I was somewhat disappointed in the clips of the show that I saw. He does explain that polygamy is not officially countenanced by the LDS today, but he did not do a very good job of explaining why they allowed it in the first place, nor the reasoning behind stopping the practice.
How many wives did King Solomon and King David have?
Beck can’t tell you why mormons practiced polygamy before because it was “revealed” so Joseph Smith could bed down under aged girls and other men’s wives.
And by the way polygamy is still practiced today, they cover it over by calling it celestial marriage.
Bullcrap!!
Tell that to their god!!!
It is STILL on the books!!
D&C 132:58-66
The spineless weasels of 18980 MORMONism threw their god under the bus in favor of statehood!
Technically, polygamy is still a mormon doctrine. Mormon scripture (D&C 132) still says polygamy is a good, divinely inspired institution. The church has never condemned the practice of polygamy. It has only told its members to temporarily stop doing it, because the US government and the federal army threatened to wipe out the church if it kept practicing it. With this threat over the church's head along with the church's hope to bolster Utah's application for statehood, the church finally promulgated a temporary ban on polygamy via the 1890 Manifesto. This ban does not repudiate polygamy as being wrong in of itself, but only says that until the prophet says otherwise that mormons should "refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land." Thus if the law of the land changes, polygamy will be ok under the wording of the manifesto. Also, all polygamous marriages contracted by members of the church up to that point in time were still allowed to stand by the church.
BTW, mormons believe in a ritual called "sealing" which joins a husband and wife in marriage for "time and all eternity." If the wife dies after being sealed to a husband, she is considered that husband's wife forever. If the husband survives his wife's decease and then gets "sealed" to another living woman, both women are considered his wives forever. Thus technically speaking, some mormons still believe they are practicing a form of celestial polygamy even today. The church approves these sealings so technically the church still approves of polygamy. Of course, the government doesn't much care about this as long as both wives are not living at the same time.