape, polygamy, and slave ownership as if they are normal and expected parts of society. Pro-slavery folks around the time of the Civil War used the same argument in favor of slavery that present-day love-you-but-youre-a-sinner bigots use to defend their intolerance of queers. The Bible said this is how it is, so we must follow its law. Clearly, weve thrown out that part of the Bible. And the Catholic Church no longer automatically excommunicates members for divorce. The truth is, Christians have always happily tossed aside whatever parts no longer suit them.

Therefore, I have to conclude that the only reason anyone would continue to hold onto the part of the Bible that condemns homosexuality is because theyre making an active choice to do so. Christians throw out the parts of the Bible that dont make sense to them and try to adhere to the parts that do. And if thats how you look at religion if youre able to keep the parts you like and throw out the parts you dont then when you tell me you love me but hate my sin, you tell me you are making a choice about that specific part of the Bible. You likethat part. You want to keep that part. Youre choosingto keep that part.

But religion isnt a buffet, and your little pact to tell your hypothetically-gay child the truth is not love. Its arrogance and hypocrisy in the extreme. My faith in my love for my partner is as pure as, and as deserving of respect as, your faith in your god. You dont get to decide how God perceives people. The Bible tells you that, too, by the way, several times.

As big and wondrous as the universe is, as impossibly miraculous as it is that life exists at all, you have the breathtaking audacity to hang eternity on this one trifling detail of humanity. You have convinced yourself that the hypocrisy inherent in your statement of loving a person but not loving who they areis something that a loving God would be in favor of. You have decided that youknow what God cares about most, and that this who a person loves is it.

You fucking hubristic turd.

The rest is here:

I Love You, But Youre Going To Hell Is Abusive B*llshit - Scary Mommy

Unlike so many of her peers in the keeping-up-appearances business, Jen Shah loves to talk about just how much help she requires to function. In December 2019, a day before she was scheduled to report for her first day of shooting the debut season of the Bravo reality series The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, I was running around at home with my 20 assistants, she tells me over the phone a year later, only mildly exaggerating. My housekeeper from New York flew in, literally flew in, and was helping organize my closet. She fell off a ladder and had to go to the hospital within, like, two hours of arriving in Utah. So, that was crazy. My assistants were scrambling to hire closet organizers because she got hurt and sprained her ankle!

Anyone who has watched Shah in Real Housewives can likely envision every part of that story with ease: the closet necessitating a ladder, the platoon improvising on the fly, Shahs sunny retelling of something a little bit sus. (Never a dull moment! is how she sums up that day.) A bombastic mother of two who describes herself as a fabulous, successful businesswoman, Shah wears extra-strappy stiletto heels in the wet winter snow, commissions Tongan dancers for someone elses birthday party, and refers to her husband, a former lawyer and current assistant on the Utah Utes football staff, as Coach Shah as if she were a defensive back suiting up for the big game. She has people who do her makeup, restock her tampons, and fill her furry fanny pack with snacks for a day on the bunny slopes.

She hurls drinks and throws hands and has never met a lovely gathering that isnt worth storming away from, in furs and in tears. She is, in other words, an instant classic caricature in the sprawling Real Housewives canon: outlandish in a somehow earnest way, prone to escalating tense situations, rocking her shamelessness as if it were a bold lip. And living in a reserved place like Utahwhere the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints physically and culturally looms, and such demonstrative personal volatility is broadly frowned upon and the domestic is considered divineShah tends to stand out.

Which is why one of her assistants, Shah tells me, is specifically tasked with being the homemaker; her duties include things like baking cookies and putting out pumpkins when seasonally appropriate. There have been times, Shah says, when she harbored some guilt about such outsourcing. She mostly places these feelings in the past tenseCoach Shah gave her a pep talk, which helpedbut its hard for anyone, even her, to remain impervious to the conspicuous efforts of some of her neighbors.

Especially here in Utah, Shah explains, Ive got every frickin mommy blogger out here cooking, baking, sewing the Halloween costumes. Im like, OK, Im a big piece of shit!

While I cant quite relate to the whole closet-ladder/hospital saga, on this topic I tell her I know exactly how she feels. I may not live in Salt Lake City, but I do live on the internet. And so for more than a decade Ive absorbed and observed, with ever-shifting ratios of envy to eye rolls, the content from some of these online women to whom Shah refers: the many outwardly serene, creative, and ambitious once-bloggers-now-influencers located in (or proudly from) Utah who are forever out there tending to their homes, their littles, their corporate sponsorships, their obliques, and often their faith with an air of lucrative, well-lit, DIY competence.

Im not alone: An essay by Emily Matchar titled Why I Cant Stop Reading Mormon Housewife Blogs ran in Salon a full 10 years ago. In 2017, Allure correspondent Alice Gregory went to Utah to figure out Why So Many of Your Favorite Beauty Personalities Are Mormon. When Bravos reality pooh-bah Andy Cohen announced in the fall of 2019 that the newest Real Housewives franchise would be filmed in Salt Lake City, local culture writer Meg Walter reacted by musing: If the term influencer wasnt born here, it was certainly made prominent by the fashion and mommy bloggers with their OOTDs, room reveals, and sponsored posts. Really weve all been watching The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City play out on Instagram for the last 10 years.

But as the actual first season of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City aired over the past three months through its finale on Wednesday night, it featured none of these frickin mommy bloggersto borrow a term of artmuch to my initial surprise. This is a reaction that Cohen seemed to be going for: In 2019, he told BravoCon audiences that I think youre gonna be really surprised, intrigued, and titillated by the group of women we have chosen. Shahs fellow castmates include a tequila slinger, a definitely-not-a-swinger, and a woman married to her step-grandfather at her late grandmothers (disputed?!) request. Far from being a look inside the lives of active Latter-day Saint women, the series follows characters who are either unaffiliated with the church or distanced from it in some way. Im neither moved to envy these women nor even to roll my eyes at them, really; Im just here to enjoy them.

This seasons Real Housewives may appear to have little in common with some of their fellow niche-famous local moms. They may be more openly willing to engage in a little light apostasy for our viewing pleasure. But they are also in some sense performing their own wildcat version of what so many real housewives in and of Utah have been doing, often with the churchs encouragement, for years: finding new, innovative ways to document and distribute their stories and selves to the world, skeptics be damned.

Were inundated with images of perfect Instagram squares of beautiful women who seem to really be killing it as moms and homemakers and craft people and volunteers and fashionistas and working out, says Heather Gay, another Real Housewife, in a phone conversation, and I mean, its inspiring, but its also intimidating. These perfect Instagram squares have websites with names like Mint Arrow and Barefoot Blonde. They have children called Arrow and Samson. Some give shout-outs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints right there in their social media bios. Some are sisters, like Emily Jackson (age 32; four children; 399,000 Instagram followers) and Rachel Parcell (just turned 30; three kids; parlayed a blog called Pink Peonies that she started in 2010 to chronicle her wedding planning into more than a million followers on Instagram and a clothing line at Nordstrom). Those two, along with their two other sisters, were once referred to as the Mormon Kardashians by their friend, Queer Eye for the Straight Guys Tan France.

Even the women who arent currently Utah-basedArizona and SoCal are popular satellite hubs among themmaintain significant ties to the Beehive State: They grew up there, or they went to Brigham Young University, or they got married in the Mormon Temple in downtown SLC, or they first established their online presence specifically to give life updates from afar to their large families back home. Here we go well see how long this lasts Naomi Davis wrote in 2007 under the first blurry-imaged post on her blog, then titled Rockstar Diaries. Thirteen years and five children later, she has nearly half a million followers on Insta.

Utah and Mormons still have a really outsized influence on the mamasphere, Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a writer and PhD candidate at Concordia whose research focuses on the evolution of mommy blogs from the confessional to the monetized, tells me over FaceTime. This can be linked to both the churchs past and its present: Before there were bloggers, there were scrapbookers, she says, a practice that was highly encouraged within the ancestry-obsessed faith. Mormons documented their families really assiduously. Blogging was a natural extension of that forte. And from the churchs perspective, an e-diaspora of internet-savvy young people getting engaged and married and pregnant and pregnant and pregnant made for some pretty attractive and high-engagement social media outreach about LDS living. (The churchs official website even has tips for how to best share online.)

Gay says it wasnt that long agoa couple of years, maybethat she used to rule over her three daughters digital feeds like a paranoid tyrant. I used to guard their Instagram, Gay says, like it was a personal billboard of their morality, their character, and my parenting. That last part was key. Gays hypersensitivity, as she terms it, stemmed from not wanting to be judgedby her friends and her frenemies and her family and the parishioners shed grown up alongside in the LDS church in and around her native Utahover the level of virtue in her daughters selfies. I had a rule, like, if I saw them with their tongue out, they lose their phone for a week, she tells me.

Things have changed ever so slightly since then. Gay is now someone whose life is a personal billboard, viewable by anyone. She co-owns a business called Beauty Lab + Laser that has its own 15-Minute Botox Parking spots, the mission statement all the best and no BS!, and promotional T-shirts that say LIFE IS SHORT. BUY THE LIPS. The same woman who once patrolled her kids phones with nervous discretion now says things like: Id fuck a grandpa, big deal! with a winsome shrug on TV screens worldwide.

Raised, educated, married, and divorced in the LDS church, Gay is now in the midst of blazing a new trail, as she says in her Real Housewives opening credits tagline. (She hasnt totally rejected the faith; in the Real Housewives finale she is characterized as a non-practicing Mormon.) This is a process that involves incrementally distancing herself from some of her most elemental beliefsparticularly, she says, the ones surrounding her roles and responsibilities as a wife and mother. Sometimes this means speaking up, and sometimes it means staying mum. This summer, when one of Gays teenagers posted a photo of herself that would have been immediately ixnayed in the past, I had to rock myself to sleep not to shame her and make her take it down, Gay says, and rock she did. Its something Im trying to work on as a mom, she says. It feels like, OK, Im not Mormon anymore. These are the kinds of words that are music to a reality producers ears.

Since the inception of Real Housewives of Orange County in 2006, Cohens reality series has featured dozens of women, from New Jersey to Beverly Hills, who flaunt great fortunes of murky provenance and/or possess personalities that are by turns lavish, comedic, and abrasive. Cohen first and foremost tends to seek out idiosyncratic locations with a vibe all their ownMiami, Jersey, Dallas. But what feels new and different about Salt Lake City is the extent to which that tried-and-true Real Housewives formula attempts to create dissonance with the common perception of the local culture, rather than amplify them up to 11. (If its extremist polygamy youre looking for, in other words, you wont find it here; check out this British documentary.)

We developed a show at Bravo years ago that was not a Housewives that was set with a lot of Mormons and wound up falling through, Cohen told People in September. (Bravo declined to share further information with me about that project.) So Im really glad weve got some active Mormons, weve got some lapsed Mormons, but Mormonism is a character and through line in the show.

Gay is not the only Real Housewife whose relationship with the church falls somewhere between the nonexistent and the fraught. Some of the six women practice different faiths: Meredith Marks is Jewish, while Mary Cosby leads the Pentecostal congregation that she says she inherited from her grandmother on the condition she marry her step-grandfather, as one does. Others are former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Shah says she converted to her husbands religion of Islam once he informed her about her former religions history of racism, both in doctrine and practice, while Whitney Rose left the Church when she got unofficially excommunicated over an extramarital relationship with an executive at the multilevel-marketing business where she worked. (Reader, she married him.)

Lisa Barlow, who grew up in New York before attending BYU at the same time as Gay, may be the lone satisfied LDS member of the bunch. She calls herself Jewish by heritage, Mormon by choice, drinks the obligatory Big Gulps of Diet Coke, and has said her conversion began when a missionary knocked on her familys door back in New York. Yet she confidently maintains an interpretation of LDS scripture that is as bespoke as her tailoring. She owns a tequila company and describes herself as Mormon 2.0, which she explained to US Weekly means Im not checking all the boxes, and I dont really fit in that square. Of her parenting style toward her 16- and 8-year-old sons, she says that what she lacks in domestic command she makes up for in entrepreneurial spirit. Listen, I may not be great at making hot dogs, she tells viewers, but one thing I am good at is inspiring my children to build things. (By things, she is specifically referring to their new family project: a line of turmeric-containing mens grooming products called Fresh Wolf.)

Real Housewives of Salt Lake City may relish its drone shots of Temple Square and its choir-of-angels soundtrack, but there is no talk of family home evenings or LDS missions. Instead, there have been decidedly non-worship-like settings, ranging from a speakeasy-themed event to a hip-hop golf party featuring a twerk/worm dance-off to a trance state is the bomb hypnosis sesh in a creepy Las Vegas mansion. (Shah stormed out of all three.)

There was season-long drama involving, at various times, a double amputation; a dozen surgeries to remove odor glands; the phrase hospital smell; a diss comparing a couture gown to a Christmas tree; and lots of long, glittering nails pointed in the direction of heavily made-up faces. At a Met Galathemed luncheon attended only by the Housewives, Cosby narrated the history of the drink they were offered as they arrived via a sad red carpet. Youre drinking Dom Perignon 2003, she said. In 2003 there was a heat wave; 5,600 people died, and it made the best grapes of all time. Everyone gets the water-into-wine parable they deserve.

In the winter of 2007, a 79-year-old elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stood before a room of college kids and encouraged them to blog. Dialogue and inquiry among Mormon thinkers was already thriving online, and had been for years. There was the co-ed consortium of early-to-mid-aughts online writers, some of whom originally met on America Online, who referred to themselves en masse as The Bloggernacle. There were the young, enthusiastic women like Davis and Stephanie Nielson of NieNie Dialogues who had already fired up their less dialectic and more diaristic Blogspots. But Elder M. Russell Ballard sought youthful reinforcements. We all have interesting stories that have influenced our identity, he told students at a Brigham Young University satellite campus in Hawaii in a speech titled Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church. Sharing those stories is a nonthreatening way to talk to others. Apostles are the original influencers, when you think about it.

At the time, the church was in the midst of weathering an intense period of national scrutiny. Leaders sought, as ever, to better differentiate themselves from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), the extremist and polygamist movement that had been formally cast out of the mainstream church a century ago but whose reputation remained both stubbornly attached and also constantly in the news. Jon Krakauers 2003 book Under the Banner of Heaven told a horrifying story of how faith can curdle into zealotry and even murder. The HBO show Big Love about contemporary polygamists premiered in 2006, the same year Warren Jeffs, the real-life abusive leader of the FLDS church, was arrested. Mitt Romneys presidential campaign drew renewed scrutiny toward his religion. We are living in a world saturated with all kinds of voices, Ballard told the students in 2007. Now, more than ever, we have a major responsibility as Latter-day Saints to define ourselves instead of letting others define us.

It wasnt the first or last time the church had faced a reputational challenge by encouraging the production of wholesome storytelling content. One yearslong promotional effort called Im a Mormon sought to combat misconceptions about members of the church, prompting New Yorker writer Rollo Romig to reminisce in 2012 about a series of PSA spots that had run on TV throughout his childhood in the 70s and 80s for the same reason. That award-winning campaign, which was called Homefront, consisted of small, sorta-cryptic vignettes of domestic life and low-stakes moral reckoning. Romig quoted a Homefront producer who discussed the success of the effort. In surveys conducted before the spots began airing, respondents had been asked what came to mind when they heard the word Mormon. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Osmonds, polygamists, racists, the producer told Romig. Those were the top four answers. After seven, eight, nine years of Homefront airing, when you asked the same question, the no. 1 answer was always family.

It was this kind of outcome, just on a slightly smaller screen, that Ballard sought with his remarks. Most of you already know, he said, that if you have access to the internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. Of course, as any fan of reality television can tell you, what someone thinks they know to be true can be a dynamic and disputed thing indeed. If the rise of the connected internet enabled the devout to more efficiently spread their good word, it also gave a platform to the doubters.

Over the years, something of an arms race has ensued. In response to recurring criticisms about the LDS church and faith that were cropping up on late-90s Mormon forums on AOL, for example, a group of posters created the Foundation for Apologetic Information Research, or FAIR, to more formally clap back. (The organization still exists as FairMormon today.) One of the earliest and most influential personal blogs of the Y2K era, called Dooce, was written not by a gentle Latter-day Saint but rather by a salty Salt Laker named Heather Armstrong who was more than happy to discuss how shed bolted from the LDS church immediately upon graduating from BYU. In 2005, a tech-forward and ultimately controversial church member named John Dehlin, who had left his job at Microsoft in Seattle to move to Salt Lake City, launched a still-running podcast called Mormon Stories in which he interviews peopleso many peoplewho are in the midst of critically assessing their faith and their relationship to the church. In 2018, Dehlin was formally excommunicated for breaking with church doctrine and, according to a letter explaining the decision, for having spread these teachings widely via the internet to hundreds of people in the past.

These days, depending on where you click around online, you can find multiple rabbit holes of testimonials, struggle, humor, and support at sites like /r/exmormon on Reddit, where people gather to vent about the TBMs (True Believing Mormons) in their lives but also to commiserate about the clueless questions and jokes they still get about their upbringing from people outside the faitha.k.a. nevermos. (There are also subreddits for both /r/mormon and /r/latterdaysaints, but they have only a fraction of subscribers.) You can also trip over the disturbing wasp nest that is #DezNat, short for Deseret Nation, an amorphous and alarming hashtag where trad dogma meets edgelord sensibilities and religious memes. (Dehlin and Jeremy Runnells, another vocal church critic, are two frequent targets.) You can feel soothed by the smooth beauty of Parcells and Jacksons influencer content, or you can be one of those commenters who consistently harangue them about how on earth they can fit their temple garments under those tight-fitting clothes. And you can stream, and then discuss, those kooky gals on Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. The program may feel like a novelty act, but that doesnt mean it lacks a plot.

If you listened to an hour of Mormon Stories a day, Dehlin tells me in a phone call about the podcast that ultimately got him kicked out of the church, it would take you five years to conquer. While not everyone who Dehlin interviews on the podcast plans to leave the faith altogether, what they pretty much all have in common is that they are very much questioning aspects of what theyve been taught about the church. Gay tells me that the first time she heard about Dehlins podcast, not too long ago in the grand scheme of things, she was warned by her Beauty Lab business partner Dre Nord that she might not be ready to listen to it just yet. After all, shed grown up being taught to absolutely not look at anything critical, anything ex-Mormon, she says. Like, that was worse than porn. Once that got in, you could never unsee it.

Over the past two months, however, Gay and Nord have made three appearances on Dehlins show, fleshing out their parochial and at times problematic upbringings and giving voice to their ongoing existential doubts. And just as Gay hadnt expected to ever find herself on Mormon Stories, Dehlin tells me that two things surprised him when he watched a little Real Housewives.

The first was recognizing someone hed known growing up in Texas in the 1980s. I played basketball against Justin Rose, he tells me, talking about Whitneys husband. He was kind of a bad boy, you know, by Mormon standards. I remember him liking rap. (Roses older brother, David, was cocaptain of the University of Houstons famous Phi Slama Jama basketball team, playing alongside Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon, before coaching at BYU for decades.) But beyond the unexpected connections, what threw off Dehlin the most was that the show, while outwardly absurd and occasionally shocking (despite his excommunication, Dehlin says, my sensibilities are still very, very Mormon), nevertheless managed to highlight a number of meaningful issues and topics that he finds relevant to LDS life and sees all the time in his work.

I kept a Google Doc, he says, and scans his list. Alcohol. Swinging. (I have close friends, very close friends that swing.) Substance abuse. (The story line involving Whitney Rose helping her father battle drug addiction was one of the seasons most resonant.) Superficiality. Faith. Marital conflict. (I could spend every hour of every day counseling married couples.) Polygamy. Porn. (In one episode, when Barlow jokingly pop-quizzes her teen son on the most important tenets of the church, the teen says: Thou shalt not smoke, thou shalt not do anything bad. When his mom asks whats considered bad, his response is: Looking at porn.) They really have hit a lot of the big ones, Dehlin says.

These same topics occasionally surfaced in the Mormon blogosphere too, though it was more rare to see them. Natalie Lovin, an early LDS blogger who went by the name of Nat the Fat Rat, ultimately split with her husband and left the church, posting all the while, though she eventually faded from the influencer circuit. Corrine Stokoe, who runs Mint Arrow, very publicly shared her husbands struggles with a pornography addiction. There have been heartbreaks and roadblocks shared around the blogosphere and on the Gram, for sure. But by and large, the vibes on most LDS influencers feeds tend toward the positive.

Which is understandable! And yet, for TV purposes, not exactly propulsive. Essentially, theyre running catalogs, Meg Walter, who lives in Utah and recaps and podcasts about Real Housewives, says about the parenting, fashion, and fitness influencers in her midst. I dont think its fair to expect them to be showing us their real lives when theyre running a business. Kathryn Jezer-Morton compares the pressures on some of the influencers and momtrepreneurs she has studied to those of a 1950s housewife, jacked up: Not only is it a ton of work to keep up the always-pleasant exterior, but many readers, whole forums full of em, are eager to locate cracks in the foundation. People are always then trying to catch you in a lie, Jezer-Morton says. And youre kind of vulnerable to accusations of fakery, whichof course its fake! (In the FAQ on Daviss website, one of the listed questions is: Is Life Really That Perfect? In the answer, Davis writes: a saying i love, comparison is the thief of joy, has never rung truer than in the blogging world.) In 2019, Armstrong reminisced to Vox about how things had changed since she first began blogging two decades ago at Dooce: Being an influencer today means sharing picture-perfect moments, and that is not what I signed up for.

There isnt much at all thats picture-perfect about Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, thankfully. (Really sweaty is how Jezer-Morton describes it, with genuine respect in her voice.) For Bravo characters, the institutional mandate is not about being immaculate, which is freeing in some ways and harrowing in others. The institutional mandate is less Pink Peonies, more Jen Shah, whose voice over the phone when we speak grows faster and more agitated in the exact same way it does on the show, an ascending spiral of accusations and affront. Her target is, blessedly, not me, but some of the women shes encountered in Utah who wont tell her whether or where they get their work done.

And theyre like, Oh no, I didnt do anything, she says, and I can hear her shaking her head, maybe even pointing a manicured finger into the air. You just pulled a Kylie Jenner! she says. You woke up this morning with a whole new face! You know, I have eyes here! Viewers do too, and theres something particularly watchable about programming that acknowledges the doubts and indulges in the drama of its characters in a similarly straightforward way. All that sweat and mess is the point.

Like all thriving ecosystems, Real Housewives is an iterative environment. Disruptive newcomers are occasionally introduced to the fray. Poisonous flowers are plucked. Some beings thrive in the shade; others wilt if they arent constantly in the light. While Cohen has confirmed that the Salt Lake City series will be back for a second season, its always possible that the cast might be shaken up on the margins.

Cosby appeared less and less in the show over the course of the 13-episode season, drawing speculation that she (and her Imelda Marcosesque closets) might wind up phased out altogether. Or perhaps another character will feel so irreparably insulted over the course of the upcoming three (!) reunion installments that theyll flounce. Maybe fashionista and tech wife Angie Harrington, a once-rumored Season 1 cast member who ultimately appeared for about 10 unmemorable seconds in Episode 12, will get more future air time. (One thing is for certain: Its unlikely well see auxiliary friend of character Sara McArthur Pierce again after photos of her at the Capitol building riot on January 6 led Rose to publicly denounce her on Instagram.)

And in my dreams, the clouds and the brands will align and well get a real-life frickin mommy blogger, and a look into what it actually, logistically takes to be a modern LDS tastemaker tasked with appearing professionally and perpetually blessed. For now, we have women like Gay, who in many ways may be a more interesting version of all of those things: a divorced mom navigating life with three daughters, a dogged business owner who built her image-based company in large part through Instagram, a woman whose search for higher meaning in this life and the next is as complicated as it is sincere. Her personal Mormon story may not be the one that the LDS church wants someone to be telling, but its illuminating to hear.

Influence, like Andy Cohen, works in mysterious ways. When I ask what switch flipped to make Gay start questioning the churchs teachings, she mentions the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaids Tale. As she watched the series and listened to the wealthy caste of fundamentalist women talking about how glad they were not to have jobs so they could tend to their homes and gardens, she realized she could hear herself in their words. When youre resonating with the villains, she says, you take a really good, hard look at what you believe.

I tell Gay I have a tangential TV rec: Mrs. America, whose real-life character Phyllis Schlafly was part of the inspiration for The Handmaids Tales Serena. Gay tells me that shes seen it, and that she was particularly taken aback by one moment. Blink and youll miss it, but theres a scene in which a Schlafly ally named Georgia Peterson of Salt Lake City brings a bus full of women to a convention to join the fight against womens lib. Georgia Peterson was in my congregation, Gay says urgently. She went to church with me. I named my daughter Georgia after herwell, she influenced it. She wore a hat to church on Sunday. She was this amazing, trailblazing politician woman. I didnt see that she was all of those things but for the wrong side. Sometimes the stories you thought you knew best are newly illuminated by another perspective.

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Bravos The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Was a Parallel Surprise - The Ringer

A Dowry of Blood is a sumptuous novel by S. T. Gibson, who asks us to raise an intoxicating glass to the vampires carnal nature and drink deep. Though it implies that that most famous vampire, Dracula, is one of its central cast, the true protagonist is Constanta, his vampire offspring and bride. Bram Stokers Dracula featured three such brides, nameless seductresses to terrify his Victorian audience; Gibson gives these brides voices and histories, turning them from objects of desire to characters with wills and desires of their own.

A lot of writers give endless thought to the logistics of vampirism: the who and where of killing, of moving around, of the laws the limit or enhance the vampiric life. Not so here. Constanta and her lovers never seem to fear discovery or vengeful mortals, or feel hemmed in by their nocturnal lifestyle. They kill with abandon, travel freely, interact easily with whatever humans they so choose. External forces rarely do more than displace them; only forces internal to their shifting relationships challenge and threaten them.

Most vampire novels are extremely grounded in places and times, especially romanticised ones. Anne Rice set a precedent for seduction-by-location with her Parisian revels and New Orleans mansions, growing sensuality from the ground up. Dowry of Blood eschews the heavy historicity in favour of a vague, lovely sweep across Europe, differentiating between Vienna and Venice only in the broadest of terms.

This may have baroque overtones, but its essentially an Impressionist book, painting with delicate dabs here and there, and then with sweeping, broad lines elsewhere. Time and place blur, faces emerge from the colourful palette of feeling rather than outward form. Its a breathlessly emotional book, furious and horny and delighted, and always a bit mad. And anyway, who cares about painstaking detail when there are such bright colours to paint with? Red, of course being primary among them.

Though Gibson can occasionally stray toward the purple with her prose, its more in a first novel sort of way. Shes just so excited for and by her characters that its hard to critique any little instances of faux pas. Theyre elegant, savage, and above all, grandiose. She doesnt tie them to the minutia of time or place because they are so very out of time and place, creatures who defy mortalityand conventional morality.

I think it would be perfectly natural if Constanta were to struggle with polygamy or being in a polycule, but I also think its perfectly reasonable that she doesnt. She slaughters humans like rabbits; even for an erstwhile churchgoer like her, whats an open marriage to the toll of her dead? Her casual embrace of non-monogamy is refreshing, and I like very much that Gibson did away with the hand-wringing. Rice already did the tormented vampire, and the unrepentant one. We already knowoh, do we knowvampires under threat from hunters or from their own guilt. Here we see the vampire at home, at rest. Their natural habitat is luxury, and it turns out their natural inclination is to form groups, albeit rather dangerous ones.

Im not only talking about the incestuous undertones of calling lovers sister and father and so on. This book is also about power dynamics and abuse of those dynamics. The unnamed father wields his power with a veneer of elegance, but hes really a common variety opportunist and manipulator. We feast on the ruins of empire, he declares with a grand flourish, forgetting that it makes him a scavenger, not a sovereign.

This definitely seems like a book produced in 2020, not just because of descriptions of plague (theyre not overwhelming, dont be deterred) but because of descriptions of a megalomaniacal narcissist who wants control at the cost of everyone elses life and joy. There is a passage late in the book that really hit the nail on the head about the thousand violations of abuse, the ones that go unremarked as they grind you down or make you finally rise up.

In a strange and not-so-strange way this book is ultimately about the queer found family and about the bonds that grow in spite of and because of trauma. Gibson doesnt belabour the backdrop because it is backdrop: the real drama and gorgeousness comes from the characters and their deadly, deliriously lovely desires.

A Dowry of Blood is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.

Synopsis | Goodreads

A lyrical and dreamy reimagining of Draculas brides, A DOWRY OF BLOOD is a story of desire, obsession, and emancipation.

Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things. Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husbands dark secrets.

With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.

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Review: A Dowry of Blood by ST Gibson - The Nerd Daily

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Concurrent with the colonial survey, as we saw in the chapter Origins, philologists were creating their own taxonomies that could account for the prostitute as the genesis of deviance in Indian society. Womens sexuality could be the premise for the scientific study of social life, as an investigation into ancient orginary tests and through legal surveys that would generate new codes for Indian social life. The sexual deviance of diverse women, brought into view through the practice of the survey, was not only an object of knowledge but also a potential site for state intervention.

W. Wavell, magistrate of Moorshedabad and the superior of Bankim Chatterjee, had commissioned Chatterjees report for the sake of accuracy; he argued that the perspective of a Bengali man was the most accurate depiction of native society. Wavell distilled Chatterjees extensive descriptions into a systematic taxonomy of all women who the state must mark as prostitutes. His list includes Muslim women living under the guise of nika marriage, girl children forced into Hindu marriage, high-caste widows barred from remarriage, and the Hindoo form of polygamy known as Coolinism.

According to Wavell, women became prostitutes as a result of ancient Hindu law: There are bad ones among the wealthiest or the highest in social rank and I think perhaps they have here more excuse in consequence of the unhappy law laid down by Manu. This explanatory mode attributed contemporary Hindu social practices to the laws laid down in ancient texts. The widow was, in the view of Wavell, an inevitable prostitute. This form of reasoning placed ancient texts as the primary origin of the Indian prostitute. According to Wavell, the secrecy of a womans sexual transgression resulted from the static nature of timeless social customs that led to an inevitable problem of widowhood and prostitution.

With a similar inventory of women, Alexander Abercrombie, the commissioner of Dacca (Dhaka), differentiated Hindu prostitutes who fell into prostitution as a result of religious stricture from Muslim prostitutes in his response to the 1872 query. According to Abercrombie, Muslim women prostitutes hid their sexual deviance in false marriages. He understood this difference in sociological terms. According to Abercrombie, women who turned to prostitution had fallen permanently out of society. If Muslim, women could find menial jobs like housekeeping because of the relative tolerance of sexual promiscuity among Muslims. As a result, they had a more stopgap or casual relationship to the act, and often were at once prostitutes and workers. Mussulmans, Abercrombie claimed, may contract a nika marriage . . . and a Mahomedan thinks nothing of contracting such an alliance. When the Muslim couple became thoroughly tired of each other, they separated without difficulty and the woman is free to go nika with another man or set up again for herself in the bazar. Hindu women, on the other hand, had no means of earning a living after falling out of society. Disreputable Hindu women converted en masse to Islam to be free from social condemnation, as Islam had nothing conservative in its tenet. While Muslim women were sexually promiscuous, they were unregulated by regimes of shame and social condemnation like their Hindu counterparts.

Also read: Why 43% of British still think colonial empire was a good thing, and a source of pride

In these taxonomies, Muslim women were characterized as more sexually brazen than their Hindu counterparts, with insatiable sexual appetites and a dangerous promiscuity unleashed by the system of temporary marriages. That said, administrators stressed that women of all religious communities were potential prostitutes. Across these letters, the same categories and social behaviors are linked to prostitution. Babu Taraknath Mullick, deputy magistrate of Madaripur, insisted that the marriage customs of Hindus led to widowhood and the polygamy of Muslims led to prostitution. For Mullick, Muslims were always leading lives of disrepute.

Similarly, explaining how Muslim women were prostitutes as often as Hindus but hid under the guise of marriage, D. R. Lyall, magistrate of Dacca, argued that officials must broaden the definition of what constituted prostitution. If prostitution meant simply one that indiscriminately carries on intercourse with men whether openly professing prostitution or not, then the number of Hindus acting as prostitutes would be significantly less than that of Mohamedan prostitutes. Lyall describes how respectable men of elite Muslim families had official wives who were, in fact, prostitutes, alongside their ayahs, nannies, who were mostly prostitutes who escape notice. The other important segment of Muslim prostitutes were the well-known dancing girls who continued in courtesan traditions, described variously as Nottees and Nautch by administrators.

Stressing the extreme nature of Muslim temporary marriages and the inevitable return of these women to prostitution, Magistrate Mullick emphasized the fluidity of Muslim social institutions and the virtual absence of propriety when compared to Hindus. The only redeeming feature of Muslim polygamy, when compared to Hindu Kulinism, was that wives lived under the supervision of their husband:

Polygamy and Coolinism also augment the number of Hindoo prostitutes. The Mohamedans, indeed, indulge in the plurality of wives, but their customs in this respect are very different from those of the Hindoos. A Mohamedan, whatever may be the number of his wives, keeps all within his harem but the wives of a Hindoo lie scattered over different places and districts. Sometimes for the sake of Koolinism, parents or other guardians of young girls marry or rather sacrifice them to men old enough to be their grandpapas. It is not therefore surprising that the wives of such Koolins and polygamists should become prostitutes.

Also read: Manuals for European women, satires, paintings: How British Raj depicted Indian workers

Here, Muslim polygamy is the foundation of the harem, governed at all points by the Muslim man. Mullick notes there is a Shastric dictate for Kulin Brahman polygamy, a textual origin for a social practice that left women outside of the domain of the conjugal home. Like the prohibition of widow remarriage among high-castes, polygamy of the Hindus created a class of unrestrained women who existed outside of monogamous marriage. In his formulation the harem, despite all of its dangers and perversions, was a means for womens sexual regulation, whereas Hindu dictates left high-caste women exposed to the dangerous result of their own sexual desire.

Many officials, including Mullick and Lyall, cited texts like Manu and the shastras as the primary reason Hindu women transgressed social bounds. For these administrators, it was not economic circumstance but the strict religious dictates of caste and ancient Hindu law that led women who were outside of a monogamous conjugal home and without the oversight of a husband to sexual transgression. Ancient law, defined through colonial engagement with a particular canon of Sanskrit text, was thus essential to the state-sponsored sociological project. Sexual transgression was hidden by the faade of caste, and required exposure through authoritative practices of description from ad- ministrative experts who would illuminate the true facts of sexual transgression. Ultimately, according to this colonial sociological survey, women who resided outside the conjugal home were almost inevitably sexual deviantsno matter the context that would have led them to desperate conditions or absolute social exclusion and condemnation.

This excerpt from Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought by Durba Mitra has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.

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Taking its cue from Mnakwethu always shaking things up in 2020, the polygamy-themed reality show sequel Mnakwethu Happily Ever After? left Twitter shook on Wednesday night when it served drama and what fans are calling scripted TV.

Husbands interested in polygamy from the first season of Mnakwethu, Qondanisa, Ngiga, Dulas and Bheki Cele have returned to the screens through Mnakwethu Happily Ever After? . And ... not only did they shake things up on the TL, they also left Twitter doubtful about the reality aspect of the show.

Mnakwethu Happily Ever After? aims to show viewers how Qondanisa, Ngiga, Dulas and Bheki Cele continued with their lives after they asked their wives for permission to take second wives.

The first instalment of the reality show was hosted by popular polygamist Musa Mseleku, and it launched in January 2020. It managed to top the Twitter trends list while causing fierce debate about its content, every time it aired.

On several occasions there have been widespread calls for it to be pulled off screens, as viewers witnessed the manner in which men approached their wives for permission to take on a second wife. The show was accused of humiliating women.

The above may explain why tweeps were not eager to buy into the happily ever after narrative that Wednesday night's episode was pushing.

More than a dozen viewers took to Twitter to say that several parts of the show looked like they were scripted. However, they were not mad at the saucy drama the show served!

Here are some of their reactions:

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IN MEMES | Tweeps think 'Mnakwethu Happily Ever?' is totes scripted - TimesLIVE

Polygamy is rare throughout most of the world. In the U.S., having spouselike relationships with more than one person under the same roof was criminalized in 1882. Today, people in the U.S. are rarely prosecuted for living with multiple romantic partners, but every state has laws against getting married while already being married to someone else.

In February, Utah passed a bill to reduce the penalties for adults who voluntarily live in polygamous relationships, making the practice an infraction, a low-level offense that is not punishable with jail time.

In other parts of the world, including swaths of the Middle East and Asia, polygamy is legal but not practiced widely. And in some countries particularly in a segment of West and Central Africa known as the polygamy belt the practice is frequently legal and widespread.

A Pew Research Center report about living arrangements in 130 countries and territories published in 2019 analyzed the number of people residing in polygamous households, as well as other types of households. Here are some key findings from that report, and from a separate study of customs and laws around the world.

Data on the prevalence of polygamous households was part of a Pew Research Center report on household composition by religion around the world. Not all people who practice polygamy live in polygamous households. Sometimes two or more wives of the same man each have their own homes. See the methodology for details on household type categories. Details on polygamy laws around the world can be found through the OECD Development Centre and the United Nations Human Rights office.

Only about 2% of the global population lives in polygamous households, and in the vast majority of countries, that share is under 0.5%. Polygamy is banned throughout much of the world, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which has said that polygamy violates the dignity of women, called for it to be definitely abolished wherever it continues to exist. But there often are limits to government administration of marriages. In many countries, marriages are governed by religious or customary law, which means that oversight is in the hands of clerics or community leaders.

Polygamy is most often found in sub-Saharan Africa, where 11% of the population lives in arrangements that include more than one spouse. Polygamy is widespread in a cluster of countries in West and Central Africa, including Burkina Faso, (36%), Mali (34%) and Nigeria (28%). In these countries, polygamy is legal, at least to some extent. Muslims in Africa are more likely than Christians to live in this type of arrangement (25% vs. 3%), but in some countries, the practice also is widespread among adherents of folk religions and people who do not identify with a religion. For example, in Burkina Faso, 45% of people who practice folk religions, 40% of Muslims and 24% of Christians live in polygamous households. Chad is the only country in this analysis where Christians (21%) are more likely than Muslims (10%) to live in this type of arrangement.

Many of the countries that permit polygamy have Muslim majorities, and the practice is rare in many of them. Fewer than 1% of Muslim men live with more than one spouse in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Egypt all countries where the practice is legal at least for Muslims. Polygamy is also legal in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other neighboring countries, but these were not included in the study due to data limitations. Muslim supporters of polygamy often cite Quran verse 4:3, which instructs men to take as many wives as they can take care of, up to four, and they also point out that the Prophet Muhammad had multiple wives. Historians have noted that Islamic guidance on polygamy was issued amid wars in Arabia in the seventh century, when there were many widows and orphans requiring financial support, and that polygamy created a system for them to be cared for. To this day, polygamy is most common in places where people, and particularly men, tend to die young.

The Jewish Torah and Christian Old Testament refer to several instances of accepted plural marriages, including by Abraham, Jacob and David. However, the practice was disavowed by these groups in the Middle Ages, and polygamy generally has not been condoned by Jews or Christians in recent centuries. Still, polygamy sometimes was practiced by certain Christian sects, including by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes called Mormons) in the U.S. until the late 1800s. Some Mormon splinter groups still practice polygamy.

Religion often plays a role in how polygamy is governed and practiced within a single country. In Nigeria, for example, polygamous marriage is not allowed at the federal level, but the prohibition only applies to civil marriages. Twelve northern, Muslim-majority states do recognize these unions as Islamic or customary marriages. In India, Muslim men are allowed to marry multiple women, while men of other groups are not. However, in countries where polygamy is common, it often is practiced by people of all faiths. Thats the case in Gambia, Niger, Mali, Chad and Burkina Faso, where at least one-in-ten people in every religious group measured live in households that include husbands with more than one spouse.

Polygamy usually takes the form of polygyny when a man marries multiple women. Polyandry, which refers to wives having more than one husband, is even rarer than polygamy and mostly documented among small and relatively isolated communities around the world. While polygamy laws are usually skewed in favor of allowing men but not women to take multiple spouses, many countries laws also speak to the rights of women. In Burkina Faso, for example, where polygamy is common, spouses must agree that a marriage will be polygamous at its outset for the husband to be allowed to take another wife in the future. In Djibouti, a judge records the existing wives opinions on any new marriages and investigates the husbands socioeconomic situation before approving a marriage contract with an additional wife.

One-in-five U.S. adults believe that polygamy is morally acceptable, a recent Gallup poll found. This share has almost tripled (from 7%) since the question was first asked in 2003, but is still among the least accepted behaviors Gallup asks about. Self-described liberals are much more likely than conservatives to see polygamy as morally acceptable (34% vs. 9%). A Pew Research Center survey published in 2013 found that Muslims around the world are divided about polygamy: While majorities in several sub-Saharan African countries and pluralities in parts of the Middle East describe polygamy as morally acceptable, Muslims living in Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe tend to say that polygamy is immoral.

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Polygamy is rare around the world and mostly confined to a few regions - Pew Research Center

SISTER Wives star Kody Brown admitted he and his polygamous family of four wives and 18 kids are still not popular in Flagstaff, Arizona, as neighbors "wish they weren't here," just two years after relocating from Las Vegas.

Kody, 52, exclusively told The Sun: Were not popular around here, as he left the $890,000 five-bed house he shares with his only legal wife, Robyn, and their five children outside of Flagstaff.

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A neighbor of the couple also told The Sun that the controversial family, who moved to the outskirts of the town in 2018, keep themselves to themselves.

The neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous, said: I have not spoken to Kody for more than two years, since before they moved into the house.

They keep themselves to themselves.

We wish they werent here because they make Flagstaff look as though everyone has all these wives.

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The Sun can also confirm the family has never integrated into the large Mormon community in their hometown.

Kody and his wives Meri, 49, Janelle, 50, Christine, 48, and Robyn, 42, are members of the Apostolic United Brethren, a sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormon religion.

The sect allows followers to practice polygamy.

There is a large Mormon presence in Flagstaff, which was designated a second stake by the churchs Salt Lake City leadership in 2017.

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The church has more than 5,000 followers in the area in 14 separate congregations.

Leslie Seaman, the churchs stake president of the Flagstaff Arizona East Stake, told The Sun that he never met Kody or his family.

And he insisted the church there does not support polygamy.

Leslie, a dentist in Flagstaff, said: I dont know this gentleman, I do not know them and I have never met them.

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We support the government and realize that polygamy is contrary to the laws of the land.

Kody and family were living in Utah, whose population is 51 percent Mormon, back in 2010 when the show first aired.

But they were afraid of being arrested under the states strict anti-polygamy laws and fled to Las Vegas, where they hoped to be more free to live their unconventional lifestyle.

But two years ago, the TLC stars left Sin City for Flagstaff.

Robyn said one of the reasons for leaving was the welfare of their kids.

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She said during an interview at the time: Vegas changed a lot over the last few years. So we started worrying a lot more about what the kids are getting exposed to.

Kody added: The timing was just right for getting our kids out of Las Vegas and into a safe place.

But the move put financial pressure on the family as well, Christine admitted.

On the most recent episode of Sister Wives that aired earlier this year, she admitted in her confessional: Financially, were drowning.

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As The Sun reported, Kodydropped $1.8 million on homesand land, including $820,000 on vacant property called Coyote Pass to be split into four parcels to eventually build on.

The family had trouble selling their four Sin City homes, which were located in a cul-de-sac.

The houses eventually sold for thousands under their asking price.

Kody and Robyn evenapplied for a home equity line of credit in the amount of $150,000on March 20, 2020 for their $890,000 home, which was approved,The Sun previously reported.

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Also on the show, a neighbor called the cops on Meri when she moved into a home in Flagstaff, unhappy at having a plural family nearby.

She ended up moving into a $1 million, four-bedroom home, which she rents for $4,500 a month.

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Sister Wives Kody Brown admits polygamous family is unpopular as AZ neighbors slam clan wishing they weren - The Sun

Five short films from five Arab countries are marrying into one - and its the finest form of polygamy we have seen to date. Called Chronicles of Her, this Pan-Arab feature-length film combines shorts from Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco, each of which discuss various womens issues across the Arab world, among them domestic violence and equal access to education.

Chronicles of Her (or Aflamhon in Arabic) has been produced by The Royal Film Commission of Jordan (RFC) as a part of their capacity building programme Anthology Film: Women in the Maghreb-Mashreq Region. But the commission isnt the sole parent of the project, with UNESCO and the European Union also collaborating on a unique project that called for filmmakers to step forward and tell the story of women in the Middle East through film.

December 10th has been marked for an online premiere of the film, where it will be screened has yet to be announced. Stay updated through @filmjordan.

Read more:

Five Short Films from Five Arab Nations: 'Chronicles of Her' Spotlights the Plight of Arab Women - CairoScene

When my theory teacher Gargi Sen (Founder of Magic Lantern Production House) first told me that Islam had arrived in India but it could not permeate (or break through) the age old patriarchal mindset of a strong hierarchal society, it made sense to me but I had no allusions to align with it. Today I have it in abundance. From questions to Qazi, HalaaltoHalla and fromHaram to Namak Haram, the rhetoric of labels and judgments run across the country with expletives - expletives doubly more explosive than what humanity had when far less civilized.

When the moral values rot the damage is collateral. We can never have a trendy capitalist society ravished in buck frenzy biosphere where everybody wants to be rich and famous (especially overnight) - an earnest social structure that moves finely on the axis of balance and sanity. Tolerance has its own compromised manifestations when not only short term T-20s usurp the longer manifestations of the game but also the general climate of the cosmos exudes lesser levels of patience. The news parlors must equally resonate round the clock. Boring, gloomy news must break every passing moment for the TRPs to shoot by hook or by crook. Quality must make way for sensation. Sense must pave way for non-sense.

Hence soon all debates on television channels would convert into wrestling programs with duelers coming from all walks of life maulvis, pundits, advocates, politicians, actors and real life drama quacks. Islam like pretty much every religion can never afford to be dogmatic and didactic. Since religions aspire to drench hearts with faith and to immerse faith completely into it: they can never be thrust(ed) on another person.If somebody is made to chant your favorite god forcibly or thrown out of the folds of a specific religion unilaterally; it further blurs the difference between theology and tyranny. The seat of piety is only the heart - as beautifully stated by the Prophet of Islam; and the heart is that which involuntarily beats.

From Adam to Aadmi, this humanshould never go insane; because if religion makes you xenophobic and terroristic, you better be irreligious.

My journey to the real Islam (which was peaceful and courteous) was possible because I stuck to the example of the Prophet of Islam, who even forgave those people who brutally persecuted members of his own family whereas he granted them amnesty on the day when emerged victorious and shone in the valley of Makkah. He smiled to people who scorned him on a daily basis. And, he was the softest and the most patient towards women and it iscategorically summarized in one of his famous sayings where he said:The best of you are the ones who are best in behavior with their wives (Tirmizi)

In the same breath of empathy I can see that women are always at the receiving end, at least in the sub-continent. The wishful desire to conquer her (and to domesticate) finds justifications through spurious, concocted and garbled legislations from across philosophies and religions.

When I hear about triple talaq, polygamy and halala, I wonder how effortlessly men masquerade as saviors of religion and distort the face of a beautiful religion for their own vested interests. Common man is happy to be ignorant and exploiters of knowledge happy to best capitalize on that absence of ilm/gyaan. Sometimes that clout wields ignominious super human powers to even ostracize a fellow human being for not being easily enslaved.

Coming back to fatwas and fantasies and the reality of Halala; the fact is that the prevalent practice is nothing but a heresy in itself. According to the correct opinion (and what exists in the whole of the Muslim world sans the subcontinent) the real case is that:If a man divorces his wife and the wife (who is now a stranger to him in relationship) leaves him and goes back to stay with her parents; this man cannot marry her again. Later if that woman herself wishes to marry someone else of her choice, she can marry (with a intention like the intention of any other normal Islamic marriage that this marriage is forever) and both these wife/ husband should never intend to do this as a temporary marriage (because in Islam there is no temporary marriage). After this second marriage of the woman if (by rare chance), this second marriage of this woman (naturally) breaks or doesnt work either or she takes Khula (separation) - then in that case, she is free to return to her first husband and remarry him if she likes. In this entire chanced reunion, the first husband must not have any role to play even remotely. If any of these actions was pre mediated then it will make the whole exercise a farce and none of these latter two marriages will count as valid. This is the correct process.

Now the malpractice which few people are doing in parts of the country is something absolutely different and grotesque. When a man divorces a woman (and through an instantaneousTriple Talaq mostly which is itself not valid), he laments the next morning and tries to salvage this marriage by asking the wife to secretively marry someone he knows (and trusts!!) and whom he has already persuaded for a marriage-cum-divorce promise. Thus the hapless woman is forced to change husbands to placate her ever anguished primary (and primitive!) man. Her man thus reclaims her (he redeems his sins I suppose!!!) through an activity which he thinks is Islamic although it is an exercise abhorred, detested and cursed in Islam and it attacks the very basis Islam came for. The Prophet (S.A.W) - who seldom went angry during his lifetime -angrily cursed the mendoing such actions and involved in these acts.

What is more astonishing is that despite several Hadiths out rightly prohibiting this act, a huge number of men (and scholars alike) still try to deny the Islamic orders and stick to their whims and thus provide ample opportunities to hate mongers to slap them in their face.

Rights of women are something Islam is swarming up with, but an absolutely inverted and perverted (somewhat subverted too) image of this beautiful religion has been designed and showcased regularly by three agents of eternal doom: Half-read scholars, Half communal hatred groups and fully irresponsible media.

And this image of Islam as being something - tyrannical, terroristic, anti-feministic and a masculine stringent doctrine - has been deliberately and delicately served with a pinch (and punch) of spice on the breakfast tables of prime time news anchors. And in the war of words, clash of cultures, brawls of broiling debates shouting on top of their shrill merciless voices- the sweet low voices of soft sane intellectuals and the weak voices of women victimized-have been either smothered and silenced or purely petrified.

( Views are personal)

*The author teaches journalism at Delhi University.

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The Science Of Halala, Haraam And The Namak Haraam - Outlook India