17 e Did the count in 17.

I don't know.

That was with Matty's.

All right, good night.

So Oh, yeah, Oh, yeah.

There is a false narrative that the nuclear family is the typical family, and that's not really true.

People seem to think that leave it to Beaver was a documentary.

It wasn't, You know, you have a very wonderful family, don't you?

Oh, sure.

It was an ideal ized representation of what people aspired to.

And since that time, the nuclear family has been held to be the ideal, and all other families have been held up against it.

Uh huh.

Families like ours weren't supposed to speak up, And if you did speak up, you could either be put in jail or there was more often the prejudice you would experience.

One of the false narratives that goes around about plural families is that there's no choice and that everybody that's in my are either a victim or a perpetrator.

And the lack of understanding that's gone on about plural families has really caused that narrative to grow and different legal systems have kept people quiet and afraid to come forward and say, That's not us.

That's not who we are.

Okay, all right, It's ready.

Let's have blessing.

Okay, Go ahead and say it.

It is a love story for me.

We have all come from plural families.

And, you know, I just graduated from high school.

E really was focused on school.

I wasn't looking to fall in love.

I knew Joe.

He was friends with my brother.

And then Vicky is my cousin and I have hundreds of cousins.

So I think I saw Vicky and Bell twice when we were kids Way when we got older, Vicky and I became friends.

Is the relationship of the two of them Blossom decided they're gonna come back after me together, and that was very confronting for me.

It was a surprise to all of us, but we were just like, let's kind of see where this goes.

We're just open thio the lifestyle, So might as well.

Yeah, we both believed in it.

And so we were like, Why not look at it and see how way were married for 10 years.

And then this gal come shows up came along, she had come out of a divorce and it was coming over.

And I saw her like, for the first time for me.

And we were both really confronted.

I wasn't looking for another wife, and e felt the zing.

And then I was like, What was that?

No.

Shortly she joined the family along with five kids and we became a plural Brady Bunch family.

The crime has traditionally been, if you purport to be married.

So it was a law against language, other, so we couldn't even talk about it.

Didn't say anything about your family.

You didn't want to lie.

But then you felt this pressure like I can't own who I am.

I can't say who I am.

I think when you do that to a culture, you do that to people where they're not even able to speak who they are or be proud of who you are.

It really marginalizes and then leads for that culture to be exploited.

I'm writing a book now, in which I try to look at ways in which people who consider themselves family have to contend with a system that tends to give greater validity to mainstream families.

That I'm interested in the idea that this nuclear family really was an invention of the 20th century.

They originate from a 19 fifties idea that there was such a thing as an ideal family, and they originate a lot from the idea of normality.

And it began in mathematics and in mathematics and meant the thing that occurs most frequently.

Techno mistake.

That idea of normality was very much celebrated.

People wanted to fit in.

They wanted to be the same.

Eccentricity was devalued, originality was devalued.

And while the pressure on human beings was significant, it was nothing compared to the pressure that was placed on families.

Oh, he was Tommy's father home from work.

And here comes Mother to say hello.

Every week Father comes home with money for Tommy and for mother.

Families had a way.

They were supposed to look, and there were roles.

There was a breadwinner father.

There was a caretaker mother.

There were a couple of Children, maybe three.

There was a dog.

There was a cat.

It was ideal ized in media representation and the assumption waas that in these households free of disability, free of difference, free of so many of the things in which we have since come to find meaning that it was in those households, that people would have the best, the optimal, the most wonderful experience.

So we came to a very sentimental and a very narrow notion of what it meant to be a family marriage to three women.

Isn't that illegal?

You have never seen any family like the darker love times.

Three are true story of a polygamous marriage.

We have the doctors here.

The Dodgers were willing to come out as polygamists at a time when almost nobody did.

They said The representations that are out there of us are wrong.

There are people who are suffering in polygamous marriages.

There are people who find them joyful.

Those stories need to be heard.

Only the stories of people who have been miserable are being heard right now.

What really got us all inspired to become more public and try to change the narrative?

Waas, My daughter Kira Um, she died when she was five months old.

The investigation and the way that we were treated and the fears that we had of interacting with other agencies.

It was really, really painful.

They went in and they pulled out all the kids from the same last name.

And the schools around Thio interview them.

You know, I was only 30 at the time, and I just didn't know what to do.

And we had seen some other families where there were some cases where the people had had something happened to their child.

And we're you know, we're being accused of some kind of abuse, and they chose to kind of go deeper and hide and, you know, the fear just made them go.

We don't dare talk to anybody.

We hardly even dare go out of the house and we could see that's not gonna be healthy.

We didn't We can't do that.

I mean, I wanted to do that because I was really scared.

But Joe was really angry, and all of us were kind of wondering what to do.

But we just knew it couldn't stay the same.

It just couldn't stay the same.

Jodi constantly smile.

Uh, way realized that narrative that we talked about us so strong that if we didn't start doing more interviews or being public or talking about it, even though it was a risk to talk about.

If we didn't do that, it was not ever gonna change.

Way really tried to examine what we had to do to change the law.

Way did a lot of politicking, and we got a lot of people active in politics.

I want to thank a darker for the invitation way had to really focus on the Republican Party to get any kind of influence and get people to see that we had a voice in These crimes do happen way families.

They're often not report.

Because of the widespread fear of the media and law enforcement Zhou has had a number of insights were crucial to bringing about decriminalization in Utah in the first place, he said.

We have tried for many years the freedom of religion argument, and it has never worked, he said.

The freedom of religion argument does not, in fact cause people to open up and say that they want to accept those of us who are practicing polygamy.

It was defeated by the Supreme Court in the Reynolds decision in the late 19th century.

It has been defeated in court over and over again, he said.

Polygamy is a free speech issue, he said.

Nobody gets in trouble because he has slept with a bunch of different women and had Children by them, he said.

I have Children with three women and I call them my wives, and it's because I use the word wives that our lives are stigmatized, he said.

That is a free speech issue.

I should be able to call them whatever I want to call them.

And so it was the revelation.

I think that this could be negotiated as a free speech issue.

That was his great primary insight and the beginning of the shift toward decriminalization.

A lot of people know there's no way you're ever gonna change a lot in a Mormon Legislature, and we had that unanimously passed in the Senate, overwhelmingly passed in the house.

Polygamy is not legalized, to be clear, but it decriminalized way.

Got it to go from criminal Polonius to now.

It's an infraction in 18 years.

Do you take in Christian, Tory and Christian Tory to Jenny's and then tests?

There's right.

A lot of times the fact that it was criminalized was used as a license to then discriminate.

Well, it's not religious discrimination because you're illegal, so I can deny you housing Aiken.

Deny your job.

I could deny you alone because you're involved in a Thelonious lifestyle.

So now that we've been able to alter that just this year, we're hoping that more people can come forward and own who they are and then weaken.

Put an end to this kind of narrative that continues exist from keeping people quiet.

People.

If we just hold on to the nuclear family versus being more accepting, then we continue to ignore what is in society.

What is is single parents, polygamous families, That's gay families.

It's polyamorous families.

So if we're going to continue to ignore what it is, then what will continue to do is then resisted, which then turns into hating it, which then turns into more stripe.

However, somebody wants Thio organize themselves to create the future way.