I read The Albert Lea Tribune column: “Will stimulus checks encourage polygamy?” by Al Batt, Tales from Exit 22.

I realize he was making a glib comment, but I really wish that a narrow channel of plural marriage would exist for adults. Hear me out. I don’t practice plural marriage, and I’m not connected with the fundamentalists way out in far west Texas. However, I had a great-grandfather who practiced plural marriage in the Midwest in the 1890s. His wives were adults, (repeat: adults) and they raised children who turned-out all right. This is in stark contrast to today’s society, which is marred by people claiming to be “monogamous” but carrying out serial marriages and divorces. There are many children born to parents out-of-wedlock and even abandoned children who grow-up on the streets.

For some odd reason, society admires people like Donald Trump, Mickey Rooney, and Rudy Guiliani, who have had at least three marriages (or more). Granted, some marriages won’t work and a dissolution is necessary. But a trend of several failed marriages indicates that the person in question is abusing the sanctity of holy matrimony as merely a license to bed hop. A lot of good women have been cast aside because the husband strays, finds a younger lover to be a trophy wife and does that serial-marriage-and-divorce routine to supposedly stay “legal.” It may be legal, but it isn’t morally right!

Instead of coping with a trail of discarded wives, confused kids and broken homes, I’d like to see the American people rethink the notion of legalized adult plural marriage. Repeat: for consenting adults. If all those in the relationship were consenting adults and no abuse, incest or coercion takes place, and if all the children are happy and healthy, I say: Let those people live quietly in peace. It was good enough in Old Testament days of the Holy Bible. And that scriptural precedent should be the legal foundation or precedent for revisions in America law today.

James A. Marples

Longview, Texas