An article by Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune entitled Polygamy remains PR stumbling block for Mormons.
An interesting read, but I don’t know enough about Mormonism to reconcile this article with, say, Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.” Krakauer’s account makes Mormonism look to suffer from more than just a public relations problem. The doctrine seems deeply weird — though, I guess I don’t know how much weirder it would seem than any other religion if Joseph Smith had been born a thousand years ago instead of a couple hundred. Age seems to have a way of immunizing the oddities of religious doctrine. And, the way polygamy works seems to involve a lot of coercion rather than a choice made freely by adults with relatively equal power. The extent of its embrace by Mormons is also a matter of some dispute. The article says that Mormons abandoned polygamy over a century ago. Krakauer suggests that the abandonment was more PR than truly embraced by the top echelon of Mormon officials. And, the article hints at that:
Ultimately, the polygamy link to Mormonism won’t go away, either, said Valerie Hudson, a political-science professor at Brigham Young University, until Mormons themselves stop believing that it is the marriage pattern in heaven.
Regular Americans “rightly suspect that there are a decent amount of Mormons — about 50 percent — who believe they will be practicing polygamy again someday,” Hudson said, “if not here, at least in the hereafter.”
The whole discussion over the Morman position(s) concerning polygamy remind me of how the first sentence of HJR-6, the first sentence of the proposed amendment to Indiana’s constitution that’s now passed once in the General Assembly really ought to read to be factually correct:
“Only a marriage between one (1) man and one (1) woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Indiana. Provided, however, that the no law limiting the number of marriages any man or woman may enter into during their lifetimes shall be valid, so long as they are sequention and not simultaneious. Nor shall any law restrict marriage or the benefits thereof to couples with children, nor specify any lenght of time a marriage must endore.”
Doug (and Don), if you haven’t ever heard Julia Sweeney’s CD set, “Letting Go of God,” order it now. Her “spiritual journey” begins when two young Mormon missionaries knock on her door…..It is a hysterically funny description of her (unsuccessful) search for God.
I don’t care how many wives Mormons expect to have in the hereafter so long as they’re not going to blow themselves up in populated public places to hasten the day.
Is the standard punishment for polygamy still having to have multiple wives? [/duck]
Parker: No, but having had more than one (sequentially, of course) has given one GOP Presidential contender some problems. Fortunately Rick Perry hasn’t had that difficulty…..he might not have been able to remember the third one’s name anyway.