"I commend Kanab City Council on its bold and outspoken support of the "natural family".
Is "natural family" a code word for polygamous marriages?
Given the proximity to The Arizona Strip—the isolated patch of northwestern Arizona north of the Grand Canyon and south of the Utah, makes me wonder. The Arizona Strip is a hotbed of
plural marriages and is the location of Colorado City, the re-named Short Creek, Arizona, where raids on polygamous families took place in 1960.
I hear you. People keep trying to lump us in with the Colorado City/Hildale polygamists. There is no such connection and hasn't been for over 100 years. The reason is that when the LDS church abandoned polygamy before the turn of the 20th century, Colorado City/Hildale disregarded that and broke off into their own church. They haven't been associated with the LDS church, nor with Kanab, which is 40 miles away, for all that time.
In fact, when I was in Kanab as a youth, I was assigned to help the LDS missionaries go to Colorado City and convert them back to the faith (some of the wives there had invited us to try to end their cycle of misery). We were run out of town with threats of violence and I don't think we've been back since. One of our General Authorities, Vaughn J. Featherstone, once said that he would know that the Gospel had been preached to the ends of the earth when Colorado City became open to missionaries. That still hasn't happened yet, but Russia is pretty much wide open though.