This article proves once again that polygamy is straight from the pits of hell.
FIP Ping
I don’t see what is in it for the guys? Did people find any of those women atractive? My Gooness. It was the biggest does of anti-viagra one could imagine. But that’s just me.
I suspect that when the smoke clears, Texas will be nearly bankrupted. Instead of individual ‘due process’ all children were forcibly taken from their parents - not just those ‘at risk’, but every child. If the threat is to underage girls, then why are the boys taken? Why are children under 5 being forcibly separated from their mothers?
The phone call was a hoax, and this is the basis for everything that Texas has done. No evidence, no criminal complaints - but private property was seiged, women were forcibly separated from their children - at people somehow support this....
If the issue is polygamy, fine. Due process, and press charges. If the issue is statutory rape, fine; press charges and have trials. But wholesale abduction of 100% of all the children is simply wrong.
I find it somewhat hypocritical, that in today’s society polygamy is looked upon as a huge crime; but a man can father unlimited children with unlimited women out of wedlock; and that’s just fine. In fact, if the police were to storm the ghetto and remove the children from groups of single mothers, who have a child without any ceremony from a single sperm donor - there would be hell to pay.
People seem eager to allow the gov’t to side-step the law; when their emotions get the better of them. I wonder if they will be this tolerant when some bureaucrat decides to take a short-cut and take your children from you.
Blame it all on polygamy? There’s more to the issue than that simple-minded approach.
bttt
The best summaries I have found to date are as follows:
Caution: This document explains the effects of polygamy in graphic detail. It is emotionally disturbing.
Caution: This 90 minute video is heart-wrenching. You will need a box of tissues by the time you get to the end.
The fLDS had excellent "tutors" in inheriting this mindset from their spiritual and family ancestors--the mainstream Mormons.
B. Carmon Hardy, in his book, A Solemn Covenant, makes it QUITE CLEAR that many, many 19th century LDS Mormons thought & taught that polygamy was sexually superior to monogamy precisely because Mormons tied sexual debauchery to monogamy--associating it with the plagues of prostitution, adultery, etc. (They conveyed that polygamy "solved" the problem of men having to pursue sex outside of marriage).
Totally hypocritical on the part of Mormons. Here, a 21st century Mormon raves about the ethical traits of a Christian, monogamous marriage... yet if monogamy is so great, why were LDS 19th-century LDS apologetics full of the "evils" of monogamy? [At a stake conference in northern Utah in the summer of 1900, LDS Apostle Matthias F. Cowley spoke on plural marriage and referred to the 'evils of monogamy.' (A Solemn Covenant, p. 189, original source was Clawson Diaries, Aug. 25, 1900)]
LDS apostle Orson Pratt urged the Saints to do all they could to purge from their own and their children's memories knowledge of Christian marital tradition. ("Celestial Marriage," Seer 1 Nov. 1853, p. 173. Similar comments in JoD vol. 12, p. 92, 1867.)
Besides, if 19th century LDS polygamy had "nothing to do with sexual debauchery," why did Benjamin F. Johnson recall that Joseph Smith taught him that plural marriage was the only means by which prostitution could be eliminated. (A Solemn Covenant, p. 16)
So--not from a personal perspective necessarily (between couples) but from a Joseph Smith policy perspective--Johnson's remembrance shows that a true purpose of plurality (not the only one) was in effect to have an "in-house" prostitute. How base is that for 19th LDS to have embraced that vantage point? Hardy cited other LDS who thought that mass polygamy would "eliminate sexual wickedness" and LDS general authority/legislator, William Gibson, who after-the-fact claimed to have voted against the Manifesto, called it "the best antidote to sexual sin." (A Solemn Covenant, p. 145, citing William Gibson, who was quoted in "Polygamous Issues," DN, March 28, 1896.)
"The need for prostitution...was seized on by Mormons as evidence that monogamy was manifestly an incorrect system of marriage...From the 1850s until the end of the century, Mormon writers and speakers struck at what they considered their detractors' hypocrisy for criticizing Mormon marriage when, as the First Presidency affirmed in 1886, adultery and prostitution were the consequences of the monogamic arrangement.... (A Solemn Covenant, p. 89, citing "An Epistle of the First Presidency..." March 1886, Messages 3:68...Hardy cites in the same footnote about 8 other sources from Heber C. Kimball to Brigham Young to John Taylor to George Q. Cannon to apostle Erasmus Snow).
So there ya go! The embracing of polygamy naturally led to an elitist position where polygamists looked down upon, frowned upon, and even openly dismissed or criticized "monogamy!" When you have an LDS "prophet" in 1886 claiming that adultery and prostitution were the consequences of monogamy, that's a major, major problem!!! about it so base? Hardy devotes a full chapter to how LDS regarded it as sexually superior--not for erotic or orgy reasons--but for what they regarded was the "opposite"--associating prostitution and the resulting ill-health with monogamy, etc.
Mainstream Mormonism taught us plenty about this in its practice of it in the late 19th century and early 20th century...and the progenitor results, the fLDS learned their lessons well from their tutors.
(1) Large families are great, but they went beyond this to a "breeding" mentality: At a stake conference, LDS leader Cannon of the First Presidency said: The people of the world do not believe in breeding, but we do.<./u> So the people of the world will die out and we will fill the whole earth. I admit those raising children by plural wives are not complying with man-made laws, but in the sight of God they are not sinning, as there is no sin in it. (George Q. Cannon, Sanpete Stake conference, Sept., 1899. Smoot Investigation, Vol. 1, p. 9.) [BTW, fLDS still cite this LDS source]
(2) It bred wifely jealousy and fueled baby-conception competitions similar to Genesis 30.
(3) It engendered an attitude that polygamy was superior to monogamy and that it was necessary to attain the highest degree of heaven.
(4) It led to thousands of incidents in lifestyle, word, and deed filled with duplicity--of people "lying for the Lord" to cover it up.
(5) Some Mormon leaders, says B. Carmon Hardy-- leaders like Democrat Brigham Roberts who was elected to Congress by Utah voters--linked polygamy with eugenics and creating a "superrace."
(6) Underage girls were exploited into coerced marriages by mainstream Mormonism for over 70 years.
(7) Marriages were "contracted between the nearest of relatives," said Fanny Stenhouse, an LDS plural wife of the 19th century.
(8) "Joseph E. Robinson recalled that President Lorenzo Snow told him that he had father a child in his eighty-eighth year." (source B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant, p. 93) When men are bearing children that old in an era not resembling early Old Testament ages, they are likely assuring their child will grow up most of his or her years minus that father's presence.
(9) The people began to consider themselves "above the law." Brigham Young said: "If I had forty wives in the United States, they did not know it, and could not substantiate it, neither did I ask any lawyer, judge, or magistrate for them. I live above the law, and so do this people" (Journal of Discourses, vol. 1, p.361).
(10) Plural wives like Margaret Geddes had husbands who denied being married to them, cutting them out of inheritance rights for children. (Geddes sued and won)
From the article:
As a teenager, Mrs. Mackert was assigned to marry her stepbrother, with whom she had three children. Shortly before the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, her husband, who had not taken a second wife, announced that he was not a believer in polygamy and was filing for divorce.
The FLDS subsequently assigned Mrs. Mackert to marry a man who was more than 30 years her senior and the husband of her sister. Mrs. Mackert refused.
“They told me I had the spirit of apostasy ... and took away my children,” she said. “I was told they were conceived under the covenant of plural marriages and that I no longer had a right to them.”
Her children were placed with her parents — a situation that terrified Mrs. Mackert, given her father’s abuse — and told that she had abandoned them.
Already posted here. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2006719/posts