Courtney W Bailey & Adam James Zahren. Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture. Volume 1, Issue 2, June 2016.
On the popular TV reality programme Sister Wives (2010), the children of the polygamous Brown family gleefully call each other ‘brothers from another mother’ and ‘sisters from another mister’. Meanwhile, third wife Christine bemoans the fact that she must identify herself as the children’s ‘aunt’ on school forms, even though the children consider her one of their mothers. The current flagship of a blossoming cottage industry, TLC’s Sister Wives (not to mention its HBO predecessor Big Love [2006]) marks a notable shift in the tone of US media culture towards Mormon polygamy. For example, Jon Krakauer’s popular book Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) focalizes on the largest known ‘splinter’ group, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Along with a slew of other tell-alls by ex-FLDS women turned anti-polygamist activists, Krakauer characterizes the FLDS as a criminal, corrupt and fanatical cult. In contrast, Sister Wives frames the Browns as respectable sexual minorities, fighting for the right to practice the central tenet of their religion.
Inspired by scholarship on post-feminism and post-racism, we contend that these contradictory discourses signal the rise of a ‘post-homophobic’ sensibility in dominant US culture. The last decade or so has seen the US Supreme Court’s rejection of the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the rise of gay visibility in entertainment media and the sweeping success of the marriage equality movement. As a result, gay men and lesbians now presumably enjoy equal access to institutions crucial to public life: the military, the media and marriage. Post-homophobia takes such legal and cultural gains for mostly white, middle-class, monogamous gay men and lesbians as proof that equality for the entire LGBTQ community is already here or inevitably is on its way. It thereby reduces sexual minority politics to its most liberal and mainstream version: equal opportunity and cultural acceptance.
In contrast, Catherine Squires’s work on the post-racial mystique explores the right-wing’s reaction to the events of 9/11. For those on the political right, the United States’s move towards multiculturalism (which includes sexual nonconformity) in the 1980s and 1990s morally weakened the nation, making it vulnerable to attacks from the evil enemy (Squires 2014: 65). National identity thus ‘needs to return to Judeo-Christian principles to squelch the alleged excesses of multiculturalism’ (Squires 2014: 8). This logic resurfaces within the context of post-homophobia, evident in the Christian Right’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Focus on the Family, for instance, hosts an entire website to help their followers ‘respond to and reverse’ the decision. The site contends that the US Supreme Court’s ruling will subject right-wing Christian businesses, pastors and churches to legal prosecution, fines and harassment. Even worse, ‘freedom of speech will become endangered as the government passes regulatory and even criminal laws punishing [right-wing] Christian views of marriage’ (Anon. 2015b). Such claims position right-wing Christians as minoritized victims of the very progress celebrated by post-homophobia.
Steeped in a false dichotomy between ‘religion’ (coded as right-wing Christian) and ‘sexuality’ (coded as LGBTQ), the Mormon polygamy cottage industry offers a ‘way out’ of the apparent impasse between celebrating sexual/familial pluralism and preserving religious freedom. Mormon polygamists are particularly well-positioned in this regard because their sexual and religious freedoms are interdependent, given that plural marriage is one of their faith’s most important and cherished tenets. Thus religious rights are necessarily respected and protected in the very act of respecting and protecting sexual rights. Following this post-homophobic narrative to its logical end, the Mormon polygamy cottage industry ironically centres Christian heterosexual (but now also polygamous) marriage as the next goal of sexual and religious minority politics.
On one level, portrayals of Mormon polygamy in US culture represent a challenge to mononormativity. A term first coined by Pieper and Bauer, ‘mononormativity’ (2005) refers to the tacit privileging of ‘coupledom, [romantic] love and sexual exclusivity’ in western cultures (Barker and Langdridge 2012: 4). Like the concept of heteronormativity from which it springs, mononormativity identifies the narrow parameters drawn around the idealized nuclear family by dominant US culture. Yet the two concepts are ultimately irreducible to each other. As implied by the prefix ‘mono-‘, the latter foregrounds the number of people within an intimate relationship and backgrounds the gender/sex/sexuality binaries implied by the prefix ‘hetero’. For this reason, we adopt the phrase ‘mono/heteronormativity’ to signify both their connection to and difference from one another.
Not unlike post-feminism’s relationship to patriarchy and post-racism’s relationship to white supremacy, post-homophobia as a concept is neither the same as mono/heteronormativity nor meant to replace it entirely; rather, the term captures a particular historical context and cultural mood that first reduce mono/heteronormativity (understood as systemic privilege and oppression) to homophobia (understood as prejudice or bigotry). This sensibility then asserts that mainstream US culture has moved beyond the latter, effectively obscuring the continued existence of the former and even entirely erasing the privilege granted to monogamy. At the same time, it reformulates mono/heteronormative assumptions in seemingly inclusive ways. Mormon polygamy, for instance, allows for a post-homophobic celebration of familial pluralism and religious freedom, all the while reinstalling the white, middle-class, Christian, heterosexual (if polygamous) nuclear family as the ideal. As we will argue, mainstream US media position certain Mormon polygamists as rightful heirs to sexual/religious minority politics and as the ‘next big thing’ for sexual/religious visibility.
Our article first provides a brief primer on Mormon polygamy for those unfamiliar with its terminology, history and theology. It is important to note that our piece does not make ontological claims about Mormon polygamy, nor does it adjudicate whether the Browns and/or the FLDS are ‘actually’ queer, ‘actually’ Christian, or ‘actually’ abusive. Rather, we address an epistemological question: how does the US American public come to know Mormon polygamy through mainstream US media portrayals of the practice? To address this question, we specifically analyse news coverage of the FLDS and its Prophet Warren Jeffs during the height of their legal woes from 2006 to 2011. For the most part, this coverage deploys a neo-Orientalist framework to determine which Mormon polygamists become legible (or not) as religious and sexual minorities deserving of equal rights.
Critiqued most famously by Edward Said (1978), Orientalism refers to a body of colonialist knowledge about the so-called ‘Orient’, a region primarily encompassing the Middle East, but also sometimes including Asia and Africa. Despite its claims to objectivity, ‘the vast corpus of [classical] Orientalism legitimized and promoted Western superiority and dominance by inventing the ideology of the West-and Islam dualism’ (Samiei 2010: 1147). This literature asserted the existence of a fictionalized and homogenized eastern (Arab/Muslim) enemy, one absolutely different from the West and hopelessly resistant to modernization (Tuastad 2003: 592). This move allowed the West to understand itself as the West in the first place and provided powerful justification for western imperialism.
Since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, a series of events has moved Islam ever closer to the centre of world politics: the political movements of the Arab Spring, the Palestine/Israel conflict, the worldwide resurgence of religiosity, the post-Communist enemy vacuum in the West, and the global networks made possible by new communications technologies. These historical shifts have thrown classical Orientalism into question, especially its belief that a strong state and weak society made despotism inevitable in Muslim territories (Samiei 2010: 1148). In the 1980s, a new generation of western scholars—referred to as ‘neo-Orientalists’—began to reverse this logic, yet retained several key assumptions from their predecessors.
In particular, neo-Orientalism still presumes that Islam’s very nature renders it incompatible with democracy and that Muslim/Arab violence arises from traits embedded in irrational local cultures rather than from political, economic or social conditions (Tuastad 2003: 594). Its adherents typically analogize contemporary geopolitical conflict to a ‘clash of civilizations’ where the white Christian West plays the protagonist to the non-white Arab/Muslim antagonist. Popularized by Samuel Huntington (1996), this framework characterizes both sides as racially and religiously monolithic, locked into a Manichean struggle for world dominance. The West/Islam dualism so vital to classical Orientalism has thus been ‘reconstituted, redeployed and redistributed’, most saliently through the US War on Terrorism (Samiei 2010: 1148).
This sort of neo-Orientalist framework relies on racialized and sexualized codes to Christianize the Brown family and Muslimize the FLDS. The Browns self-identify as Christian, a claim bolstered by Sister Wives’ portrayal of their family’s church service every Sunday and their special rituals for holidays like Christmas and Easter. On the other hand, anti-polygamist discourse deploys phrases like ‘North America’s Taliban’ and ‘The Taliban among us’, to code the FLDS as Muslim under the binary terms of the War on Terrorism (Bramham 2008; Solomon 2008). The sect’s ‘moral murkiness’, reflected in its racial, religious and sexual ambiguity, however, destabilizes that same neo-Orientalist binary (Freydkin 2010: 7B). To contain this threat, mainstream US media juxtapose the Browns against the FLDS, starting with the Brown adults’ vigorous denial of any connection to the ‘evil’ Warren Jeffs. This move makes the Browns legible as rightful post-homophobic citizens, especially in contrast to the darkened, queered and abjected FLDS. In perhaps unexpected ways, then, Mormon polygamy serves as a post-homophobic site for playing out and containing US American cultural anxieties over the post-9/11 enemy within.
Mormon Polygamy, a Brief Primer: Terminology, Theology, and History
Preached and practiced since the nineteenth century, Mormonism stands as one of the only religions born in the United States (Barringer Gordon 2002). Sharing theological roots with Protestant Christianity, it studies both the Bible and The Book of Mormon, originally published by its founder Joseph Smith in 1830 (Bringhurst et al. 2013). Early in its history, Mormon leaders valued plural marriage, also known as ‘the principle’, as fundamental to their divine rewards in the celestial kingdom (the afterlife). Contemporary Mormon polygamists share this belief, often claiming the alternative moniker ‘Mormon fundamentalist’ to highlight their adherence to their faith’s original tenets (Quinn 1998). The term ‘polygamy’ refers to a marriage with multiple spouses; Mormon polygamists specifically practice polygyny or marriage between one man and multiple women. Although not mutually exclusive, polygamy should not be conflated with polyamory (a set of principles and practices for multiple partners regardless of marital status) or with bigamy (the illegal obtainment of two or more marriage licenses) (Barker and Langdridge 2012).
Despite Mormon polygamists’ self-identification as Christian fundamentalists, they face intense pushback from the official Mormon Church (LDS) and from other Christian fundamentalists like right-wing evangelicals. The LDS prefers to call them ‘polygamist sects’ in an attempt to distance Mormonism from plural marriage, and it excommunicates any members discovered practicing polygamy (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints 2015). Some forms of Christianity refuse to recognize even the monogamous form of Mormonism as a legitimate religion, seeing it as a cult that taints and degrades authentic Christianity (Jacobson and Burton 2011). Such tensions potentially complicate our earlier argument that Mormon fundamentalism ‘stands in’ for Christian fundamentalism in post-homophobic discourse. However, we are interested in the ways mainstream US media nonetheless do equate the two via the racialized, gendered and nationalist codes of neo-Orientalism.
These portrayals build on the mostly forgotten, yet highly contentious, history of Mormon polygamy in the nineteenth-century United States (Talbot 2013). Anti-polygamists regularly framed Mormons as an obstacle to the consolidation of the West, just as slavery threatened the consolidation of the south. The 1856 Republican Party platform, for example, included the following plank: ‘It is the duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery’ (Ertman 2010: 307). Though perhaps strange to modern ears, this analogy developed into a commonplace rhetorical device, circulating widely in nineteenth-century political, medical, legal and popular texts (Talbot 2013). This commonplace characterized Mormon polygamy as driven by despotic and theocratic separatism, sexual deviance and anti-Christian/anti-American attitudes. Like chattel slavery in the south, plural marriage came to represent a savage counter-force in the west, a serious hazard to the burgeoning nation state’s commitment to civilized liberal democracy.
In an ironic twist, nineteenth-century anti-polygamy rhetoric anchored its claims in the very same naturalized racial differences used to justify slavery. In her study of political cartoons from the period, Martha Ertman concludes that the debate was less invested in polygamy per se and more invested in the ‘political and race treason’ attached to it (2010: 293). The Supreme Court itself asserted that theocratic despotism and polygamy might be ‘natural’ to the ‘African and Asiatic races’, but both remain ‘odious’ to the Northern and western European races that inherently prefer monogamy and the liberal/social contract (Ertman 2010: 289). Such legal doctrines demonstrated ‘the nineteenth-century view that polygamy was problematic primarily because it was a symptom of a much greater offense: the establishment of a separatist theocracy’ (Ertman 2010: 295). By conflating racial identity and sexual practices with forms of governmentality, this argument secured white monogamy’s place as key to liberal democratic citizenship. A slight variation of this argument framed Mormons as on the fence: not yet fully Asiatic/African, but in the process of becoming Asiatic/African. Their sexual proclivities would, without proper management, create ‘a new race of effete men, ungovernable hordes of women and children and primitive characteristics like licentiousness, laziness, childishness and submissiveness to despotism’ (Burgett 2005: 86). By upending proper gender roles within the family and encouraging a primitive form of sexuality, their offspring would then undermine the moral and physical potency of the United States’s nineteenth-century nation-building endeavours.
Furthermore, Ertman (2010) contends that the debate rested largely on the popularized language of Orientalism. This perspective imagined Africans and Asians as feminized, sexually deviant, non-white and religiously backward savages, the exact opposite of virile, religiously righteous and civilized white European Christians (Said 1978). Mormon polygamists embodied the allegedly impossible: even those who appeared ‘white’ by dint of skin colour/phenotype were still susceptible to slipping down the racialized evolutionary ladder. Their presence within North America disrupted the Orientalist fantasies so central to western imperialism; in particular, they hindered the westward expansion of the United States under Manifest Destiny (Ertman 2010: 309). To rectify this situation, Mormon polygamists either had to reform their wanton ways or be cast out of the Union.
Pro-polygamy arguments of the period simply reversed this logic, positioning Mormon polygamists as the moral and biological saviours of the white race (Hardy and Erickson 2001: 41). In fact, the official Mormon Church barred black people from full participation until 1978, while the FLDS still embraces an explicitly white supremacist doctrine to this day (Stacey and Meadow 2009: 169). Despite such pro-polygamy appeals, the ‘twin relics of barbarism’ trope ultimately won the day. A series of anti-polygamy laws forced Mormons further and further west until they settled in what would later become Utah. The 1879 Supreme Court case Reynolds v. United States (1879) effectively prohibited plural marriage in the United States and its territories. As part of Utah’s bid for statehood in 1890, the LDS Church itself finally disavowed polygamy and excommunicated its practitioners.
Despite the official Church’s renunciation, some Mormons continue to adhere to the principle to the current day. The FLDS town of Colorado City, for instance, has an estimated 8000 residents, making it the largest openly Mormon polygamist town in the United States (Adams 2010: 36). In 2002, Warren Jeffs became their spiritual leader, dubbed ‘the Prophet’. After Jeffs eluded law enforcement for months, police finally arrested him in 2006 on multiple charges from multiple states, including sexual assault of minors, bigamy and accomplice to rape. Taking place from 2006 to 2011, his various criminal trials sent him to prison for life several times over (CNN Library 2014). After receiving a phone call (later revealed as a hoax) from an FLDS woman in major distress, the state of Texas raided the sect’s Yearning For Zion (YFZ) ranch in 2008 (Campo-Flores and Skipp 2008: 34). The raid ended with the forced removal of hundreds of children from their families, an action later judged unconstitutional by the Texas Supreme Court (Stacey and Meadow 2009: 168). Finally, Texas legally seized the YFZ ranch and relocated its remaining members (Martinez and Stapleton 2014).
Although polygamy remains illegal in most places in the United States, state and local governments typically adopt a ‘live and let live’ approach to its practice – with notable exceptions like the case of Jeffs and the FLDS. In a rather startling reversal, the Brown family of Sister Wives successfully sued the state of Utah in 2013 over its anti-polygamy laws (Turley 2011: A27). The suit characterized such laws as unconstitutional abridgements of religious expression and violations of legal precedents set by Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and United States v. Windsor (2013), thereby drawing a clear analogy between gay rights and Mormon polygamist rights (Richardson 2011: 10). The judge’s decision effectively decriminalized polygamy within the state of Utah, once known for having the strictest anti-polygamist laws on the books.
Neo-Orientalism as a Post-Homophobic Containment Strategy
In an echo of its Orientalist nineteenth-century forerunner, neo-Orientalism underwrites twenty-first-century US media coverage of Mormon polygamy, only this time with a post-homophobic twist. Whereas nineteenth-century deployments of Orientalism darkened and queered Mormon polygamists as a whole, twenty-first-century neo-Orientalism can no longer paint all Mormon polygamists with the same racialized and sexualized brush. Doing so would contradict the logic of post-homophobia, which must welcome certain Mormon polygamists into the US American fold. To avoid this trap, mainstream media coverage recuperates the Brown family as the default, generic, non-racial (read: white, Christian and American) type of Mormon polygamists at the expense of the abjected FLDS.
This section analyses two archetypes crucial to such coverage: (1) the sexual predator and (2) the national security threat. We borrow these archetypes from the book Queer (Injustice by Mogul et al. (2011)). The book analyses the central roles sexual and gender deviance play in notions of crime, whether actual illegality or cultural stigma. Dominant US culture deploys archetypes or ‘recurring, culturally ingrained representations’, that conflate queerness with criminality and invoke emotions of anger, hatred and fear in the sexually ‘normal’ population (Mogul et al. 2011: 23). Consistently found across mainstream media coverage of Mormon polygamy, the archetypes mentioned above establish a moral distinction between normal and abnormal sexuality. As Gayle Rubin (1984: 281) famously argues, dominant US culture privileges those whose sexual practices most closely approximate the normal, healthy, holy and safe ‘charmed circle’ and marginalizes those who land too closely to the abnormal, sick, sinful and illegal ‘outer limits’. Building on Rubin’s work, Michael Warner explores the ‘expulsion, abjection and contempt for those more visibly defined by sex’ in a culture where the height of morality lies in controlling the sex of other people (1999: 67).
Whereas Sister Wives distances the Browns from sex by emphasizing the containment of sexual desire within white, Christian, heterosexual marriage, neo-Orientalist news coverage practically reduces the FLDS to nothing but sex and, hence, sexual deviance. However, this coverage does not simply or straightforwardly equate the FLDS with the East or with Islam. Rather, it frames FLDS members as in the process of becoming easternized/Muslimized and hence as occupying a racially, religiously and sexually ambiguous state. Their ambiguity transgresses a number of neo-Orientalist boundaries that should be fixed and absolute. Within the context of the War on Terrorism, they therefore represent a threat to the unity and security of the US as a nation state and must be abjected from the realm of civic belonging. The sect functions as a cautionary tale about the potential racial, religious and sexual degeneration of the normative family at the heart of western civilization, the very family exemplified by the Browns.
Archetype #1: The sexual predator in the harem
News media frequently employ the archetype of the sexually degraded predator in its coverage of Jeffs and his male followers. Whether in its typical forms of the gay white paedophile or the black rapist, the sexual predator represents ‘a perpetual threat not only to children and innocent adults, but to the normalcy, promising futures and rigidly gendered, raced and classed social order that those innocent lives represent’ (Mogul et al. 2011: 34). Although media coverage does draw parallels between this archetype and male FLDS members, the latter’s status as white, straight, Christian men (no matter how contested) complicates any attempts at a straightforward conflation. Media coverage, then, typically portrays the FLDS as a corrupted and corrupting version of racial, religious, sexual and gender norms, one that threatens to corrupt the neo-Orientalist and post-homophobic social order needed for the War on Terrorism.
The FLDS’s thorny relationship to the sexual predator archetype appears most vividly through the trope of the harem, which eroticizes ‘Eastern’ races and relegates them to sexual depravity (Ahmed 1982). Mainstream news coverage of the FLDS invokes the harem both verbally and visually; for instance, an article in The Independent (London) claims that Jeffs, upon his rise to power, ‘promptly added his [deceased] father’s several dozen wives to his harem of over 100’ (Adams 2010: 36). Photographs of the Prophet frequently situate him surrounded by his homogenous-looking wives, who all sport the same style of braided hair and interchangeable prairie dresses. The women in these photos act as ‘signifiers of male power over infinitely substitutable females’, a key visual feature of the harem (Shohat and Stam 1994: 164, emphasis added).
In contrast, pictures of Jeffs with each of his wives separately often place them in classic poses associated with heterosexual romance. Sometimes his arms envelop them in a protective (even possessive) gesture and sometimes he carries them across the threshold of their home (Martinez and Stapleton 2014). By breaking Jeffs’s marriages down into conventional-looking couples, such images underplay the harem-like quality of the group photos. Photos of the couples come closer to the charmed circle, yet the group photos emphasize the FLDS’s easternized sexual decadence. They highlight Jeffs’s considerable sexual access to multiple female bodies and his patriarchal power to keep adding women to his collection. The juxtaposition of both kinds of photographs portrays Jeffs and his followers as racially, religiously and sexually ambiguous, somewhere in between western sexual morality and eastern sexual immorality—and, even worse, headed in the ‘wrong’ direction.
In his analysis of Orientalist photographs, Alloula (1986) notes the importance of space to visual renderings of the harem. NBC news describes the FLDS’s YFZ ranch in Texas as ‘sitting down a narrow paved road and behind a hill that shields it almost entirely from view in Eldorado … only the 80-foot-high white temple can be seen on the horizon’ (MSNBC Staff 2008). Aerial photographs of the ranch often focus on the temple, which dominates the orderly landscape of small houses and rows of crops (Martinex and Stapleton 2014). The ranch’s exterior spatial arrangement centres on imposing and looming structures that allow for surveillance over the population. This panoptic arrangement exists in tension with the visual characteristics of the eastern harem (Foucault 2007). Portrayed as ‘a labyrinthine space, the harem consists entirely of a succession of secret alcoves, hidden doors, courtyards leading to more courtyards and so on’ (Alloula 1986: 72). Largely missing from the YFZ ranch exterior, a harem-like visual configuration appears most clearly in the temple’s interior, especially through ‘evidence’ presented during Jeffs’s trials. A police photograph of Jeffs’s elaborate bathtub, alongside the existence of unmade beds in the temple, purportedly exposes some of the hidden nooks and crannies where sexual deviance can flourish (Daily Mail Reporter 2011). CBS News even claims that most evidence against Jeffs ‘was discovered in a vault at the end of a secret passageway in the temple’ (Mann 2011). The harem’s visual qualities, therefore, become literal proof of the FLDS’s slide towards sexual criminality and religious sacrilege.
For US mainstream media, nothing represents this slide more strongly than the ‘sex tapes’ introduced during one of Jeffs’s numerous trials. The audio tapes allegedly capture a sexual encounter between Jeffs and three of his underage wives, which he subsequently uses to prepare his new brides for sexual intercourse with him (Daily Mail Reporter 2011). He can be heard on the tapes describing the young women as ‘honorable vessels’ more than ‘willing to obey’ his sexual commands, and he promises that God will reward them for enduring the pain of first-time sexual intercourse (Daily Mail Reporter 2011). Prosecutors then introduce visual ‘proof of the acts caught on the sex tapes: the aforementioned police photograph of a bathtub where Jeffs allegedly holds orgies with his wives, which he calls a ‘baptismal font’ (Daily Mail Reporter 2011). The fact that Jeffs calls the bathtub a ‘baptismal font’ on the audio tapes further cements his perversion of white western Christian practices and mores. This analogy interjects the sexualized body into an ‘antibody’ ceremony that usually celebrates the transcendence of bodily desires through the washing away of original sin (i.e., sexual intercourse) (Dyer 1997: 16). Furthermore, the ‘rhythmic panting’ heard from Jeffs on the sex tapes calls to mind the bodily aspects of sex often associated with the bestial eastern races. Although Jeffs and his male followers do limit their sexual practices to a (suspect) form of Christian marriage, they still cannot control their bodily urges in the Christ-like manner necessary for white western masculinity (Dyer 1997:16-17). This failure demonstrates how even purportedly white western Christians can slide down the ladder of sexual respectability and civic belonging into the realm of eastern criminality and immorality (Warner 1999).
In contrast, Sister Wives frames the Browns’ sexual practices as akin (and even superior) to serial monogamy (Bailey 2015: 44). Husband Kody spends one night with each of his wives in a row, a carefully planned schedule meant to ensure equal sexual access. In this scenario, serial monogamy in polygamous drag provides a safe outlet for white Christian masculinity’s internal struggle for mental control over sexual appetites and temptations (Dyer 1997: 17). Kody’s ability to pass the moral trials that Christianity lays out in front of white heterosexual men, in fact, hinges on his adherence to the principle. He can satisfy his bodily desires by limiting them to spiritual marriages sanctioned by God, rather than indulging in sheer animal lust like the men of the FLDS. Kody thus qualifies as a proper post-homophobic subject who reconciles sexual nonconformity with religious freedom; his dedication to the principle allows him to live an ‘alternative lifestyle’ in accordance with a form of Christian fundamentalism.
By willingly bestowing their sexuality on one man, the Brown sister wives similarly balance the passive, receptive nature of Christian femininity with post-feminist sexual agency that positions women as actively desiring subjects (Dyer 1997: 17). In her groundbreaking book The Aftermath of Feminism, Angela McRobbie (2009) contends that post-feminist discourse both takes feminism ‘into account’ and discredits it as extremist and out-of-date. On the one hand, post-feminism ‘ushers in a new regime of sexual meanings based on female consent, equality, participation and enjoyment’ (McRobbie 2009: 18). On the other, women’s sexual agency gets reduced to the simplistic notion of individual ‘choice’, which can then excuse the replication of patriarchal norms like the mono/heteronormative male gaze.
In the context of Mormon polygamy, post-homophobia preserves post-feminism’s liberatory ring, while introducing an additional layer of defense for patriarchal gender and sexual norms: women’s consent to sexual nonconformity and to religious faith. Sister Wives takes great pains to reassure its audience that Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn are consenting adults who willingly embrace the principle as a religious calling (Bailey 2015: 43). As first wife and hence the only one with a marriage license, Meri even declares her wish to divorce Kody at the end of the show’s 2014-2015 season. Her decision provides strong evidence that Mormon polygamy is actually based on women’s consent and well-being; it also distances the Browns from the patriarchal religious zealotry that plagues the FLDS.
On the flipside, mainstream media coverage portrays FLDS women as making the ‘wrong’ decisions – or as not having the ability to make decisions at all. They deserve either condemnation or pity for ‘remaining unable or unwilling to help themselves’ (McRobbie 2009: 73). News reports consistently frame Warren Jeffs as ‘a silver-tongued cult leader and fraud, who marries underage girls off to his elderly cronies’ and who autocratically directs the lives of his followers (Adams 2010: 36; Winston 2008: 7D; Shattuck 2014: AR.6). He stands as a false ‘god on earth’ who dupes FLDS members with especially dire consequences for his female followers (Dougherty 2007: A17). One representative article from The Philadelphia Inquirer asserts that, ‘in [FLDS] compounds, women allegedly have been drugged, brainwashed and repeatedly impregnated until they are physically and emotionally wasted’ (Anon. 2006: C01). This characterization frames FLDS women as helpless victims of quasi-religious indoctrination whose agency gets taken from them or even more extremely, never exists in the first place. For example, NBC News interviews a well-known anti-polygamy activist, Carolyn Jessop, who claims that women on the compounds ‘were born into this … and their mothers were born into it … [and] their grandmothers were born into it’ (MSNBC Staff 2008). Jessop’s phrasing naturalizes women’s participation in the FLDS, taking it entirely out of the postfeminist realm of choice.
Although never directly stated in a post-racist world, such depictions invoke white supremacist discourses that stress the pathological and immoral nature of the black family in the United States. Through figures like teenage pregnancy and male irresponsibility, the ‘broken’ black family supposedly fails to procreate in a responsible manner, depends too much on the state to take care of their broods of children, and disregards the central roles fatherhood and biological ties should play in anchoring the nuclear family (Collins 2004:197). Such assumptions undergird the West’s long imperialist history of constructing ‘white Western normality … on the backs of Black deviance, with an imagined Black hyper-heterosexual deviance at the heart of the enterprise’ (Collins 2004: 120).
This entanglement surfaces in media coverage of FLDS women in their role as mothers. Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general involved in the 2008 raid of the YFZ ranch, tells NBC News that ‘children [on the compound] were removed [by Jeffs] from their parents at birth. Some of these mothers may not even know who their children are’ (Morrison 2008). Even worse, Child Protective Services ultimately determines that ‘nearly two-thirds of sect families had children who were abused or neglected, mostly through inappropriate exposure to underage marriages’ (Ramshaw and Garrett 2008: 1A). Rumors of welfare fraud have long dogged the sect; according to exposes like Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), FLDS women who are spiritually, but not legally, married become wards of the state, allowing the male leadership to stash away ill-gained taxpayer dollars.
Coverage that emphasizes the criminal and predatory nature of Mormon polygamy, then, attaches racial ambiguity to women who might otherwise simply appear white by virtue of their skin colour. On the one hand, their docile and modest appearance signifies the spiritual devotion and sexual purity of the white Madonna figure within Christianity (Dyer 1997: 17-18). Their bevy of blonde children symbolically promises to preserve the allegedly beleaguered and soon-to-be outnumbered white race. On the other hand, the sheer number of their offspring, coupled with allegations of child abuse and welfare fraud, conjures the hyper-procreative, neglectful and needy motherhood often associated with women of colour.
Neo-Orientalist media coverage further darkens FLDS women by linking them to unbridled lust not confined to heterosexuality or conventional marriage. One news source alleges that ‘girls were so indoctrinated that they held each other down during “heavenly” sessions of brutal sexual abuse’ (Mail Online). The press also reports that ‘the convicted child rapist [Jeffs] can be heard [on the sex tapes] panting and breathing as he instructs his ladies on how to please him as well as each other1 (Daily Mail Reporter 2011, emphasis added). Descriptions of orgies and hints of homoerotic behaviour signal FLDS women’s fall into the sexual unorthodoxy typically assigned to erotic and dark eastern women. They participate, but not by their own postfeminist choice. Instead, they are victims of successful patriarchal brainwashing. This narrative echoes the logic used to justify US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq as necessary to ‘liberate’ Muslim/Arab women (Cloud 2004: 286). Homoeroticism among FLDS women, framed as a demeaning act performed only at the whim of heterosexual men, offers more proof of the sect’s sexual perversion and its accompanying descent into racialized barbarism.
Despite its celebration of sexual difference, therefore, post-homophobic discourse still treats white heterosexuality as the normal and natural default, which most Mormon fundamentalist women would ‘return’ to if not under the thumb of sexual predators. Whereas easternized FLDS women are never allowed to follow their own (hetero)sexual desires (or even possess them in the first place), the westernized women of the Brown family enjoy full postfeminist sexual agency. Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn do deem themselves married to each other by virtue of their marriage to the same husband. However, the Browns viscerally deny any insinuation that all five of them ever sleep together or that the sister wives ever engage in sexual relations with each other (Bailey 2015: 43-44). Despite their public support of marriage equality, same-sex and/or polyamorous desire remains verboten within the Browns’ own intimate life. Their willing participation in Mormon polygamy and their disavowal of same-sex/polyamorous behaviour distances the Brown sister wives from the excessively deviant behavior of the FLDS women. By contrasting the sexual proclivities of the Browns and FLDS women, mainstream US media imagines the combination of non-monogamous and same-sex desire as evidence of racial inferiority and pseudo-religious indoctrination that denies women their post-feminist sexual agency. Post-feminist and post-homophobic liberation, therefore, must grant women not only the right to choose polygamy, but also the right to assert their ‘authentic’ heterosexual desires in an increasingly queer world.
Archetype #2: The national security threat and domestic terrorism
Neo-Orientalist portrayals of sexual predation and innocence inform the second archetype commonly found in depictions of Mormon polygamy: the national security threat. The events of September 11 have heightened fears about the ‘integrity and security of the family, community and nation’, presumably guaranteed by steadfast and impenetrable boundaries between citizens and foreigners (Mogul et al. 2011: 36). The case of the FLDS, however, suggests that those boundaries are more porous than they should be. Their mere existence indicates that any or all white, heterosexual Christian Americans could theoretically participate in the same racial, sexual and religious degradation, turning from innocent, law-abiding citizens into guilty, law-breaking criminals. In response, neo-Orientalism attempts to naturalize and secure those borders most at risk. This process relies upon what Nadine Naber calls nation-based racism, ‘a process of othering … where foreignness is inscribed with criminality and therefore marked for abjection’ (2007: 280-81).
In a seemingly contradictory fashion, nation-based racism functions as part of the ‘post-racial’ era ushered in by the 2008 election of Barack Obama. This era touts a colour-blind ideology that purports to see through or above race. In the words of Sara Nilsen and Sarah Turner, colour blindness incorporates a ‘contemporary set of beliefs that posit that racism is a thing of the past and that race and racism do not play important roles in current social and economic realities’ (2014: 4). Under a colour-blind regime, racism can ‘take on new forms that can signify as non-racial or even antiracist’ (Melamed 2006: 10). Nationbased racism, for instance, relies on the deeply racialized, if unacknowledged, underpinnings of both foreignness and criminality. To manage the threat posed by foreigners/criminals, news coverage adopts a colour-blind ideology that rarely, if ever, directly mentions race, turning to phenotype, national identity, criminal status and religion as suitable alternatives.
Given the status of whiteness as a ‘non-race’, Mormon polygamy seems to have little to do with race or racism. In fact, at first glance on the basis of skin colour, the Browns and FLDS look white. However, this assumption overlooks the ways in which whiteness can expand and contract across historical, cultural and political context. In Richard Dyer’s (1997) famous account, whiteness resides not just in skin colour or phenotype, but in more intangible qualities like willpower and drive. Neo-Orientalism positions the Browns as white—and hence Christian and American—for both reasons. Their skin colour and phenotype match their enterprising spirit, demonstrated through their public advocacy of Mormon polygamy. After the family moves out of Utah, Kody repeatedly notes that his new home in Las Vegas is his ‘Plymouth Rock’. By invoking the lineage of white Christian European settlers of the New World, Kody stands as a kind of Messianic figure. He leads other wandering Mormon polygamists to a safe land where they can practice their religious beliefs unhindered by legal prosecution. The Browns’ religious/sexual practice of polygamy therefore emerges from the tradition of religious liberties supposedly made possible by the white Christian founders of the nation.
The FLDS, in contrast, presents a racial paradox. On one hand, Jeffs’s followers seem to qualify as white based on factors like skin colour and phenotype. They even proudly espouse white supremacy, making it onto the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate-groups (Hardy and Erickson 2015a). On the other hand, their embrace of overt patriarchy and theocratic despotism aligns them with the barbarism and savagery of the darker races. Their ambiguous racial status destabilizes the neo-Orientalist binary that posits white, western and Christian civilization as superior to its racially dark, eastern and Muslim foil. FLDS members technically live on US soil and are legal US citizens, yet neo-Orientalism frames them as dark, queer foreigners who reject the post-9/11 surveillance state and perpetrate terrorist violence against their own women and children.
The Browns’ willingness to prove that they have nothing to hide, in contrast, makes them ideal subjects of the national security surveillance state. They purposefully step out of the polygamist closet with their reality series, which facilitates ‘genuine’ disclosure of their everyday lives and, perhaps more importantly, validates the truth of their sexual/religious oppression (Bailey 2015: 39). They surmount cultural stigma – not through systematic change—but through their sincerity, openness and authenticity. Allegedly ‘harder to infiltrate than the Taliban’, the FLDS refuses to reveal itself, violating the national security demand for transparency and casting suspicion upon the entire faith (Philp 2006: 32). For example, the FLDS does not keep official governmental documents like birth or death certificates, making it difficult to identify particular FLDS members who often have similar last names (Associated Press 2008). FLDS’ appeals to sexual and religious liberty fall on deaf ears, heard only as deceptive excuses for installing a sham, anti-Christian and anti-American faith inside US borders.
Moreover, their uncooperative attitude towards the US legal system and security state analogizes them to Muslim society. Patricia Crone, known as ‘one of the most persuasive and rigorous neo-Orientalists’, argues that Muslim culture ‘withholds its support from political authority’ (1980). This refusal destabilizes the security of the state and thereby hinders ‘development of a true civil society’ (Crone 1980). News media coverage of the FLDS echoes these assumptions. For instance, the sect migrates among their various compounds in the United States, Canada and Mexico in an effort to avoid legal prosecution. According to the logic of national security, the FLDS’s nomadic existence does not acknowledge legal international borders and hence confuses state efforts to distinguish citizen from foreigner. Their slipperiness undermines the state’s capacity to win the War on Terrorism, which necessitates the capacity to identify and eliminate the enemy within. Furthermore, it requires citizens to distrust each other and to keep a vigilant eye on both friends and strangers, conditions that can lead to the undoing of US America’s ‘true civil society’ (Crone 1980).
In her study of post-9/11 televisual representations, Eve Alsultany (2014: 143) argues that US American media have created an Arab/Muslim phenotype to paper over the racial ambiguity historically assigned to Arabs. Revivified in the context of the War on Terrorism, this phenotype firmly locates Arabs and Muslims outside the ‘purview of Americanness’ (Alsultany 2014: 142). The mainstream media take the FLDS through a similar neo-Orientalist process in an attempt to resolve the sect’s own racial and religious ambiguity. During one NBC News spot that focuses on the YFZ ranch, anchor Keith Morrison (2008) repeatedly insists that ‘people in this country do not condone sex between an adult and an underage girl’ and ‘we’re talking about 50-year-old men having sex with 14- and 15-year-old girls … Americans won’t accept it’. In this scenario, the FLDS is based on a fundamentally anti-American behaviour, which lies at the heart of their religious practice. Unlike the Browns’ mature, knowing and consensual spiritual marriages, the FLDS male leadership uses religious devotion as a criminal con.
Mainstream news media highlight the criminal nature of the FLDS by focusing on their peculiar, quasi-foreign look, seen in the close attention payed to the physical appearance of FLDS women addressed in the previous section. The notion of a specifically Mormon phenotype has historical roots in the nineteenth-century work of Dr. Robert Barthelow. Utilizing the scientific method, Barthelow identified in 1867 ‘what he term[ed] the new Mormon “racial type” in gendered terms of physical and moral weakness’ (Hardy and Erickson 2001: 48-19). Barthelow’s conclusions were meant to help ‘distinguish [Mormons] at a glance’, an eerie echo of the intensified racial/ethnic/religious profiling supposedly necessitated by the events of 9/11 (Hardy and Erickson 2001: 48-49). Such profiling hardly ever hones in on whiteness per se because whiteness is not seen as a race in the first place; similarly, it hardly ever focuses on Christianity, which is already conflated with both whiteness and American national identity.
The possibility of a Mormon race, in contrast, provides additional ammunition for the security state’s purported need to profile ‘suspicious’ looking people. For example, one CNN headline claims that ‘Polygamist’s body language tripped off trooper’. The trooper in question, who helped arrest Jeffs, states in the article that he ‘noticed Warren was extremely nervous. He was sitting in that right-side back seat and wouldn’t make eye contact … But his carotid artery was pumping’ (Anon. 2007). Although non-racialized at first glance, this description recalls the close, intense scrutiny of ‘suspicious’ bodies by state authorities. It racializes (not to mention feminizes) Jeffs by associating him with physical and moral cowardliness, guile and emotional excess—all traits historically linked to both Mormon and eastern races.
Despite its colour-blind, post-racial ring, the notion of a suspicious look naturalizes racial, religious and sexual differences, turning them into bodily characteristics possessed by certain categories of people. It presupposes that the distinction between American and foreigner, in particular, can be read off physical cues that cannot be suppressed and that mark certain bodies as religiously suspect, racially inferior and sexually criminal. Tapestry Against Polygamy, an activist group formed by ex-FLDS women, even calls its members ‘refugees’, implying they have escaped from patriarchal, despotic, and abusive foreign soil and now seek asylum in the post-feminist/racist/homophobic, liberal democratic and officially secular United States.
Utah’s attorney general Mark Shurtleff goes so far as to call the ‘whole [FLDS] enterprise a form of domestic violence’ (Anon. 2006). Read in a doubled way, the term ‘domestic’ signifies violence both within gendered relations and the boundaries of the nation state. Shurtleff’s metaphor consequently charges the FLDS with exercising both patriarchal and terrorist violence – in fact, the two become one. A report of domestic violence spurred Texas’s heavily armoured and militarized YFZ raid in 2008, which ended with the controversial decision to take hundreds of children away from their parents. News media images from this raid include tanks on the apparently peaceful compound grounds and armoured police literally taking children out of their mother’s arms (Associated Press 2008). Lest viewers become too sympathetic to the plight of the FLDS, however, media coverage of the raid also is replete with phrases like ‘Jeffs’s army’ (Associated Press 2006). Such phrases militarize the sect itself, especially in the context of previously unsympathetic coverage that links it to systemic sexual abuse of women and girls. Ultimately justifying the police raid, the sect operates ‘coldly and callously’, but does so without any legal or moral grounds at all (Associated Press 2006).
Coverage of the FLDS as a domestic form of violence illustrates what Tuastad calls neo-Orientalism’s ‘new barbarism thesis’, in which violence—particularly the terrorist kind—appears ‘rooted in local culture’ (2003: 595). Rather than dealing with political and economic structures or larger contexts, neo-Orientalism blames violence on traits associated with said cultures (Tuastad 2003: 592). The FLDS sect’s culture of secrecy and silence shields its violence from law enforcement and news media, thereby undermining the safety of the domestic spaces of family and nation. An op-ed piece in Canada’s National Post makes the terrorist analogy particularly clearly. It first quotes a radio spot by Laura Bush who says ‘fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of [western] culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity’ (Bramham 2008: A27). The op-ed piece continues, ‘the Bushes were referring to the Taliban in Afghanistan, but they might as well have been talking about women and children in the United States and Canada living under the tyranny’ of the FLDS (Bramham 2008: A27).
Strengthened by the placement of Warren Jeffs on the FBI’s Most Wanted List alongside Osama Bin Laden, the analogy between the FLDS and Muslim terrorist groups runs throughout mainstream news media. It pits the immoral violence that arises from a specific culture against the West’s own violence that only serves the universal good. FLDS leaders ‘seek power or chaos’ through their patriarchal, terrorist violence, whereas the US government strives to ‘preserve equality’ through state violence meant to liberate women from their culture’s misogyny (Alsultany 2014: 154). Just as importantly, the violence perpetrated by the FLDS results from their peculiar sexual proclivities and misguided religious dogmatism, epitomized by their devotion to the abusive enactment of the spiritual principle of plural marriage. They take advantage of sexual and religious freedoms granted by liberal democracy, only to pervert them beyond recognition. They betray their own racial, sexual and religious potential, unlike the securely white, Christianized and westernized Browns.
Conclusion
Technically, of course, both the Browns and FLDS break the law by practicing polygamy. We contend, however, that the Browns can ‘get away with it’ in a manner not available to the FLDS. The former’s relationship to the legal system and dominant racial, religious, civic and gender norms transforms the family from outlaws on the run to citizen-activists working for reasonable social change. Post-homophobic discourse frames Mormon polygamists like the Browns as the next worthy occupants of the charmed circle—more worthy, in fact, than many LGBTQ people and certainly more worthy than Warren Jeffs’s sexually perverted cult. The FLDS fails the moral test of Christianity, the racial test of whiteness, the post-feminist test of gender equality and the civic test of liberal democracy. Just as importantly, they fail the post-homophobic test, unable to stand as an intelligible and legitimate sexual/religious minority deserving of equality and liberty. Even worse, the sect illustrates the fragility of supposedly fixed neo-Orientalist boundaries. Serving as a cautionary tale, the saga of the FLDS suggests that all white westerners can potentially slip from citizen into the abjected enemy within. Mainstream news coverage tells Like post-feminism and post-racism, post-homophobia tells a linear and citizenship that reconciles sexual equality and religious freedoms.
Linear narratives of progress and regression
Like post-feminism and post-racism, post-homophobia tells a linear and generational version of US historical change (McRobbie 2009; Tasker and Negra 2007; Gill and Scharff 2011; Squires 2014; Nilsen and Turner 2014). More complicated than straightforward tales of progress, all three ‘posts’ nevertheless reduce history to movement towards or away from a more perfect union. Media coverage of Mormon polygamy works especially well for two reasons; it (1) welcomes the next form of sexual nonconformity in need of legal rights and cultural acceptance and (2) remedies Christian fundamentalists’ sense of victimhood by allowing them to inhabit sexual minority politics. Within the context of Mormon polygamy, the ‘post’ in post-homophobia celebrates the inevitable inclusion of gay men and lesbians into mainstream institutions, all the while remaking anti-queer sentiment into an endangered religious right. Cultural acceptance and legal decriminalization of a (polygamous) form of Christian, heterosexual marriage thus makes logical sense as the next goal for sexual and religious politics. In this way, the role of rightwing Christianity in perpetuating patriarchy, white/Christian supremacy and mono/heteronormativity disappears in a puff of post-homophobic smoke.
Furthermore, post-feminism, post-racism and post-homophobia often frame progressive social movements as admirable examples of the equality and liberty possible within the United States. Projected outwards, feminism, civil rights and gay rights represent ‘the fruits of secular modernity and a benevolent state’, serving as models for backwards eastern cultures and hence as tools for winning the War on Terrorism (McRobbie 2011: xii). For instance, a 2014 AP article admits that the United States still contains traces of homophobia, but it swiftly moves on to Obama’s decision to send gay rights diplomats to places like Vietnam, Nigeria and Russia ‘where prejudice remains deep’ and ‘gays face life-threatening risks’ (Gera 2014). In this example, post-homophobic discourse positions the United States as a shining beacon of liberal democracy, a place where the struggle over homophobia is almost a relic of the past. The nation’s hard work provides it with the necessary credentials to ‘help’ backwards places like Africa and Asia where homophobia still reigns.
Unfortunately, as the story goes, these very same movements tend to overcorrect and create new victim classes out of their old oppressors. Therefore, they require checks and balances that take into account opposing groups’ needs and interests. With this in mind, media coverage of Mormon polygamy turns what could seem like a backwards (and hence undesirable) regression into nostalgic longing for nineteenth-century Midwestern farm towns, visualized through the neat rows of houses and crops that fill FLDS compounds. Such an idyllic space could facilitate a reactionary’s wildest dream – one in which white supremacy is proudly embraced, women perform their subordinate role with no complaints, gay men and lesbians do not even exist (let alone bisexuals, trans* folks or queers) and men enjoy absolute power. For reactionaries, this type of space faces extinction at the hands of government interference, militant feminists, dark savages and unrepentant queers. The cultural and legal (mis)treatment of the FLDS could thereby underwrite Christian fundamentalist claims to victimhood. However, the neo-Orientalist slant of US popular culture redirects this reactionary dream towards the Browns whose experiences also demonstrate the oppression faced by white, heterosexual, right-wing Christians. Moreover, the Brown’s pro-polygamy activism makes them intelligible as proper liberal democratic citizens, whereas the FLDS’s racial, sexual, religious and civic ambiguity potentially blurs supposedly hard and fast neo-Orientalist boundaries.
In this fashion, the evolution/devolution narrative justifies militaristic policing on the part of the state in the name of shoring up threatened borders. In the case of the FLDS, such policing can save women – especially girls—from patriarchal, sexually criminal and immoral men. Alleged acts of sexual abuse and assault on FLDS compounds rationalize efforts to achieve and preserve equality through state intervention and regulation. By denying the civic and human status of the easternized FLDS, its members are reduced to ‘problems to be solved, analysed, confined or taken over’ (Said 1978). The neo-Orientalist ‘new barbarism imaginary’ thus legitimizes a continuous colonial economic and political project (Tuastad 2003: 597). Ensuring safety for the family and the nation requires both the surveillance state at home and US imperialism abroad—offset by the liberal democratic promise of civic belonging to those who play by its rules.
Citizenship in post-homophobic America
The twenty-first-century debate over Mormon polygamy revolves around access to the charmed circle and the full citizenship that accompanies it. A neo-Orientalist framework makes these determinations based on who can most satisfactorily meet the twin post-homophobic demands of sexual/familial pluralism and respect for religious rights. Neo-Orientalism imagines racial, national, sexual and religious homogeneity as necessary for winning the War on Terrorism, yet must still ‘celebrate difference’ if it is to live up to its selfproclaimed dedication to liberal democracy (Squires 2014: 7). Given their location as white, Christian, American and polygamous, the Browns fit the bill perfectly. They represent not only reasonable sexual difference, but also disenfranchised white Christian fundamentalists whose ancestors purportedly made sexual freedom possible in the first place. The Browns’ endeavours thus illustrate America’s unflagging dedication to equality and liberty even in the midst of the War on Terrorism.
On the contrary, the FLDS represents a chink in the United States’s liberal democratic armour. The sect’s racial, religious and sexual ambiguity, coupled with its home-grown status, reinforces the post-9/11 sense of the United States as ‘a nation in perpetual danger’ (Alsultany 2014: 157). Whether Mormon or Muslim, terrorist groups within US borders weaken national and moral unity at the precise moment it is needed most. Given the enemy’s chameleon-like ability to show up anywhere at any time, good US citizens ‘must live in a state of constant fear and vigilance’ lest they find themselves devolving into the enemy within (Alsultany 2014: 156). In addition, the post-homophobic take on Mormon polygamy promises to help us distinguish between friend and enemy more readily and easily. It reasserts neo-Orientalist binaries at the very moment they seem at risk of dissolving. Coded as white, western, Christian and heterosexual, the Browns qualify as rightful post-homophobic subjects who strive for both sexual equality and religious freedom. Despite the haziness introduced by the FLDS, they are nevertheless coded as racially dark, eastern, Muslim and sexually deviant. As anti-citizens, they embody the ‘danger, deception and dishonesty’ already ’embedded in sexual and gender nonconformity’ and let the Browns off the hook in the process (Mogul et al. 2011: 43).
Mainstream media’s depictions of Mormon polygamy code neo-Orientalist boundaries between the West and ‘the rest’ along the lines of gender equality, sexual liberty, religious freedom and liberal democracy. Mormon polygamy, if practiced properly, reveals the centrality of Christian moral imperatives to these western goods. The faith teaches that liberal democracy has a divine quality that makes it the ‘most perfect form of liberty’ (Squires 2014: 79). In fact, ‘God wants us all to be living in democracies—so long as they are democracies guided by Christian theology’ (Squires 2014: 79). Far from being incompatible, then, right-wing Christianity understands itself as providing the moral backbone of liberal democracy, the primary reason we fight the good fight in the War on Terrorism.
In sum, mainstream media depictions frame the FLDS as too racially, sexually and religiously ambiguous for the Manichean world of the post-9/11 War on Terrorism. Media discourse privileges a neo-Orientalist framework to dispel any such uncertainties. It thereby codes the FLDS as an easternized group that has no right to exist inside the United States, given their callous disrespect for the nation’s commitment to gender/sexual equality and religious liberty. Even though they technically qualify as sexual and religious minorities, their unapologetic sexual abuses and overtly theocratic tendencies render them illegible as post-homophobic subjects. FLDS members thus stand as the abjected other necessary for drawing and reinforcing clear boundaries around post-homophobic citizenship. The Browns, in contrast, manage to reconcile the sexual and religious freedoms central to western civilization. Their right to express their faith entails their right to polygamy and vice versa, exemplifying the alliance between Christian fundamentalism and pluralist liberal democracy. By redirecting sexual equality towards polygamy, protecting right-wing Christians’ religious freedom and preventing the excesses of both, the Browns make for perfect post-homophobic citizens.