Another bit on Polygamy

My church has been in the news a lot lately. A lot. Most of the media attention has good things to say, but no one seems to be able to get over the polygamy thing. In every single news article, even if it is just about how Romney sneezed, they have to add some kind of caveat: "Mormonism, which abandoned the practice of polygamy in 1890...." Since we stopped doing polygamy 120 years ago, is there really any need to keep bringing it up?

I was raised LDS, and I had never even heard of polygamy until I was about eight or nine. I might even have been older. Kids at school found out I was Mormon and started making fun of me for having six moms. "In your church, people are supposed to have lots of wives!" "That is NOT TRUE!" I would yell with tears in my eyes. When I found out that polygamy was truly a part of the early church, I was completely shocked. I think the fact that it is not part of the Primary curriculum should be a good indication as to how modern Latter Day Saints feel about polygamy.

Now that I've grown up and learned more about plural marriage, I have formed my own opinions, and I am pretty strongly entrenched them. My opinions and how I arrived at them are personal, so I won't share that here right now.

That said, in my own family history, polygamy has been the source of a lot of pain and suffering. One ancestor, for example, was told that he and his wife would never have children until he took a second wife. He complied but he married the homeliest girl he could find. He always made it very clear to everyone that he always favored the first wife. The first wife and her children got a nice house, nice clothing, nice everything, while the second wife's kids had to wear raggedy old clothes. Do you think the second wife's kids got to go to college? Ha. (I'm descended from the second wife. We're not bitter.)

Another ancestor from a different branch of the family took a second wife the year before the manifesto. His first wife, my great-great-grandmother, had waited for this guy for years while he served a mission in the Sandwich Islands. Everyone in her family urged her to forget about him and marry someone else, but she refused, so deep was her love for him. She was very hurt that he would even dream of taking a second wife (even though her husband divorced the interloper only about four years later) that she could never stand to talk about it until her dying day.

As you can imagine, no one I know is in a huge hurry to have this sort of thing brought back.  And mentioning it every time anyone has anything to say about Mormons is kind of like saying, "...South Carolina, which was the first state to secede from the Union..." or "...the Southern United States, which disavowed the Jim Crow laws in 1965..." or, my favorite, "Germans, who were largely responsible for all that unpleasantness back in the '40s..."


I hope that these comparisons shame the media into getting over it.