The fact still remains that Zina was married to BY AT THE SAME TIME as she was married to Henry Jacobs, and she bore BY's son. There is no question that she had sexual relations with BY.
Why are you going off on this tangent? Please answer the original question.
Where did the practice of having sexual relations change between Joseph Smith and BY? If there was no change, then why shouldn't we assume that Joseph Smith was practicing polyandry the same way BY did?
A short trip to FAIR, where some substantive scholarly research has been done on this subject, will suffice to reorient Scotty's attempt at historical analysis:
http://www.fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferences ... r_Men.htmlZina and Henry's marriage fell apart at Mt. Pisgah, and Zina never again lived with him before openly living with Young as his plural wife. It seems all we would now require are the divorce papers, which may or may not be extant somewhere. This, however, is problematic for a number of historical reasons, as Wyatt points out:
One question that often comes up concerning the dissolution of Henry and Zina's marriage is why, if they were legally married, they never procured a legal divorce. Most people who raise this question have no problem with the concept of Joseph and Zina being "married" while Zina was still married to Henry; they typically assume that the marriage to Joseph was a platonic sealing, with no earthly accoutrements that normally attend marriage. The point at which the question inevitably comes up is when Zina married Brigham in the Nauvoo temple, continued to live with Henry during the trek across Iowa, and then transitioned into Brigham's family after Henry left for his mission to England.
There are two points at which a divorce could reasonably have taken place: In Nauvoo, at about the time that Zina and Brigham were married, or in Iowa, after Henry left for England. There is no record of any divorce in Hancock County, Illinois.68 This is not surprising; for the nineteen months from the martyrdom in June 1844 until the Saints were driven from Nauvoo in February 1846, the relationship between the Saints and the various levels of government was tenuous, at best. The Saints did not trust the state or federal governments, having felt betrayed at every turn over the years. There is evidence that the Nauvoo municipal government was very dysfunctional during this period, and then entirely non-existent after the revocation of the Nauvoo Charter in January 1845. A year later, when Zina and Brigham were sealed, it is doubtful that the Saints would have turned to those they viewed as hostile enemies to request divorces.
The situation is even more unclear as the Saints migrated westward through frontier Iowa. According to Iowa territorial law in 1846, divorces were granted by district courts.69 At the time there were only three district courts established in the Iowa Territory, and these covered only the eastern-most counties of the state. 70 There were no District Courts that covered the unincorporated areas (the "Indian lands" where Mt. Pisgah was located), nor were there any in 1846 in any of the counties bordering the unincorporated areas.
Critics who complain of Henry and Zina not having a "legal and lawful" divorce fail to point out what constitutes "legal and lawful" when it comes to a frontier where there is no established government. Who, exactly, should Henry and Zina have gone to in order to satisfy our modern sensibilities of what constitutes a "legal and lawful" dissolution of marriage?
The inaccessibility of government and the hostility of the trail may not be the only reasons why a formal divorce was not sought by Henry and Zina. Many people during the era, Mormon and non-Mormon alike, particularly those who were poor and transient (conditions that certainly applied to this couple), would engage in self-divorce. Rather than seek out the approbation of authority that was often seen as meddlesome, distant, and aloof, couples would simply agree to dissolve their marriage, and then each go their separate ways. This seemed, to those predisposed to distrust a hostile government, a practical and pragmatic solution to ending a marriage, and appears to be the path chosen by Henry and Zina.
So, as you see Scotty, the historical cherry picking, fudging of evidence by greatly oversimplifying complex historical variables, and removing all benefit of the doubt from historical Church leaders a priori stirs up more mud than it settles.