Monthly Archives: April 2022

If you havent heard of Elwood Gallimore, you can read the factual account of his life and death and the religious debate of the self-appointed Henry County pastor in this past weeks editions of the Bulletin.

What do I call you, I asked Gallimore when I interviewed him back in the 90s.

Call me whatever you want, Gallimore answered.

Id rather you tell me what you would like me to call you, I responded.

Then call me Elwood, Gallimore said.

For two hours we talked, and laughed, and even shared a tear, as I recall. He was passionate, convincing and in every sense of the phrase a good ole boy whom anyone would enjoy in their company.

He believed in and practiced polygamy, the custom of a man to have more than one wife at the same time.

Polygamy was not a taboo subject for Elwood. In fact, he was preaching about it right up until his death. So, regardless of the people who consider a discussion of polygamy with Elwood referenced after his death as disrespectful, I submit, based on my personal knowledge of Elwood, he would not only approve of it, but encourage it.

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Elwood received a bit of national publicity almost 30 years ago when the State Police swooped in and confiscated church tapes of him preaching and charged him with being married twice at the same time.

In an investigation worthy of a Barney Fife blunder, no one but the judge seemed to notice that Elwood only had one marriage certificate. His second marriage was in the eyes of God, Elwood told me.

Ive asked many religious leaders over the years, given their expertise on Bible matters, how Elwoods understanding of polygamy differed from most modern nations who outlaw the practice and most modern religions which condemn it.

The answer has always been consistent:

God permitted polygamy in the days of the Old Testament because it solved a pervasive problem of the time when women, with few exceptions, were uneducated, untrained and depended upon their fathers, brothers and husbands for survival.

Back then unmarried women were most vulnerable to prostitution and slavery.

Polygamy was an act of love and kindness, a selfless act by an authority figure in a dangerous culture that afforded a woman safety and protection.

Beyond that, everyone I spoke to in religious circles said the Bible makes it clear that polygamy was never Gods design for marriage and ideally; God prefers a one-woman man.

In fact, they said the Bible is also clear that the perfect man of God should remain celibate, but given our God-given nature to pursue physical relations with one another, it would be better to marry than remain unmarried.

Just this past weekend I learned that a family member, whom I obviously do not keep up with, has pulled a Caitlyn Jenner.

As I was told, he grew up, married and had two children. Then he became a woman and his wife became a man. His wife, now a man, married another woman, and he is raising his two children as their mother.

Men are becoming women and using their superior athletic ability to break all kinds of records in the womens sports world.

Given our advanced medical abilities to transform the gender of people according to their wishes, there are people born with identities, both physical and mental, that make the man and woman, or male and female concept, a matter of contradiction.

I cant help but wonder what Elwood would say about all of that now.

Since 2015, same-sex marriage has been federally legal in all 50 states due to a ruling from the Supreme Court. In Virginia, a statutory ban on same-sex marriage was repealed in 2020.

Frankly, Im surprised the legality of polygamy has not been an issue since Elwood stirred the pot almost 30 years ago.

Bill Wyatt is a reporter for the Martinsville Bulletin. He can be reached at 276-638-8801, Ext. 2360. Follow him @billdwyatt.

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The virtues of a one-woman man | Columnists | martinsvillebulletin.com - Martinsville Bulletin

Four months ago, in early December, my cousins husband, Bashi Malama*, took off and disappeared into thin air without notice.

Two months later, word came that he had been spotted alive and well at a house in a nearby township; this is to say, in plain language, that he was staying with another woman.

We broke the news to the wife, Bana Malama*, who responded with just one word: bakabwela (he will come back), and continued eating, unbothered.

We repeated the information, taking turns, just in case she hadnt heard us correctly: Bana Malama, your husband, Bashi Malama, to whom you are married, who we thought was in danger, is living with another woman, sharing the same bed at a place not so far from here.

The second response was even shorter: So?

In collective anger and bewilderment, we stopped talking to her for a couple of days. When that didnt yield the result we wanted, we conjured up stories which we loudly shared of husband A who ended up marrying a second wife, husband B who never returned home, husband C who brought home STIs. That wife D beat up the other woman, and wife E left her philandering man and landed herself a prince in shining armour. None of these stories permeated Bana Malama.

Last week, Bashi Malama returned unannounced and as silently as he had left. Bana Malama neither welcomed or unwelcomed him; the two just slipped back into pre-disappearance norms.

Lived experience has turned Bana Malama into a social scientist. Over the years, she has observed social phenomena, examined patterns, analysed trends and looked at outcomes before arriving at her scientific conclusion: Bakabwela he will come back.

Bana Malama believes in three things. The first one is that all men, without exception, are polygamous. The second is that all women, without exception, cannot stop the first thing. The third is that each woman must either take it or leave it nothing in between. She has chosen to take it.

I have in the past written fervently about polygamy. The premise for my argument was and still firmly remains that polygamy is natural, and that monogamy is a social construct, a learned behaviour. Monogamy, the sexual commitment to only one partner at a time, till death do us part is not achievable for most men, except for a few (God bless them). The reasons abound, and I will not belabour them here.

My views have drawn sharp and often contrasting responses from men and women. The latter accuse me of promoting promiscuity, with some offering to pray for me because the the devil is using you. The former have largely been agreeable, others even sharing detailed experiences, mostly about wanting but struggling to stay monogamous.

I stand by my argument: all men are polygamous. Those who are not, are due to resolve and self-control, while the rest are a matter of time and opportunity.

A study by Conley et al. (2012) in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, 9, 1559-1565 observed that those who consider themselves monogamous are not always sexually faithful, are unlikely to use condoms during their outside sexual encounter, and are unlikely to inform their partners, in keeping with their self-image of being monogamous.

The study concluded that unprotected monogamy is riskier than condom protected promiscuity. Therefore, as a strategy for preventing sexually transmitted infections, condom use is a much safer option than monogamy, which has a high rate of failure.

Am I suggesting that there are no men out there in Zambia, the rest of Africa and the world who are not monogamous? No. I want to believe that they are there, and if they are, they know themselves.

One of my girlfriends has sworn never to date an African man again, because they cheat on you and mess you up big time; I am now doing Europeans only, she declared, buying into the myth all too common among some African women that Caucasian men, unlike black men, are predisposed to monogamy. No use trying to convince her that the European stock of men are not exactly cleansed of polygamous urges, contrary to Western popular culture, which portrays them as a faithful-loving-feminised-domesticated lot.

Repeatedly, I have been asked whether I would marry into or be in a polygamous relationship; a contemptuous question pretending to be philosophical, if you ask me.

I must perhaps reflect on the advice of Bana Malama, too wise for her age, in particular, her second premise, that no woman, without exception, can stop a man, other than himself, from dreaming of, fantasising about, wanting to and having sex with more than one woman. But it is her third premise, her advice to women, which I find most arbitrary, profound, brutal, wise and conclusive: take it or leave it.

It is what it is, folks! When you know, you know.

In my painstaking conclusion, a monogamous man is an indulgence, a wish list, a construct, a lottery win, the privilege of a select few women and less of an inalienable right of every woman.

Excerpt from:

Monogamy is a social construct - Mail and Guardian

Doomed from the start. That phrase neatly describes the Apollo 13 mission, which launched this day in 1970, and the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination effort in the U.S. Yet both can be seen as successful failures.

When astronauts James Lovell, John Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center, they were anticipating mankinds third trip to the surface of the moon. Two days into the mission, a defective oxygen tank exploded when they were some 200,000 miles away from Earth, imperiling their lives and making it impossible to complete their mission. Around-the-clock efforts by teams on the ground, imbued with NASA ingenuity, helped the astronauts return safely to Earth in what was nothing short of a miracle. Our mission was a failure, Lovell wrote later, but I like to think it was a successful failure.

We see parallels with Covid-19: a mission doomed from the start that has managed to eke out some successes.

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More than two years into the pandemic, its clear that the country has failed its primary mission of saving lives. The U.S. is now approaching a devastating 1 million deaths from Covid-19, an incomprehensible loss of life. But within this massive failure there has been a public health success: The tireless work, ingenuity, and collective action of scientists, public health practitioners, and clinicians in both the public and private spheres reminiscent of what NASA scientists and engineers did, but on a much larger scale has led to what is arguably the single most successful vaccination program in U.S. history.

Months before Covid-19 emerged in December 2019, the Global Health Security Index indicated that no country was really prepared for a pandemic. Although the U.S. was deemed most prepared, its capabilities could not compensate for the many shortcomings of its health care and public health systems. These are the same shortcomings that have consistently led the countrys health care system to rank last among high-income countries: incomplete access to care, glaring inequities, insufficient public health resources and infrastructure, and mistrust in both government and industry, to name a few. There was no reason to think the pandemic would solve these problems. Indeed, it made many of them worse and also created new ones.

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But the vaccines their development, manufacture, and widespread uptake have been a massive success. As we write this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 88% of American adults have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and 75% have been fully vaccinated, a higher Covid-19 vaccination rate than other non-mandatory vaccines have reached after being around for decades.

This means that in the span of about 18 months, some 227 million adults voluntarily got vaccinated despite the time it took to arrange an appointment, the discomfort, the likelihood of minor side effects like a sore arm or flu-like symptoms, and the uncertain likelihood of more serious side effects from the most rapidly developed vaccine of all time.

We know it might be hard to view any part of the Covid-19 pandemic response as a success. At times it feels impossible to think weve done anything right when Americans continue to spread SARS-CoV-2 and die from Covid-19 every day. The work is by no means done, and there are substantial gaps in vaccination coverage among adults, particularly when it comes to booster doses and younger populations.

Yet when rates of adult Covid-19 vaccination are compared to rates of vaccination against other vaccine-preventable illnesses, the U.S. has done remarkably well in a short amount of time: More American adults have received a two-dose Covid series since it became available than are current on their once-every-10-years tetanus boosters (about 70.5% of the adult population is up to date). Many more adults have been vaccinated against Covid than get vaccinated against influenza, where were lucky to see even half of the adult population vaccinated in a given year.

Eighty-eight percent is a simple statistic, but simple figures can reveal a lot about broader trends. For points of reference, a higher percentage of U.S. adults have had at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine than, according to Gallup, drink alcohol (60%); use Google (74%) in a typical week; find polygamy unacceptable (78%); or send their kids to public schools (83%). And despite the saying as American as apple pie, only 19% of Americans actually rate apple pie as their favorite, making Covid vaccination more American than apple pie at least by the numbers.

There are few things Americans appear to agree on more than Covid vaccination, though two key issues have clearly been settled: The Wizard of Oz was a classic (89%) and Gigli probably should never have been made (94%).

It was by no means certain that Covid-19 vaccination would become a widely accepted part of American life in less than a year and a half. This should be viewed as an important public health accomplishment a success within the countrys broader failure. Why? Surveys indicate that self-preservation and self-interest seem to be the major drivers as people make decisions to get vaccinated meaning public health messaging has helped many Americans see through widespread disinformation, fearmongering, and conspiracy theories to understand their own risks and take the appropriate action to lower them.

But the sense of duty that serves as a primary motivator for some and a secondary motivator for many more cant be discounted. Concerns about externalities an economic term that refers to the effects an individuals decisions has on others are at the core of this sense of duty and are what make getting vaccinated not just a privately beneficial decision but a patriotic one, even when promoting the public good isnt the primary motivator and even when people dont necessarily view it this way. Indeed, one study has shown that a sense of purpose can be a motivator of vaccination decisions.

If we were to ask the NASA workers whose tireless efforts brought Lovell, Swigert, and Haise back home, we imagine that self-interest wanting to keep their job would have been one motivator. But other motivations that kept them working through sleepless nights would surely have included a sense of duty, purpose, and even patriotism.

Patriotism in America is about coming together under common threads and common values. More than 40 million people watched television to see if the Apollo 13 astronauts would make it back to Earth safely. When they did, a New York Times reporter wrote that the events in all probability united the world in mutual concern more fully than another successful landing on the moon would have.

If there is any indication of Americans mutual concern for our national health and well-being, it could very well be the 88% of us who have received Covid-19 vaccinations.

To be sure, uptake of Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S. has not been as high as in other countries, including countries like Brazil or Vietnam that have far fewer resources than the U.S. And its certainly worth making comparisons between the U.S. and countries that have outperformed it to learn whatever public health lessons this pandemic has to offer. But it is also important to consider what might have happened had the U.S. not achieved the high levels of vaccination it did.

Its also tempting to point to divisiveness within the country as a sign of failure and, in particular, for the vaccinated to view the unvaccinated as paying no price for their decisions and being inconsiderate of their duty to their community and their country. Lies and misinformation have fueled very loud critics of scientifically undisputed infection-control measures, while assumptions about the character of the unvaccinated have led to vitriolic, misplaced accusations about entire groups of people.

While we personally think that our unvaccinated and undervaccinated neighbors could be doing more, extreme views are pervasive and ignore an important reality: We have all made sacrifices or done something other than getting vaccinated that supports our communities during the pandemic, whether its working an essential job with higher risk of infection, managing family life disruptions from social distancing and infection control measures, or helping neighbors that have been hit hard financially by economic disruptions. While most Americans now have some degree of biological immunity against Covid-19, none of us has been immune to the social and economic tolls of the pandemic. And, sadly, many more unvaccinated Americans have paid the ultimate price death from Covid-19 than vaccinated Americans since vaccines became widely available

Public health wont be taking days off for the foreseeable future, nor will doctors and nurses and caregivers. Many of them are running on fumes, though some want to stop. Lets not lose sight of the success buried within this larger failure and take a moment to recognize a truly remarkable achievement: 255 million (and counting!) people children, adults, our neighbors and friends have bettered their country by getting Covid-19 vaccinations.

Christopher M. Worsham is a pulmonologist and critical care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Anupam B. Jena is an internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and host of the Freakonomics, MD podcast.

Read this article:

The 'successful failures' of Apollo 13 and Covid-19 vaccination - STAT