~”So, how does the church explain the conflict of its doctrine compared to the fact that Smith was only legally married to one woman, and yet claimed to be married to others with whom he committed adultery?”~
There is no conflict. In that day, there was no law in the United States against polygamy. Therefore, Smith was legally married to more than one woman. In the eyes of the law, and, we believe, in the eyes of God, this was not adultery.
The nation made polygamy illegal after Smith’s time. After exhausting appeals to the highest court in the land, the Church fell in line with the law, and the engagement of new plural marriages, with a few aberrant exceptions, was eradicated.
Bringing us back to the original topic of the thread, engaging in polygamy today is an excommunicable offense.
You must be careful when judging the past through the prism of contemporary standards. You assume that polygamy is necessarily adultery because we consider it to be so today. That is not an historical truism.
Smith had sex with wives of other men. That is adultery under any standard; not just polygamy.
Sex with multiple women IS adultery. It doesn’t matter if it is legal or state law.
Words have meanings. Twisting them does not prove your case.
This is so incorrect, it's funny. There was no Federal law prohibiting polygamy in Joseph Smith's day, (those came a short time later - prompted precisely because of the Mormons), but every State had laws against adultery.
Adultery was defined as a man having sex with a woman other than his wife (singular). Just as todays laws say nothing specifically about gay marriage, it has always been prohibited (until the time that we are forced to address it).
Mormons were forced from State to State during Joseph Smith's time, not because they were jealous of his "revelation," but because of the practice of the aberrant multiple 'wives.'
The old copy of a paste was still on my clipboard...< embarrassed>
Uh...
Wasn't it 'illegal' in the STATES?
Bigamy is the crime of marrying while an undivorced spouse from a valid prior marriage is living. Because many prominent nineteenth-century Mormon men became polygamists under Church mandate, both their vulnerability to prosecution for bigamy and the legal attacks on the Church and its members for supporting plural marriage created a crisis for Mormonism during the 1870s and 1880s.
Bigamy was recognized as an offense by the early English ecclesiastical courts, which considered it an affront to the marriage Sacrament. Parliament enacted a statute in 1604 that made bigamy a felony cognizable in the English common law courts. After American independence, the states adopted antibigamy laws, but they received little attention until the nineteenth century in Utah.
The United States government has constitutional power to enact laws governing territories, and under that authority Congress enacted the Morrill Act (1862), making bigamy in a territory a crime punishable by a fine and five years in prison. The statute was upheld in Reynolds v. United States (1879), although the defendant argued that the law violated the First Amendment guarantee of the free exercise of religion.
Few Mormons were prosecuted for bigamy because the government had difficulty obtaining testimony about plural wedding ceremonies. Rather, they were charged with bigamous cohabitation, a misdemeanor created by the Edmunds Act (1882). Proving cohabitation was easy enough, and over 1,300 Latter-day Saints were jailed as "cohabs" in the 1880s.
Antipolygamy legislation also put pressure on the Church by threatening members' civil rights and Church property rights. The Edmunds Act barred persons living in polygamy from jury service, public office, and voting. The Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) disincorporated both the Church and the Perpetual Emigrating Fund on the ground that they fostered polygamy. Furthermore, it authorized seizure of Church real estate not directly used for religious purposes, and acquired in excess of a $50,000 limitation imposed by the Morrill Act. In the Idaho Territory a test oath adopted in 1885 was used to ban all Mormons (and former Mormons) from voting because of the Church's position on polygamy.
In 1890 after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the seizure of Church property under the Edmunds-Tucker Act in The Late Corporation of the Mormon Church v. United States and the Idaho test oath in Davis v. Beason, it became clear that plural marriage was leading toward the economic and political destruction of the Church. Shortly after these decisions, a revelation was received by President Wilford Woodruff, who then withdrew the requirement for worthy males to take plural wives and announced the manifesto, formally stating his counsel to Latter-day Saints to abide by antibigamy laws (see D&C Official Declaration—1). The Manifesto ended the legal confrontation between the U.S. government and the Church.
Congress passed a final federal antibigamy provision in 1892, which excluded polygamists from immigration into the United States. This exclusion remains part of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Code.
http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/daily/history/plural_marriage/Legislation_EOM.htm