People are often accused of pulling statements from the church from decades ago in order to demonstrate that the church is seeking to mislead re certain aspects of tis history. These statements are from two weeks ago, a year ago, etc. I simply cannot believe it continues. Truly just baffles me.
Perhaps you're an easy person to baffle, mms.
bc's thumbnail explanation is perfectly reasonable.
I think, given developments during the last thirty of forty years, we should be very, very careful in taking the side of the state against a religious out-group just because we find one or more of their practices unpalatable, in our own estimation.
David Koresh and his followers, though certainly believing things I and other Americans would find odd or ridiculous, was, nonetheless, harmless. However, based upon nothing more than hearsay evidence, and the paranoia of a virulently anti-religious federal government, fearful and hostile to groups given to succession from the common culture, even if doing no harm to those around them, the government physically assaulted the Koresh compound and burned it to the ground, killing adults and children in the process.
Polygamy, whatever one may think about the particular LDS version (and there is no reason to believe, traditional Protestant comprehensions of the issue nothwithstanding, that all forms of plural marriage are equal, or necessarily negative in their consequences), involved, as practiced by LDS, the same moral and ethical standards obtaining in monogamous relationships (which were still the overwhelming majority of relationships in nineteenth century Mormonism). Polygamy, as all other callings or ordinations in the Church, were entered into willingly, by woman as well as men who were called to that practice, and given the truely small percentage of LDS who actually ever engaged in the practice, the continued preoccupation (especially in a secular culture that for several generations has gone out of the way to glorify serial sexual relationships that amount, for all intents and purposes, to random, sequential polygamy) is rather startling.
Traditional Christians are really the only one's who have a leg to stand on in this debate, which I understand and commiserate with (and I would not want, nor do I think I would be able to, practice plural marriage, at least, not in this life). Secularists will have to go begging, I'm afraid, until they can at least at first accept the general sexual standards of the law of Chastity accepted by LDS and, in basically the same form, the remainder of Christendom.