Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Because state laws exist, polygamy is not actively prosecuted at the federal level. [3] Many US courts (e.g. Turner v. S., 212 Miss. 590, 55 So.2d 228) treat bigamy as a strict liability crime: in some jurisdictions, a person can be convicted of a felony even if he reasonably believed he had only one legal spouse. For example, if a person has ...
The legal status of polygamy varies widely around the world. Polygamy is legal in 58 out of nearly 200 sovereign states, the vast majority of them being Muslim-majority countries. Some countries that permit polygamy have restrictions, such as requiring the first wife to give her consent.
Polyandry (/ ˈ p ɒ l i ˌ æ n d r i, ˌ p ɒ l i ˈ æ n-/; from Ancient Greek πολύ (polú) 'many' and ἀνήρ (anḗr) 'man') is a form of polygamy in which a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time. Polyandry is contrasted with polygyny, involving one male and two or more females.
Polygamy is a crime and punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or both, according to the law of the individual state and the circumstances of the offense. [18] Polygamy was outlawed in federal territories by the Edmunds Act, and there are laws against the practice in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, [19] and Puerto Rico. [20]
According to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, of 1,231 societies noted between from 1960 to 1980, 588 had frequent polygyny, 453 had occasional polygyny, 186 were monogamous, and 4 had polyandry [5] – although more recent research found some form of polyandry in 53 communities, which is more common than previously thought. [6]
A criticism against polygyny is that in almost all cultures and religious communities that practice it, polygyny is the only form of polygamy that is allowed; and, as such, this violates modern principles of equality between men and women, especially as in many such places females having multiple partners is violently punished through honor ...
Muslims in the rest of the country are subject to the terms of The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937, interpreted by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board [8]. However, in a judgment in February 2015, the Supreme court of India stated that "Polygamy was not an integral or fundamental part of the Muslim religion, and ...
The practice primarily focuses on polygyny (one man having more than one wife) and not polyandry (one woman having more than one husband), as polyandry is implied to be unlawful by the Hebrew Bible's laws of adultery (e.g., Deuteronomy 22:22) and in the New Testament (e.g., Romans 7:3).