Why is there no lesson in this year's Priesthood/Relief Society manual on the 1890 Manifesto of Wilford Woodruff???
There is token mention on p. xiii that President Woodruff "received a revelation from the Lord" on September 24, 1890. It is NOT hard to argue that this event was one of the most important in ALL of Church history. The Manifesto is plain for all to see in the D&C. So, why is it NOT plainly discussed???
Practice of polygamy will lead to excommunication. Therefore, we cannot argue that the Manifesto is irrelevant to today's practice of Mormonism. I guess I would just appreciate an open discussion in Church of the abandonment of polygamy
Excellent points, and this essentially resurrects the hoary old specter of the BY manual that failed to mention his polygamy. Some follow-up posts from some of the FAIR regulars, including this wiggedy-whack tidbit from juliann-the-perpetual-grad-student:
juliann wrote:(Her Amun @ Oct 27 2006, 10:22 PM)Actually, more wives=fewer babies. Under what scenario will more children be born, one man with 20 wives or 20 men with one wife each? Under scenario one, you have one sperm donor. Under scenario two, you have 20 sperm donors. For the polygamist in this situation, he would have to have sex as often as 20 men.
fewer children per woman,more children per man......i think that is what actually happened. this might actually be healthier for the woman and her offspring. This way a woman can cut back on child birth while still multiplying and repleneshing the earth.
You are right. There were some instances where there were more women (or at least not enough Mormon men.) It was also helpful to single immigrant women by distributing property. When the countermos think women back then could saddle up their horse and ride to the nearest ATM machine to pay for all of those C-sections and other life saving techniques... it is a little difficult to have a conversation about the limitations of life for women in that era. One of the major problems was their inability to control their own bodies and, thus, pregnancy. Pregnancy was serious business. Life for the lower class women was factory work....it doesn't get much worse than that. Until the countermos can muster the intellectual honesty to compare what a typical woman's life of that class would have been like in an eastern city as opposed to a Utah city these discussions never get anywhere.
Huh? What do class status and working conditions have to do with a woman's sharing her husband with other women? Also, doesn't juliann know that the de rigueur birth control method during that era was coitus interruptus? Or is she implying that Mormon men during the 19th century refused to do that, and that the women didn't get any say in the matter? Hmmmm.
Finally, we get Prof. Peterson, calling for a whitewash via one of my fave apologetic red herrings:
If the manual and the course of study were focused on Church history or on the biography of Wilford Woodruff, I would find it a serious oversight if the Manifesto were not treated in some detail.
Since the manual and the course of study are focused neither on Church history nor on the biography of Wilford Woodruff, I don't see why the Manifesto should be a focus of either the manual or classroom discussion.
I wonder how he feels about post-Manifesto polygamy, and whether or not he feels that that should be stricken from the record, too.