David Snell’s New Video on Polygamy in Utah

[Buckeye]

9 hours ago, Calm said:

I am in my 60s and I most certainly don’t when it comes to the “you young people have made things so difficult I’m not sure how anyone is getting married”.  I don’t think it’s only the “young people” who have made things so difficult given the current financial situation many young people find themselves in because of the economy and expectations and costs of educational systems that has nothing to do with what young people are doing and everything to do with what the previous generations have done.

I am not certain the most important aspect of courtship and marriage is that both are seeking God in faith (I think attributes are too synergistic to separate out one as most important), but I do believe this aspect is best coupled with other important aspects (open, willing communication would probably be my top requirement if I were to have one as I see less wiggle room for adjusting to each other by trial and error available to young couples these days due to more financial stress and the easy availability of so many distractions from investing and building in an actual relationship).

As far as the soulmate issue, like I said I am in my 60s, 65 to be precise and this was imo a major cultural influence in my youth, both in the general population and in the LDS faith…Saturday’s Warrior was first performed in 1973 (for those unfamiliar with it, two spirits in the preexistence promise they will find each other to marry).  There was also in the general population this idea that being in love with your soulmate would be enough…Love Story was a movie/novel about two very beautiful people—both nominated for Academy awards while the novel was on the NYT’s bestseller list for 41 weeks (can’t tell if this means number one or just on the list)—from ‘opposite sides of the tracks’ with the caption “Love means never having to say you are sorry” (meaning according to AI they have such a deep, unconditional love the other’s needs are so perfectly understood, no apologies are necessary).  Love Story was seen by many of my friends and, as far as I could tell back then (based on ads, magazine, and tv references), also seen by many in the greater population as an example of what would be the ideal relationship, the type of love to wish for where you instinctively knew each other so well and were so compatible actual communication wouldn’t be necessary (though they didn’t usually say it that way).

added:  nowadays I see a lot more criticism of the “you should know what I want without even asking me” or “if I have to ask, then it’s not love” mentality, so I see the current generation as likely better educated in communication skills than previous ones…whether they use those skills or not it another thing.

I just learned (since I never actually saw the movie nor read the companion novel, I looked for a review for the date they were released—1970—and to make sure I was right about the quote) that a crucial part of the story was the doctor telling the husband his wife had terminal leukemia and encouraging him not to tell his wife that she has it, I guess so she can live a happier life in the time she has left.  I think that demonstrates just how antiquated the author’s point of view was (that it would even be semirealistic and not laughable to occur, even if the author presented it as a negative, which seems likely as the wife confronts the doctor eventually according to wiki) and while one can have novel ideas next to very out dated ones, the idea of “soulmates” has been around since Ancient Greece at least…and criticized that long as well (Plato has one character in the play, Symposium, tell an absurd myth of humans originally being one soul, one body but as a punishment the gods split their body into two, so they become one soul, two bodies…the other characters approach love in a much less simplistic way, so one shouldn’t blame Plato for promoting the idea.  )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_(Plato)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Story_(novel)

I’m one generation too young for Love Story. Fortunately my parents had the wisdom to show us What’s Up Doc. It’s one of my favorites and my kids too. One of the best lines is at the end when Barbara Streisand’s character quotes the line “love means never having to say you’re sorry” and Ryan O’Neals character retorts “that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

[Calm]

47 minutes ago, Buckeye said:

One of the best lines is at the end when Barbara Streisand’s character quotes the line “love means never having to say you’re sorry” and Ryan O’Neals character retorts “that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

I howled when I first saw that.

[ZealouslyStriving]

2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Yes. Aunt Julia as the first wife was called got to live with the husband while Lorena went into hiding, adopted false names and had to teach her toddler to lie about who her dad was. I pretty much don’t see any redeeming qualities to polygamy, but the state persecution of what consenting adults do makes me really mad. 
 

The woman in question is Lorena Washburn Larsen. I don’t recall ever seeing anything but low and behold a quick google search shows her quoted in one of the polygamy essays:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/the-manifesto-and-the-end-of-plural-marriage?lang=eng
 

Every story is so complex. I see the despair and desperation in her story but also acknowledge the light she felt from her faith which was the defining characteristic of her life. 

She is featured prominently in "Saints, Vol. 2: No Unhallowed Hand"

Index

 

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/saints-v2/index?lang=eng

 

I knew the story sounded familiar.

[ZealouslyStriving]

2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Yes. Aunt Julia as the first wife was called got to live with the husband while Lorena went into hiding, adopted false names and had to teach her toddler to lie about who her dad was. I pretty much don’t see any redeeming qualities to polygamy, but the state persecution of what consenting adults do makes me really mad. 
 

The woman in question is Lorena Washburn Larsen. I don’t recall ever seeing anything but low and behold a quick google search shows her quoted in one of the polygamy essays:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/the-manifesto-and-the-end-of-plural-marriage?lang=eng
 

Every story is so complex. I see the despair and desperation in her story but also acknowledge the light she felt from her faith which was the defining characteristic of her life. 

Duplicate... Oops.

Edited August 25, 2025 by ZealouslyStriving

[Devobah]

4 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Polygamy was such a sacrifice for the women that lived it. It’s one of the one issues I had with the video in the OP which just came across as a dude explaining it away. In addition to the above, I have a gg grandma on my mother’s side that lived through the manifesto era. From her:

 

She went on to live as a single mother, providing all the support for her eight children  (four born post manifesto). She describes her growing resentment for her husband who lived with his first wife and only came for conjugal visits, but also continued spiritual affirmations that it was what God wanted of her. The sacrifice and hardship that she went through (and she is far from alone I know) is indescribable in a way that the video just fails to capture. 

I appreciate you sharing the stories. I think the primary purpose of David’s video was to answer the question of if the missionaries were helping traffic women to the US to be wife’s up. 
It’s a shorter video, only 10 minutes long. Video formats are useful in a lot of things, but this is one of the reasons why it is not. David isn’t trying to say that people didn’t have it hard during polygamy (recorded records of the blessings and hardships of those within the practice show that) but rather that it wasn’t some nefarious scheme to get women to the US. I think the rest of the video deals with some interesting things about polygamy in the early Utah era as well. 
I hope you know I’m not trying to downplay your views on this. It’s an incredibly difficult subject for a lot of people and I’m no fan of it either, though I also had a few family members that practiced it as well. I like David and his videos and wanted to share this because it answered something that I saw in my journeys in the metaverse. 

[bluebell]

10 hours ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

She is featured prominently in "Saints, Vol. 2: No Unhallowed Hand"

Index

 

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/saints-v2/index?lang=eng

 

I knew the story sounded familiar.

That's where I've heard it before!

[MrShorty]

Tangent alert! In the spirit of "the more things change, the more they stay the same..."

17 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

My anguish was inexpressible, and a dense darkness took hold of my mind. I thought that if the Lord and the Church Authorities had gone back on that principal, there was nothing to any part of the Gospel. I fancied I would see myself and my children, and many other splendid women and their children turned adrift, and our only purpose in entering it, had been more fully to serve the Lord. I sank down on our bedding and wished in my anguish that the earth would open and take me and my children in. The darkness seemed imponerable.

Interestingly, I hear this kind of sentiment a lot in modern faith crisis circles. "If the church has gone back on (fill in the blank -- Biblical racial curses, creationism/anti-evolution, apostasy of same sex couples, Lamanite descendants, or whatever change you identify), then was there anything true about anything the church taught?" And I see this sentiment outside of LDS deconstruction circles, such as Rhett McLaughlin who has been on a few podcasts in recent months and describes his deconstruction as starting with creationism/anti-evolutionism and, when he discovered the holes in his fundamentalist apologetics, he started asking what else he had been wrong about. I can't help but wonder if we could carefully explore this across time and issue, we could pick out some general principles for why some people have such a hard time when the church changes or appears to have been wrong about something.

A few of the things I would hypothesize are part of this experience. As @Navidad mentioned the other day, certainty seems to play a role. I think another tendency we have is to interrelate things. "If the Joseph Smith was a prophet and..., then (a long list or even everything else the church teaches) must also be true." Christ's atonement is only meaningful if humankind is fallen, which means Adam and Eve must have been historical and the fall occurred exactly as outlined in Genesis, so therefore evolution and/or death before the fall must be false." I would also think that "all or nothing" or "black and white" attitudes have a role to play, too. There's probably more.

17 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

The voice said, "Why, this is no more unresonable than the requirement the Lord made of Abraham when he commanded him to offer up his son Isaac, and when the Lord sees that you are willing to obey in all things the trial shall be removed."

I kind of hate to speak ill of such a spiritual or revelatory experience, since it clearly had great meaning to her, but it sometimes feels to me this idea of an "Abrahamic sacrifice" (almost always some kind of obedience test) becomes more about dismissing doubts and questions rather than really grappling with them. We say it was an Abrahamic sacrifice for some to practice polygamy. It was also an Abrahamic sacrifice for some to abandon polygamy. Every question of "obedience even if my moral and ethical compass tells me otherwise" ends up being answered with "obedience is best, because Abraham did it, and God rewards obedience, even if the command is morally or ethically questionable." I'm starting to count months until this shows up in our SS classes.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

15 hours ago, Devobah said:

I hope you know I’m not trying to downplay your views on this. It’s an incredibly difficult subject for a lot of people and I’m no fan of it either, though I also had a few family members that practiced it as well. I like David and his videos and wanted to share this because it answered something that I saw in my journeys in the metaverse. 

I appreciate this.

Quote

I think the rest of the video deals with some interesting things about polygamy in the early Utah era as well. 

I personally doubt the original allegations. I guess I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that there wasn't a significant amount of coerersion involved. Different people see that differently. It's hard to reconstruct the past, but Lorena wrote a ton. She was taught by her church leaders and family that the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom was only available to those who practiced plural marriage. She (and her son - who has a wing named after him at BYU) is adamant that this was the position of the church at the time. Additionally, her Patriarchal blessing (which church members view as guidance from God) told her that she was heir to all  the blessings of Sarah and "if I would obtain them, I must yield obedience to the law of Sarah." When Lorena was 14 (just a couple months shy of her 15th birthday 😉 ), she turned down her first marriage proposal. The man and his wife approached Lorena's parents for permission which was granted. Her father pressured her saying "I am afraid you will some day be sorry for turning down such a fine man." He was 50 years old. Became Lorena's bishop two years later and continued to pursue Lorena. Once the guy's first wife died he even took her to a dance. While Lorena turned him down (good for her), that's a ton of pressure on her. Asymmetric pressure that is just glossed over in the video. There is no healthy society in which adults are trying to marry off their young teenagers to 50 year old men. The dude was Martin Harris's Nephi btw Bishop Dennison Lott Harris. And he was far from the only old man to court Lorena in her teenage years. I went back to check and at least 6 others proposed marriage to her before she choose her husband at the age of 20 (he was 35).

[Senator]

1 hour ago, MrShorty said:

I'm starting to count months until this shows up in our SS classes.

If such a SS class were to ever exist, and you were to give these exact comments, I would book a flight just to sit in the corner to listen and observe.

Edited August 25, 2025 by Senator

[Devobah]

1 hour ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

I personally doubt the original allegations. I guess I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that there wasn't a significant amount of coerersion involved

I take that to mean that you're referring to the courtships?

Edit: I guess I should remember to read the entire thing before I respond. That is exactly what you are referring to.

Edited August 25, 2025 by Devobah

[SeekingUnderstanding]

20 minutes ago, Devobah said:

I take that to mean that you're referring to the courtships?

Edit: I guess I should remember to read the entire thing before I respond. That is exactly what you are referring to.

Correct. And anything that attempts to downplay the pressure felt by these young women (and the inherent inequity that came after) to enter these relationships is inherently dishonest IMNSHO of course. 

[webbles]

Another thing I'm curious about (and the recent discussion prompted this) was what would polygamy have looked like if it had been left to continue.  Up until 1845-1847, polygamy was mostly in secret.  So courtships was a secret affair and the other wives had to act as if they were unmarried in public.  Then from 1847-1852, it was openly practiced in Utah but not publicly announced.  Then from 1852 to 1882 it was publicly practiced.  Then 1882 to 1890, it was hidden again.  And then from 1890 to early 1900s, it was even more hidden.  It only had about 1.5 generation of practitioners.  The early saints didn't really have a lot of time to change their lifestyles around it.

The video does mention the "Seer" and what Orson Pratt explained was the proper way for polygamy to occur, but that was in 1852, after the secrecy was just removed.  By the 1890s, some leaders were delegated the authority to authorize polygamy without going to the prophet.  So the mechanism was already changing.  There were women who initiated the proposal, men who didn't go to the parents, and other changes.

There's really no way to know, because polygamy was abruptly shut down, but it is a "what if..." that I've pondered every now and then.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

47 minutes ago, webbles said:

The video does mention the "Seer" and what Orson Pratt explained was the proper way for polygamy to occur, but that was in 1852, after the secrecy was just removed.  By the 1890s, some leaders were delegated the authority to authorize polygamy without going to the prophet. 

I don’t know how it worked elsewhere, but in the late seventies near Monroe, first presidency approval must have been an after thought or perhaps a rubber stamp? Lorena, went to the next town over to house sit and help with kids at her fathers first wives home while the wife was away. Within a week she reports three plural marriage proposals. There is no way they had time to run that up the flagpole. 

Edited August 26, 2025 by SeekingUnderstanding

[MrShorty]

6 hours ago, Senator said:

If such a SS class were to ever exist, and you were to give these exact comments, I would book a flight just to sit in the corner to listen and observe.

I agree, it would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall for such a discussion. Usually when I think about this, as much as I might want to think about how it plays out when discussing Abraham and Isaac, I usually end up thinking it might actually work better later, when discussing 1 Sam 15 where we can talk about obedience and the commandment relayed through Samuel to Saul to kill all of the neighboring Amalekites. That lesson often focuses on verse 22 and 23 that asserts that obedience is what God really wants, and one could then ask questions like, does this kind of unfailing obedience extend to things like genocide that one might believe are immoral or unethical? Saul got called on the carpet for disobedience, but his disobedience appears to have been motivated by greed. What if I were in Saul's place, but my disobedience was motivated by the fact that I think genocide is a horrible evil? Much worse than letting past injustices go unpunished or learning how to live peaceably adjacent to people who worship differently than we do. I have no idea what the conversation might look like, but that is a conversation I think would be interesting.

[The Nehor]

11 hours ago, MrShorty said:

Tangent alert! In the spirit of "the more things change, the more they stay the same..."

Interestingly, I hear this kind of sentiment a lot in modern faith crisis circles. "If the church has gone back on (fill in the blank -- Biblical racial curses, creationism/anti-evolution, apostasy of same sex couples, Lamanite descendants, or whatever change you identify), then was there anything true about anything the church taught?" And I see this sentiment outside of LDS deconstruction circles, such as Rhett McLaughlin who has been on a few podcasts in recent months and describes his deconstruction as starting with creationism/anti-evolutionism and, when he discovered the holes in his fundamentalist apologetics, he started asking what else he had been wrong about. I can't help but wonder if we could carefully explore this across time and issue, we could pick out some general principles for why some people have such a hard time when the church changes or appears to have been wrong about something.

I think in this case it had a specifically big impact to practitioners of plural marriage. Being told it was vital to get the highest degree of glory and so you do it and have a really rough time with a mostly absentee husband and father and then yoink…..you didn’t actually have to do it and would have been fine marrying someone with only one wife. I imagine it hurts much more if what you thought was hardship and suffering that God specifically asked of you suddenly became optional.

Removing the priesthood ban may have tried people’s faith but it didn’t ask you to do anything specifically.

11 hours ago, MrShorty said:

A few of the things I would hypothesize are part of this experience. As @Navidad mentioned the other day, certainty seems to play a role. I think another tendency we have is to interrelate things. "If the Joseph Smith was a prophet and..., then (a long list or even everything else the church teaches) must also be true." Christ's atonement is only meaningful if humankind is fallen, which means Adam and Eve must have been historical and the fall occurred exactly as outlined in Genesis, so therefore evolution and/or death before the fall must be false." I would also think that "all or nothing" or "black and white" attitudes have a role to play, too. There's probably more.

There is a weird element at play in which people can become perversely proud of rejecting elements of academic scientific and historic consensus as a badge of loyalty.

11 hours ago, MrShorty said:

I kind of hate to speak ill of such a spiritual or revelatory experience, since it clearly had great meaning to her, but it sometimes feels to me this idea of an "Abrahamic sacrifice" (almost always some kind of obedience test) becomes more about dismissing doubts and questions rather than really grappling with them. We say it was an Abrahamic sacrifice for some to practice polygamy. It was also an Abrahamic sacrifice for some to abandon polygamy. Every question of "obedience even if my moral and ethical compass tells me otherwise" ends up being answered with "obedience is best, because Abraham did it, and God rewards obedience, even if the command is morally or ethically questionable." I'm starting to count months until this shows up in our SS classes.

I also find it deeply weird how Joseph Smith seemed to “test” people along these lines. A cynical person might think that he called it a test when he changed his mind on something. I don’t know that I would go that far but I try to imagine apostles today throwing out tests like these and can’t see it.

[The Nehor]

6 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

I don’t know how it worked elsewhere, but in the late seventies near Monroe, first presidency approval must have been an after thought or perhaps a rubber stamp? Lorena, went to the next town over to house sit and help with kids at her fathers first wives home while the wife was away. Within a week she reports three plural marriage proposals. There is no way they had time to run that up the flagpole. 

Yeah, that sounds like a rubber stamp thing. You propose first and then get the approval and the marriage or even you just marry and get the sign-off to ‘validate’ it.

[Calm]

On 8/24/2025 at 4:57 PM, bluebell said:

People aren't big on self sacrifice right now, I think you are right.  It's the top reason that I see people give for not wanting to have kids.  

I wonder if it’s more selfishness or more not feeling like one has enough control over one’s life to take the risks needed, especially with kids.  If your experience is that often promised delayed rewards never show up, why would you be motivated to not only sacrifice in the moment, but set yourself and your kids up for a high probability of a difficult life when the rewards don’t come through.  You can adapt to changing demands of life a lot easier without kids and who wants to put their kids in crappy situations when one knows early trauma and stress can actually damage kids.  My guess is fewer adults are using “kids are resilient” to reassure themselves their mistakes, their own tragedies won’t impact their kids that much, once upon a time parents seemed to think their kids could still have decent lives even if the parents were really struggling, they were protected by the innocence of youth.  People are likely more realistic now there is much more research on how childhood trauma can have significant negative life long effects to.  Kids don’t just bounce back once parents find their feet again.  Having kids early before you know your likely financial situation might end up with you never being able to afford a home of your own and having to live with Mom and Dad because the anticipated job never materializes or the start up company one was part of never really got going or the great entry level job that looked like the beginning of your career was pretty much the end of it as well.  So many things can go wrong, the world itself seems to be changing in faster ways, harder to predict.

Edited August 26, 2025 by Calm

[Tony uk]

It seems to me, that people these days, do not want to take a risk on sacrifice. Marriage, kids, starting up their own homes or business, or moving to a new job. Everything seems to be a risk that few people wish to take. Some people may wish to take an easy option and stick with what they know. 

[Navidad]

I am not sure if this is relevant to this thread, but I received an interesting email just about four days ago. It was from a highly regarded British historian at a well-known British university. He indicated he is working on a book that includes the instances of Irish/English converts to Mormonism in the 1840s. He is apparently digging through old records from the United Kingdom. In his email he specifically mentioned that he had found evidence of Mormon converts and "trafficked women" being shipped to colonies in Utah in the 1840s.

As I understand it, his book and study are not specifically religious in nature. He seemed to have found such records when searching for Anglo (British/Irish) migrations to the United States in general. Of course it has nothing to do with Mexican colonies since there weren't any until 1875, and they were not church-related colonies but groups of Mormons coming to Mexico for economic purposes (mining salt, mostly). In fact, the first officially sanctioned LDS organization in Mexico is overlooked by virtually all LDS scholars because it was not "officially" migration under the direction and orders of Church leaders. This was a Sunday school organized by the authority of an Arizona bishop in Corralitos, Chihuahua. Sorry, I digress.

At any rate, this email is the first mention I have ever heard of female Anglo (United Kingdom) Mormon subjects having been "trafficked" to LDS colonies in America. Now, a few days later, I read the term used again here. Two instances do not make a trend - they just make it interesting. 

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

I wonder if it’s more selfishness or more not feeling like one has enough control over one’s life to take the risks needed, especially with kids.  If your experience is that often promised delayed rewards never show up, why would you be motivated to not only sacrifice in the moment, but set yourself and your kids up for a high probability of a difficult life when the rewards don’t come through.  You can adapt to changing demands of life a lot easier without kids and who wants to put their kids in crappy situations when one knows early trauma and stress can actually damage kids.  My guess is fewer adults are using “kids are resilient” to reassure themselves their mistakes, their own tragedies won’t impact their kids that much, once upon a time parents seemed to think their kids could still have decent lives even if the parents were really struggling, they were protected by the innocence of youth.  People are likely more realistic now there is much more research on how childhood trauma can have significant negative life long effects to.  Kids don’t just bounce back once parents find their feet again.  Having kids early before you know your likely financial situation might end up with you never being able to afford a home of your own and having to live with Mom and Dad because the anticipated job never materializes or the start up company one was part of never really got going or the great entry level job that looked like the beginning of your career was pretty much the end of it as well.  So many things can go wrong, the world itself seems to be changing in faster ways, harder to predict.

I’m going off of specific social media accounts I see, which say that having kids is too much work and they’d rather focus on themselves.  When they are married they refer to themselves as DINKS (dual income, no kids).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/06/20/the-rise-in-dinks-sinks-dinkwads-kippers/

I’m sure there are people out there with too much anxiety to have kids, I just haven’t seen them on social media or as much in the news.

[stelf]

For most of my life in which I was aware of polygamy, I viewed it as a hard sacrifice that I didn't understand and was grateful I didn't have to practice. At this point I see no way that men and women can be considered equal in this kind of arrangement. As @bluebell stated "polygamous marriage is a multiplication for the man and a division for the woman". For me this is directly contradictory to the claim that God loves all his children equally. Even "coupled with eternally glory" it is an inequality.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

On 8/24/2025 at 12:59 AM, Devobah said:

divorce during the height of the plural marriage era of the church.

If you all will indulge me one more family history story, Lorena's mother Flora was picked up as a third wife in Nauvoo in 1846. Had a baby shortly thereafter and started to cross the plains. A couple things left Flora dissatisfied with her situation. One, the husband was very harsh with her child and two, he pretty much left her to get across the plains on her own as he was off pursing wife number four. Flora was fed up, and decided to divorce and marry a different individual as a second wife. 

According to Flora's first husband: "Among other things to annoy me, my wife, [Flora], rebelled at my government of her child and left us upon the road, and associated with a family named Washburn, into which she afterwards married." According to Flora's daughter Lorena: "Mother had become alienated from her husband on account of his conduct. She laid her case before President Brigham Young. Johnson at first refused to sign the divorce and sent it back to Salt Lake unsigned, but President Young said, ‘I will see that he does sign it,’ and he did.”

 

Edited August 26, 2025 by SeekingUnderstanding

[bluebell]

2 hours ago, stelf said:

For most of my life in which I was aware of polygamy, I viewed it as a hard sacrifice that I didn't understand and was grateful I didn't have to practice. At this point I see no way that men and women can be considered equal in this kind of arrangement. As @bluebell stated "polygamous marriage is a multiplication for the man and a division for the woman". For me this is directly contradictory to the claim that God loves all his children equally. Even "coupled with eternally glory" it is an inequality.

I guess the idea of inequality in polygamy isn’t a dealbreaker for me when it comes to mortality because I’m a woman.

As a woman, the stuff that I have to suffer through and deal with for 50+ years of my life in order to have children for a few years is completely outrageous. In my opinion, this is especially true when you compared it to what a man has to do to have children. There’s really not anything more unequal in life than that difference, in my opinion.

And yet it appears to be an inequality that God is completely OK with for now, for whatever reasons.

i’m not saying it has to make sense to anybody else, but for me, as long as that inequality punches me in the face every month, I can’t use inequality as a reason not to accept that polygamy could be condoned by God.

(maybe I could come up with some other reasons, but inequality is off the table as a valid one for me.)

 

Edited August 26, 2025 by bluebell

[Devobah]

1 hour ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

If you all will indulge me one more family history story, Lorena's mother Flora was picked up as a third wife in Nauvoo in 1846. Had a baby shortly thereafter and started to cross the plains. A couple things left Flora dissatisfied with her situation. One, the husband was very harsh with her child and two, he pretty much left her to get across the plains on her own as he was off pursing wife number four. Flora was fed up, and decided to divorce and marry a different individual as a second wife. 

According to Flora's first husband: "Among other things to annoy me, my wife, [Flora], rebelled at my government of her child and left us upon the road, and associated with a family named Washburn, into which she afterwards married." According to Flora's daughter Lorena: "Mother had become alienated from her husband on account of his conduct. She laid her case before President Brigham Young. Johnson at first refused to sign the divorce and sent it back to Salt Lake unsigned, but President Young said, ‘I will see that he does sign it,’ and he did.”

Family history really is something that I should look more into. I don't know for sure if mine is as detailed as yours is though. This is very interesting.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

14 minutes ago, Devobah said:

Family history really is something that I should look more into. I don't know for sure if mine is as detailed as yours is though. This is very interesting.

I’ve got a ton and it’s all fascinating. The closer you get to original sources the more raw and real it is. In a rare reversal of roles on polygamy, another gg grandmother was Eliza Cusworth Burton Staker. Here I’m speaking more from memory so hopefully I won’t mess up too much. Eliza and her first husband Joseph converted in England with two young children, but Joseph died shortly thereafter. Eliza walked across the plains with the Martin Handcart company with her two young children (age 7 and 4). Met a widower (Nathan)in Salt Lake, they married and had an additional 5 children but they were all sealed to the first husband and as they believed she and they would be his (the first husbands) in the eternities. Real life makes a mess of “simple gospel truths” at times. Nathan stood proxy actually for the sealing.