Interesting Presentation: Ethics Of Polygamy

[USU78]

Principle Voices is in no way affiliated with Warren Jeffs' group and certainly does not defend or condone Warren Jeffs' ideas on polygamy:

Q: Is Warren Jeffs connected with your group?

Anne Wilde (Community Relations Director, Principle Voices): Not at all. Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist LDS church is only one of many fundamentalist groups. I've never met him, and I don't particularly want to meet him. I know some of the people who have left his community, but I am glad to say I am not associated with his leadership in any way.

Q: Why are you glad about it?

Wilde: I understand that he has exercised a lot of control over his people and has condoned and even married underage women. I believe that a girl ought to be 18, generally speaking, before she gets married, in monogamy or polygamy. And so there are things I've heard have gone on in that community that I am glad I am not a part of. And yet I still respect a lot of people that are members of that group.

I am glad you brought up this issue of young girls being taken into marriages.

I do not condone that or recommend it.

A Second Wife's Tale

I'm glad you ran that down, Nighthawke. It echoes my position exactly.

I have no problem with folks' unauthorized (from the LDS Church's position) practice of a version of the Principle:

It is the marriages of underaged girls, especially to older men;

It is the marriages to too close kin;

It is the widespread welfare fraud; and

It is the outright thievery of people's homes

that have always been a problem amongst the Short Creek Fundies that stick in my craw and lead me to root for prosecutions both in Arizona and Utah.

Take those items out of the equation, and I'm just fine with 'em.

Those folks forget that:

The Orderville, Brigham City, and other UEPs did not mispropriate the homes of folks who left the Order;

The XIXth Century polygynist Mormons in greater Deseret did not go on the dole to support their peculiar lifestyle;

The close-kin marriages were a tiny minority (about as frequent as other close-kin marriages on the frontier); and

XIXth Century marriages on the frontier tended to come at younger ages for girls . . . but not so in the more settled areas and certainly not so today.

They are not the mirror image, or even a particularly interesting caricature, of my Great- and Great-Great Grandparents' experiences living the Principle.

[John Corrill]

Nighthawke: My posts have been specific to the FLDS....

John Corrill: My posts have been in regards to "contempory polygamy" in general, which would include the whole spectrum of Fundamentalist Mormons. I think there is much to be learned by observing all groups.

Nighthawke: Principle Voices is in no way affiliated with Warren Jeffs' group...

John Corrill: I understand that.

Nighthawke: I'm glad to hear that you talked to some of these women; so, what did they think about your thoughts and feelings with reference to Joseph Smith?

John Corrill: We didn't talk about Joseph Smith. I mostly asked questions and listened. I was interested in learning about them - their culture, their motivation, their beliefs, how they got involved in modern polygamy, etc, etc.

For some reason, I only get "preachy" about Joseph Smith in forums like this When you and I bump into each other at FAIR someday, I'm guessing we could have a great discussion about the beautiful landscapes in Canada, our latest hobbies or projects, or the politcal state of the world, and not even mention Joseph Smith once!

[John Corrill]

USU78: The XIXth Century polygynist Mormons in greater Deseret did not go on the dole to support their peculiar lifestyle....They are not the mirror image, or even a particularly interesting caricature, of my Great- and Great-Great Grandparents' experiences living the Principle.

John Corrill: Instead of going on the dole, the women and children were just neglected, never saw their father because he had his wives spread out from Provo to Bear Lake to Star Valley to Brigham City. The wife never had any money and had to hire out as a maid. When the wife finally got fed up and left the husband, she and the kids ran a farm so they would have some food to eat.

This is the caricature of mine and many others Grandparents experiences living the Principle.

[Nighthawke]

I don't believe the Church is embarrassed about polygamy, if they were then why footnote something to a book that has all that information at one's fingertips?

If they weren't, why not show the same respect for polygamous wive's of Prophets as they do for monogamous wives of Prophets and reflrect them as "Significant Events"? Why not mention them at all on an official website that is supposed to give a history of each Prophet? Why only mention the monogamous wives?

Why only in a "footnote" to an unofficial publication when it would be so simple to include the sacred and meaningful polygamous marriages of the Church founders as a "Significant Event", in the very websight they do for monogamous marriages of past prophets? Why do they so obviously differentiate the "significance" of these two types of marriages in the same websight? It would be so easy to include, reflect a consistency in content, and show the same respect for these women of supposedly sacred marriages as their monogaous counterparts!

Why?

If you really want to know why then I suggest you ask the Church instead of a message board.

I've never had a problem getting the information. It is available, much of it has been published by the Church-owned presses (Deseret or BYU). And like I said a lot of it is available on Church-owned websites, you just need to click extra icons to get to it. I am presently writing up short biographies of many plural wives and have been able to find information on all of them so far and I live all the way up in eastern Canada.

[Nighthawke]

John Corrill: Instead of going on the dole, the women and children were just neglected, never saw their father because he had his wives spread out from Provo to Bear Lake to Star Valley to Brigham City. The wife never had any money and had to hire out as a maid. When the wife finally got fed up and left the husband, she and the kids ran a farm so they would have some food to eat.

This is the caricature of mine and many others Grandparents experiences living the Principle.

um, "caricature"?

In what timeline did all of this happen? Sometimes knowing what year something occurred explains a lot. On the other hand not all polygamous marriages were ideal. Monogamist marriages often end up in divorce. Indeed the divorce rate in plural marriages was lower in the nineteenth century that today's monogamous marriage divorce rates.

[katherine the great]

One of the biggest differences between this group and 19th century Mormons is geography. There is NO where for these people to run. The government is going to have to take a hard look at marriage and decide if monogamy is truly the one true "American Way." Then they need to address the problem of underage marriages and the extreme poverty.

[Nighthawke]

One of the biggest differences between this group and 19th century Mormons is geography. There is NO where for these people to run. The government is going to have to take a hard look at marriage and decide if monogamy is truly the one true "American Way." Then they need to address the problem of underage marriages and the extreme poverty.

You're absolutely right... the planet ends at the U.S. border.

The government hasn't prosecuted anyone for polygamy since the Short Creek raid back in the 50s. It isn't about polygamy and hasn't been about polygamy for decades.

[Ref]

If you really want to know why then I suggest you ask the Church instead of a message board.

I have on several occasions over the past year by submitting that very question on their official website in the venue they provide for questions to be asks. It

[USU78]

The XIXth Century polygynist Mormons in greater Deseret did not go on the dole to support their peculiar lifestyle....They are not the mirror image, or even a particularly interesting caricature, of my Great- and Great-Great Grandparents' experiences living the Principle.

Instead of going on the dole, the women and children were just neglected, never saw their father because he had his wives spread out from Provo to Bear Lake to Star Valley to Brigham City. The wife never had any money and had to hire out as a maid. When the wife finally got fed up and left the husband, she and the kids ran a farm so they would have some food to eat.

This is the caricature of mine and many others Grandparents experiences living the Principle.

You misconstrue the exception to be the rule.

By no means do I assert that neglect never happened: folks is folks, after all, East or West.

But neglect rarely happened, unless you want to include the condition of the women forced to band together to form a economically viable unit when the "breadwinner" patriarch is off on mission after mission after mission among the neglected. I do not.

My paternal-paternal-paternal GG Grandfather was a serial monogamist and went on mission after mission after mission, and his 2nd (and later 3rd) wife was left alone with some grown and partially grown stepchildren as well as young children or her own to help her get by.

There's hardly anything that approaches a straightline correspondence between such women's experiences and the Short Creek folks.

[Nighthawke]

Also Nighthawke, could you refer to the places at lds.org where you found all this information on polygamy? Is it within the official church website or links to unofficial sources. Thanks in advance.

The Internet links I use are all Church-owned websites; that includes BYU websites which lds.org links to.

[Ref]

Also Nighthawke, could you refer to the places at lds.org where you found all this information on polygamy?  Is it within the official church website or links to unofficial sources.  Thanks in advance.

The Internet links I use are all Church-owned websites; that includes BYU websites which lds.org links to.

Great.

Could you provide me specific references?

Thanks in advance again!

Also, any opinion on why only polygamous wives were excluded from the official "History of the Prophets" website?

[Nighthawke]

Also Nighthawke, could you refer to the places at lds.org where you found all this information on polygamy?

[katherine the great]

You're absolutely right... the planet ends at the U.S. border.

The government hasn't prosecuted anyone for polygamy since the Short Creek raid back in the 50s. It isn't about polygamy and hasn't been about polygamy for decades.

For Americans it does. I suppose they could all immigrate to Mexico.

I don't understand your second comment. If a thread on the ethics of polygamy isn't about polygamy, what is it about?

[Nighthawke]

The government hasn't prosecuted anyone for polygamy since the Short Creek raid back in the 50s. It isn't about polygamy and hasn't been about polygamy for decades.

I don't understand your second comment. If a thread on the ethics of polygamy isn't about polygamy, what is it about?

You're the one who referenced the government when you typed, "The government is going to have to take a hard look at marriage and decide if monogamy is truly the one true "American Way.""

I was just letting you know that the government hasn't prosecuted anyone for polygamy since the Short Creek raid in the 1950s.

Attorney General Shurtleff says that the Utah government is not interested in prosecuting anybody for polygamy and neither is Arizona. So it seems to me that the governments have taken a hard look at polygamous marriage and decided that they aren't going to prosecute anyone who is a polygamist with polygamy/cohabitation/bigamy if it was consensual between adults.

Warren Jeffs for example is not charged with being a polygamist.

[John Corrill]

USU78: You misconstrue the exception to be the rule...neglect rarely happened...

John Corrill: Hardly. Where do you come up with this stuff, USU78?. One does not have to look that deeply into polygamy - in any era - to find neglected wives and needy children. If we need to go into all the documentation on this, my evening is free and I will be happy to post references all night long about the neglect of wives and children in polygamy - and that would just get us through Joseph Smith's neglect of his own wives.

[USU78]

You misconstrue the exception to be the rule...neglect rarely happened...

Hardly. Where do you come up with this stuff, USU78?. One does not have to look that deeply into polygamy - in any era - to find neglected wives and needy children. If we need to go into all the documentation on this, my evening is free and I will be happy to post references all night long about the neglect of wives and children in polygamy - and that would just get us through Joseph Smith's neglect of his own wives.

We were having a conversation about the Deseret example. JSJr's experience, whatever you think of it, is quite inapposite to that discussion.

Take away the mission experience (which is plainly seen by the participants as a sacred duty) which applies to both monogamous and polygynous marriages in Deseret, and you can come up with very few concrete examples of what could be called neglect.

But let's please avoid the presentist fallacy: what you and I might see as neglectful behavior was not seen as such at the time.

[John Corrill]

USU78: We were having a conversation about the Deseret example. JSJr's experience, whatever you think of it, is quite inapposite to that discussion.

Take away the mission experience (which is plainly seen by the participants as a sacred duty) which applies to both monogamous and polygynous marriages in Deseret, and you can come up with very few concrete examples of what could be called neglect.

John Corrill: The time period doesn't matter one bit. There are scores of examples of neglect of wives and children in polygamy whether it's the Joseph Smith era or the Deseret era. I'm equally happy spending the evening rolling out examples and references about Wilford Woodruff, Brigham Young, my own Deseret ancestors, etc. There are plenty of concrete examples to keep us busy.

USU78: But let's please avoid the presentist fallacy: what you and I might see as neglectful behavior was not seen as such at the time.

John Corrill: I agree. It's very possible that those dishing out the neglect and abuse, did not see it as such.

[USU78]

We were having a conversation about the Deseret example. JSJr's experience, whatever you think of it, is quite inapposite to that discussion.

Take away the mission experience (which is plainly seen by the participants as a sacred duty) which applies to both monogamous and polygynous marriages in Deseret, and you can come up with very few concrete examples of what could be called neglect.

The time period doesn't matter one bit. There are scores of examples of neglect of wives and children in polygamy whether it's the Joseph Smith era or the Deseret era. I'm equally happy spending the evening rolling out examples and references about Wilford Woodruff, Brigham Young, my own Deseret ancestors, etc. There are plenty of concrete examples to keep us busy.

But let's please avoid the presentist fallacy: what you and I might see as neglectful behavior was not seen as such at the time.

I agree. It's very possible that those dishing out the neglect and abuse, did not see it as such.

Scores of examples amongst how many total?

How do those numbers compare to the general monogamous population?

By whose measurement are we to judge neglect?

[Nighthawke]

John Corrill: The time period doesn't matter one bit. There are scores of examples of neglect of wives and children in polygamy whether it's the Joseph Smith era or the Deseret era. I'm equally happy spending the evening rolling out examples and references about Wilford Woodruff, Brigham Young, my own Deseret ancestors, etc. There are plenty of concrete examples to keep us busy.

The timeline matters a whole heck of a lot actually once the feds started hunting down 'cohabs' and you should darn well know that.

Surely you are aware that men were fined and jailed in the penitentiary for having dinner with a suspected plural wife, for financially assisting a suspected plural wife, for visiting the children of his suspected plural wife, et cetera. 'The Raid' forced men, women and children apart. I know of one case where the man was fined and jailed twice and his plural wife was also sent to the penitentiary because she didn't want to answer questions.

I can't believe you have the gall to say "the time period doesn't matter one bit."

[Nighthawke]

USU78: But let's please avoid the presentist fallacy: what you and I might see as neglectful behavior was not seen as such at the time.

John Corrill: I agree. It's very possible that those dishing out the neglect and abuse, did not see it as such.

And maybe it is your imagination working overtime again.

I'm tired of you not posting any documentation John Corrill, I think it's time you brought something to the table.

[USU78]

USU78:  But let's please avoid the presentist fallacy: what you and I might see as neglectful behavior was not seen as such at the time.

John Corrill:  I agree.  It's very possible that those dishing out the neglect and abuse, did not see it as such.

And maybe it is your imagination working overtime again.

I'm tired of you not posting any documentation John Corrill, I think it's time you brought something to the table.

Hear! Hear!

[John Corrill]

Nighthawke: The timeline matters a whole heck of a lot actually once the feds started hunting down 'cohabs' and you should darn well know that...I can't believe you have the gall to say "the time period doesn't matter one bit."

John Corrill: As far as neglect directed toward women and children, the time period really does not matter. Joseph Smith was sneaking around, hiding his wives, trying to avoid being caught, every bit as much as those in the Deseret Era. His treated his plural wives inappropriately every bit as much as women in other eras of polygamy were treated. Neglect of women and children is an instrinsic part of polygamy. I understand that you like to point fingers at the law or the feds or somewhere else, but really the primary problems are with polygamy itself, not with societal reaction to polygamy. Criminals always feel picked on by the law. Our polygamist ancestors are no exception.

Nighthawke: And maybe it is your imagination working overtime again.

John Corrill: Oh no. Not again! I hate it when this happens

Nighthawke: I'm tired of you not posting any documentation John Corrill, I think it's time you brought something to the table.

John Corrill: I agree!!! Since I am a busy boy at work right now, I previously offered to spend time this evening offering up examples (with documentation, of course) of neglect in polygamy from either the Joseph Smith era or the Deseret era. Where should we start?

[Nighthawke]

Nighthawke:  I'm tired of you not posting any documentation John Corrill, I think it's time you brought something to the table.

John Corrill:  I agree!!!  Since I am a busy boy at work right now, I previously offered to spend time this evening offering up examples (with documentation, of course) of neglect in polygamy from either the Joseph Smith era or the Deseret era.  Where should we start?

Just put your cards on the table and let's see what you've got. And please don't put up the same old stuff that has already been rebutted on this board and on ZLMB because then that makes you just another one-song apostate wonder, in which case you can consider our chat at an end.

[USU78]

I for one would appreciate context being supplied.

For example, if abusive patriarchal polygynist X is to be accepted as being abusive to/neglectful of wives and children, I would like to see the circumstances which surround his neglect, if any. Being "neglectful" because you're on a mission or in the Sugarhouse Pen is unimpressive to me.

And I'd really like to see what passes for a definition of "neglect" and "abuse" that is not mere Mormonslamming. Let's be specific.

[katherine the great]

The government hasn't prosecuted anyone for polygamy since the Short Creek raid back in the 50s. It isn't about polygamy and hasn't been about polygamy for decades.

I don't understand your second comment. If a thread on the ethics of polygamy isn't about polygamy, what is it about?

You're the one who referenced the government when you typed, "The government is going to have to take a hard look at marriage and decide if monogamy is truly the one true "American Way.""

I was just letting you know that the government hasn't prosecuted anyone for polygamy since the Short Creek raid in the 1950s.

Attorney General Shurtleff says that the Utah government is not interested in prosecuting anybody for polygamy and neither is Arizona. So it seems to me that the governments have taken a hard look at polygamous marriage and decided that they aren't going to prosecute anyone who is a polygamist with polygamy/cohabitation/bigamy if it was consensual between adults.

Warren Jeffs for example is not charged with being a polygamist.

Do you think they are going to be able to continue to ignore the issue with all the press this is getting?