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An excellent article on GetReligion analyzing a recent NYTimes article about Joe Darger, the UNLV forward with 2 moms...and a dad. At what point does polygamy become normalized? I'm extraordinarily uncomfortable with the whole history and current state of the practice. Big Love presents polygamy as somewhat pedestrian but fetishized, some groups like Tapestry against Polygamy are so against it their publications border on parody. Let's just say I'm erring on the side of TaP. Perhaps Short Creek was the way to go.
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TaP consists of embittered people who are out to sensationalize something that truly, really, rather is pedestrian in most cases. Trusting the women of TaP to tell the truth about polygamy is like asking a young girl who has been molested by her father (likely a monogamist) to extol the virtues of father-daughter relationships. It is like asking a woman who's been married twice to abusive husbands who beat her, to extol the virtues of marriage and domestic bliss. It would be like asking men who were molested as boys by Catholic priests to pontificate on the virtues of the One True Catholic Church.
Most polygamists are like any other family. It is unfortunate that Colorado City/Hildale (the FLDS, headed by Warren Jeffs) gives all polygamists a bad name. Aside from that, people ASSUME that all the members of the FLDS *agree* with their renegade so-called "prophet", when in reality many suffer in silence, knowing that if they oppose Jeffs, they will lose their homes and family.
The FLDS were not always that way. But back around the 80s some of their priesthood council tried to impose a "one man rule" form of government, and that is when it began to go downhill. When Warren's father--who was loved by many--had a stroke (I believe around the late 90s) and became unable to administer the affairs of the sect, Warren stepped in and controled his dad from behind the scenes and issued judgments and edicts and pronouncements in his dad's name. When Warren's dad died a few years later, then Warren really went crazy, leading to the current state of affairs there. But those people know that if they oppose Warren, their wives and children and husbands will be stripped from them, and they can be kicked out of the communally-owned homes.
So they suffer in silence. Much the same way some non-believing LDS members continue to "play the game"--go to church, pay tithing, talk in meetings, attend the temple, even hold leadership callings--for fear of being alienated or estranged from their loved ones if they were to disavow the LDS prophet. Marriages and families have been destroyed when LDS leadership have told women and men to divorce their non-believing spouses. It happens ALL THE TIME.
The FLDS problem is not polygamy, but brainwashing and mind control, and the fear of standing up against unrighteous dominion. Due to the FLDS's adoption of one-man rule in the mid-80s, a number of families split from the FLDS and moved to a new community they called Centennial Park (called such because they formed it in 1986, exactly 100 years after the famous ordinations by John Taylor of certain men to carry on the practice of plural marriage). Centennial Park is an example of how plural marriage is done right. The AUB who mostly live in Salt Lake and the surrounding area are also an example of polygamy done right. Many of them could be your neighbor and you'd never know they were different, because aside from having multiple wives, they aren't. The people of Centennial Park and the AUB (who formed from a schism from the FLDS some decades earlier) don't dress in prairie garb, don't shun outsiders, and generally interact with the larger community in a 100% normal fashion.
You can't judge all polygamists based on the embittered grumpy women of TaP and the deranged, maniacal FLDS "prophet" Warren Jeffs, anymore than you can judge all LDS based on murderers and criminals like Mark Hacking, Brian Mitchell, Mark Hoffman, or that active LDS missionary who recently got arrested for molesting a little boy.
There is a reasons TaPs publications "border on parody": a lot of their stuff is straight out lies, mixed with the embittered disillusionment of selfish people who want to blame everyone but themselves for their problems in life. Tapestry's stuff is ridiculous and anything but rational or objective. Read their stuff, chuckle, and then search out the truth...which, as usual, is pretty unextraordinary and not very sensationalistic.