I don’t get it – Mormons have a history that was largely built on persecution for the way they wanted to marry. My family was part of that history – and although I am what is now called a Jack Mormon (for me a cultural or historical Mormon) – my families’ pride has been strongly tied to the essential Mormon struggle.People should live their lives in the light of day – and families should be able to form and protect the family unit no matter what that family looks like. So long as people are not exploited and others are not damaged, then how can another’s choices hurt me?
The troubles affecting the early Mormon Church drove them from New York, to Illinois to Utah Territories – and drove them from practicing one of their basic tenets. Now another disaffected group is being discriminated because of beliefs that are personal, and don’t affect anyone not directly practicing this lifestyle and one of the loudest protests is coming from the LDS.
A good friend wrote to me and one thing she said was “I like the idea of boycotting Utah ...it really pisses me off that a church would spend millions of dollars on banning marriage when there's children starving in this country. Their list of priorities is f*'d.
I hope it gets overturned....”
Each of my parents had ancestors that went back to the first families (yes, the pilgrims) that settled the country that later became the United States of America. Some of those pilgrims went back to Huguenots that fled France for religious freedom in England, LatEr fled England to the Netherlands and then back to England and onto the Colonies for religious freedom in the New World. Some went on to follow some of the 19th Century religious experiments like the Oneida Colony and the fledgling LDS under the leadership of Jos. Smith in New York.
The LDS had unconventional beliefs that upset the neighbors and were driven out of New York, and every community they settled in. I grew up hearing about the atrocities done to my ancestors – in the 1970s my father and I took my children on a sort of pilgrimage to our cultural ‘holy sites’ at the early settlements; we followed the Mormon Trail from Nauvoo west and visited sites in Utah, Idaho, Nevada and California.
All my life I had such pride that my ancestors were “willing” to die for the things that they believed in.
There are people, like the ancestor pictured here, Sarah, who fled the aggre
ssion against Mormons. She was the mother of nine, (the last born and died on the trail), her husband died of cholera and was buried in the Mormon Trail (actually in the trail – so that the wagons would run over the grave and wild animals would not dig up the remains) – this woman carried on. She later entered into a plural marriage as the second wife to a bishop who was, I think, heroic. He and his first wife opened their little sod home to a woman with seven living children at home.These Mormon ancestors were willing to flee, fight and many times die for their beliefs – they truly suffered physically, emotionally and financially for nearly a century; these people walked across continents for their unorthodox beliefs. They just wanted to live in a place where they could hold their heads high and live in peace with their families – they did not ask others to live the way they lived.
Maybe it all changed in the 1890’s when the church abandoned the practice of plural marriage to stop the US Army from militarily enforcing the territory’s residents with prosecution under the new laws against polygamy. Utah was then an island of Mormons with unusual beliefs – and it was inevitable that it had to end to get statehood. So, just as a revelation had started plural marriage – a revelation ended it.
They did not force abandonment of already established families – but at least one family in the highest level of the LDS Church did forsake all its ‘sister wives’ except for the first wife.
My great grandmother, the fifth wife in a plural marriage, was abandoned and instantly was an unwed mother of two, now, bastard children – during a time that this was truly a disgrace. This young woman, in her twenties fled her home town, in shame, in the middle of the night. She invented a new history for herself by going to a mining town in an adjoining state and gaining employment as a laundry woman to support her two children – and telling people that she was a widow. She later met and married my great grandfather – they fled this community also, to set up a new lives even farther from the territory. All her life she was terrified that her history would be discovered and she would bring further shame to her husband and family.
Living their beliefs in the light of day had ended their problems, for a while, and when the law no longer protected their lives then dishonor, fear and shame returned and families were irreparably damaged.
We are going through a period in our cultural history when many are choosing to have children and not marry, a time when many parents have chosen to have very limited relationships with their children. Millions of children are neglected; tens of thousands are in foster care. And in my lifetime I have seen divorce, with children, go from disgrace to acceptance to such an extent that people think it is remarkable for my husband and I to be together for almost four decades. Yet there is a segment of our society that is still optimistic enough to want to marry and have families.
Why would any of us fight this concept? And why would any group that was so persecuted for the composition of their families inflict this upon another group that really only wants that same peace and protection of law that so long eluded the early Mormons? I just don’t get it.
