huckelberry wrote:Accept polygamy and you cross that river to being a people apart. Is that not what was intended? It could have produced fewer children in the short run but they were born inside a high fence.
Agreed on the outcome, although I think you stretch the interpretation that's been used since the beginning. Members who have polygamy in their family tree know the stigma and the sting attached to the word "Mormon" more than any convert ever will. Converts can claim they had nothing to do with it, and can at least put some distance between themselves and the abomination, claiming it happened long before they came on the scene. BIC have no such distance. That stigma reinforces the "us against them" that surrounds Mormon culture. We can't let it go and we sure can't kick it to the curb (as I definitely wish we would) because to do so negates the sacrifice made by all those ancestors of the staunch (re: tithe paying) BIC members who revere their pioneer ancestors.
People get all caught up in the hype surrounding the pioneers, and refuse to see what's in front of their faces: that our ancestors were duped, allowed themselves to be duped, embraced being duped, and took being duped to a whole new level. Were they to see Joseph as the lying adulterer he was puts their ancestors in the light of either really stupid or really crooked. No one wants to admit their ancestors were either.
Joseph needed a mechanism that solved two problems: his lust for women and his need to keep his followers in prophet-awe. Plural marriage solved both his problems. It was a slam-dunk to him: 1st, he gets to have multiple women in his bed and his wife can't complain, and 2nd, he involves all his closest friends on the down-low and they can't expose him without exposing themselves. The fly in the ointment was William Law, but Joseph thought he could ride rough-shod over him. That it backfired on him and led to his death was probably not in Joseph's plan when he ordered the destruction of the printing press.
So we're left with Joseph's excrement, the very human waste of his lust for women and power. On the one hand, we're abhorred and disgusted by the whole thing, and on the other, we want to honor and revere our ancestors and their sacrifice on our behalf (and on behalf of the nation... let us not forget that Brigham was a prime mover in opening the West). So we're conflicted. And our leaders are hamstrung. If they kick it to the curb (as I think some at least would), they admit that our ancestors were duped. If they keep it as it is now constituted, they are ridiculed by virtually everyone else and critics use it for ammunition, against which there is really no defense. No wonder they have so many splinters in their backsides; they're constantly shifting on that fence!
Interestingly enough, some of my Native friends are the ones least disgusted by it. They have it in their own ancestors, although they don't lie about nor do they claim it was a commandment from God.