Season 17, Episode 7 of Sister Wives shows Kody driving out of state to officiate a friend’s wedding. He’s tasked with writing the couple’s vows, but finds himself drawing a blank because he’s so hung up over Christine leaving him. Kody seems keyed up and unhinged the entire time and even considers talking his friend out of getting married.
While preparing for the wedding ceremony, Kody filmed a video diary where he seemed extremely anxious and hyper. He said he was hoping for inspiration to strike, because he was drawing a complete blank. He was also uncharagtieristally nervous about performing.
While speaking with producers, he animatedly describes how he drove to Oklahoma while “decrying marriage and the foolishness of it.” He later says he was “followed there by a demon” on his drive over.
He also says he wondered if he was supposed to stop his friend Brian from going through with the marriage. Brian assured him. however, that he wanted to get married and it was okay. The one thing that reassured Kody that things could be okay was the fact that he saw that the wife was happy to take her husband’s last name. He saw this as a sign that she would be a “perfectly supporting wife.”
Kody’s nerves did not improve on the big day. While on stage he asked the bride Judith if she was nervous. When she answered “a little bit,” Kody replied “you should be, because I am.”
When he got to the vows part, he advised the couple to not try to change each other. He goes on to tell them they must “willingly negotiate” with each other. He also tells them they need to seek a “win-win settlement situation,” which sounds like he was thinking a little too heavily about his own divorce from Christine while writing these vows.
Kody then continued to exhibit a manic-like energy at the reception, where he appeared to dominate the dance floor with his enthusiastic moves.
Why was Kody asked to officiate a wedding?
Kody says he “used to be a minister,” and what he’s referring to is the fact that he led the Brown family home church after the family relocated from Lehi, Utah to Las Vegas, Nevada.
He calls himself the “high priest of my own family.” Then then calls himself a “failed priest.” He says he’s defrocked and has a wife leaving him.
At some point, though, the home church services stopped. When his daughter Maddie got married she asked Kody to officiate her wedding, but that seems to be the only wedding he’s done because his friend Brian’s. He got ordained in Oklahoma in order to perform the wedding.
Brian, who is not a polygamist, has been friends for decades after meeting him at a sporting event.
Double COVID stands for Kody
To add insult to injury, when Kody’s daughter Ysabel found found out he had traveled to do the wedding, she felt hurt because he had refused to travel for her surgery several months before.
Kody cited COVID restrictions and the inability to be away from his young children with Robyn as his reasons for not being there for Ysabel’s major spinal surgery to correct severe scoliosis.
Christine says that Ysabel was heartbroken. To make matters even more complicated, Kody did not wear a mask or seem to follow any more COVID precautions while at the wedding in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This was hypocritical behavior because he had been enforcing strict COVID rules on his family that prevented him from seeing most of them very often since the start of the pandemic.
On his drive up there, Kody says that he felt safe traveling to the wedding because at the time there were only 11,000 cases in the U.S. at the time.
When Janelle brought up this hypocritical behavior, Kody argued to producers that she was gaslighting him. He claimed that the family wasn’t seeing each other even before COVID, which contradicts the fact that he blamed his family for hindering him from seeing them because they weren’t following his super strict COVID rules.
In the trailer for the second half of the season, we see that Robyn later got sick enough from COVID that Kody worried that she might not live. When Janelle got COVID, he wasn’t really there for her at all despite telling her sons that the would care for her if she got sick.
Violeta Idyll can be found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrXfMhWGyRrW4Q0qAmwfTTQ and Twitter https://twitter.com/IdyllVioleta
