In Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints v. United States (1890), the Supreme Court declared: “It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and the civilization which Christianity has produced in the Western world." In an earlier decision that year, the court declared in Davis v. Beason that “Bigamy and polygamy are crimes by the laws of all civilized and Christian countries. . . . To call their advocacy a tenet of religion is to offend the common sense of mankind.” Once the Bible is rejected as a standard for moral values, then everything is up for grabs. It’s getting more difficult to argue against polygamy after the way consensual homosexuality is being legalized. In fact, what we’re hearing about the Texas polygamy cult is about the forced sex that’s going on with underage girls. If the state is against polygamy, then why haven’t “wives” been arrested for violating the law?
Given the worldview shift that has taken place in America, none of this is of any consequence. Evolutionary and atheistic assumptions are standard worldview thinking in every public school classroom in America. So then, why is it wrong with having forced sex with young girls? It’s evolution in action. Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer argue in A Natural History of Rape, a book published by MIT Press in 2000, that evolutionary principles explain rape as a “genetically developed strategy sustained over generations of human life because it is a kind of sexual selection—a successful reproductive strategy.” I need to have explained to me, using evolutionary assumptions, why having sex with underage girls is morally reprehensible. It happens in nature every day with other “animals.”
No evolutionist has ever offered a scientific reason why what we call “rape” is morally wrong. Richard Dawkins, the modern-day patron saint of atheistic evolution, says of natural selection that it “is a deeply nasty process,” that “human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection. . . . From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb.” Calling “human super niceness . . . just plain dumb” has no validity within the context of the evolutionary worldview. In his book _River Out of Eden_¸ Dawkins argues, “DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”[1] There is no dumbness or smartness where DNA is involved. If as Dawkins believes that “we animals exist for” genetic “preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines,” then how can it be wrong for men to insure that their genes will survive when they choose young girls for the repository for their genetic material? Dawkins offers a more full explanation here:
The selfish-gene idea is the idea that the animal is a survival machine for its genes. The animal is a robot that has a brain, eyes, hands, and so on, but it also carries around its own blueprint, its own instructions. This is important, because if the animal gets eaten, if it dies, then the blueprint dies as well. The only genes that get through the generations are the ones that have managed to make their robots avoid getting eaten and succeed in living long enough to reproduce.
The secularists should be proud of what these polygamists are doing. They are confirming the evolutionary thesis of Dawkins and his selfish gene hypothesis.
Footnote
[1] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133.