So the members finding out that they were all called the "chosen generation" and that they couldn't all be THE chosen generation have anything to do with polygamy?

When Joseph and Brigham as well as other adulterous mormons had their "other" families, there were accounts where they would play the families, the wives in particular, off of each other and tell them they alone were "special" one. The result was they would internalize the abuser role in making themselves work harder for affection or acceptance than the rest because they viewed themselves as better than them.

I wonder when polygamy had to go underground if this wasn't the result - the systemic abuse of the general membership, generation by generation?

Curious to know your thoughts.

Here's a weird aspect of mormon plural marriage, excerpted from ""The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature":
A Revised History of Homosexuality & Mormonism, 1840-1980" by Connell O'Donovan, http://www.connellodonovan.com/abom.html

In my estimation, it is a must-read document and serves to support the notion that the church is a miserable way to live a life, if you're not a good looking, extroverted, White & Delightsome person with money.



"The "David and Jonathan" of the Primary: Louie B. Felt and May Anderson"

"...Indeed at least one Mormon woman went so far as to request that her husband marry polygamously after she fell in love with another woman, so that the two women could openly live together.

"Sarah Louisa Bouton married Joseph Felt in 1866 as his first wife but according to a 1919 biography, around 1874, Louie (the masculinized nickname she used) met and "fell in love with" a young woman in her local LDS congregation named Alma Elizabeth (Lizzie) Mineer. After discovering her intense passion for Lizzie Mineer, a childless Louie encouraged Joseph to marry the young woman as a plural wife, explaining "that someday they would be privileged to share their happiness with some little ones."

"Joseph married Lizzie Mineer in 1876. But Lizzie's new responsibilities of bearing and raising children evidently proved too great a strain for her and Louie's relationship. Five years later Louie Felt fell in love with "another beautiful Latter-day Saint girl" named Lizzie Liddell, and again Joseph obligingly married her for Louie's sake. Thus Louie "opened her home and shared her love" with this second Lizzie.

"In 1883, 33-year-old Louie Felt met 19-year-old May Anderson, and they also fell in love. This time, however, May did not marry Joseph Felt. In 1889 May moved in with Louie, and Joseph permanently moved out of the house Louie had built and bought on her own.

"Thus began one of the most intense, stable, and productive love relationships in turn-of-the-century Mormonism. These two women lived together for almost 40 years and together presided over three of Mormonism's most significant institutions: the General Primary Association (for Mormon children), the Children's Friend (a magazine for young Mormons), and founding the Primary Children's Hospital.

"Louie and May were fairly open about the romantic and passionate aspects of their relationship, as reported in their biographies published in several early issues of the LDS Children's Friend. According to their recent biographer, Felt and Anderson's relationship was a "symbiotic partnership with each compensating for the weaknesses and complementing the strengths of the other".

"The 1919 Children's Friend biography more bluntly declared that 'the friendship which had started when Sister Felt and [May Anderson] met...ripened into love. Those who watched their devotion to each other declare that there never were more ardent lovers than these two'.

"The same biography also calls the beginning of their relationship a 'time of love feasting', and makes it clear that the two women shared the same bed. Twice in the Children's Friend, Anderson and Felt were referred to as "the David and Jonathan" of the Primary, which, the magazine explained, was a common appellation for the women.

"For centuries, the biblical characters David and Jonathan have been classic signifiers of male-male desire and homoeroticism, because, in the Hebrew scriptures, it was written in 2 Samuel 1:26 that upon Jonathan's death in battle, David lamented, 'very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.' That these two women were described as "David and Jonathan" simultaneously masculinizes them and firmly encodes their love for each other in a homoerotic context."


It's easy to associate 'evil' with 'religion'.

So they were the forerunners of Wendy and Sheri?

Excellent use of perspective!!

Heartless Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So they were the forerunners of Wendy and Sheri?

Is there any evidence of this? Sometimes a friendship is just a friendship, even when it is very close. This friendship is strange, but is it a relationship?

Louie sounds more predatory than her husband. It was she who forced these women into plural marriage. Louie seems to have "fallen in love" every few years. Some people fall in love once or never in their lifetimes. If it was love and not some form of lust, which let's be honest here was what drove most polygamous men more than love.

Louie sounds like she picked up women and then discarded them several years later. How did Lizzie II feel about Lizzie I? How did May feel about the previous two? How did the older women feel about getting ditched for a younger teenage model? Louie gets to be Alpha predator, moving onto a new conquest. Her exes can't move out, because they're all married to Joseph Felt. It sounds like a seething cauldron of envy.

We let Louie off here because she was a lesbian, but she sounds worse than her husband.

"In 1889 May moved in with Louie, and Joseph permanently moved out of the house Louie had built and bought on her own."

She even kicked him out of the house... Ouch! If anyone sounds like the victim here, it's Joseph.