I am looking for sources about whether or not the official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints still practices polygamy. I watched a video a few weeks ago but I can't find it now. When did the church officially stop living plural marriages?

Looking for sources that I can look into. I had gotten latched onto the idea that they even practice now, secretly, but I cannot remember where I got that from. And it might have gotten confused with one of the other offshoots.

there were Not One, but TWO official pronouncements declaring the end .... er, discontinuance of Poly issued, IDK if they're still included in the MoEdition of "scriptures".

They curiously had something to do with a USSC decision, rumors of an Army 'invasion' of Ewtah, even a side car of the MMM.

For a while it was interesting weave of doctrine, events, social studies, sexuality & misogyny, but it's only occasionally denied by leaders lately.

179.5 degrees currently denied, pushing up against a 180 flip by ChurchCo.

(forgot to mention)

Today's leaders want the current membership to have NO Recollection of polygamy, but they haven't set a date for no-one to remember, recall, or mention it.


the scrubbing of scriptural & GA mentioning of poly isn't yet complete...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2020 12:44PM by GNPE.

as a side note, the 'TOPICAL GUIDE' included with the MoEdition of the scriptures was originally titled "TROPICAL GUIDE" as certain Q15 members wanted to move the church to the south Pacific Islands

a. Hoped they could continue living 'the principle' there, and

b. wanted warmer climes - relaxation & retirement, (BY forgot to mention those terrible weather extremes in Utah, skiing wasn't practiced yet) but an editing or printer's error quashed that...


now you know!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2020 01:13PM by GNPE.

Yes, this sounds right. I guess I had mistakenly assumed the second pronouncement happened a lot later(closer to modern church time) than it actually did.

I believe the current President and “Prophet”of the Mormon Church is sealed for time and eternity to two women.

Yes, this I had heard also but thought I heard of secret continuation of the practice with living wives. I must have gotten mixed up.

The Manifesto of 1890 renounced polygamy in order to get statehood but it was not enforced. That document is in the D&C. The church issued a Second Manifesto in 1904, saying "this time we really mean it."

There was tolerance for those who were already married polygamously; some of those people were lived into the 1950s. Relations between church leaders and the old polygamists, often relatives, remained warm until then. But new plural marriages were no longer tolerated; Short Creek, which couldn't have happened without the church's approval came in, I believe, 1953.

Since then polygamy has been highly inconvenient: a man has to wait for his first wife to die before he can add a second to his harem.

Bless you, LW. Yes, this is what I think I had misremembered. The second pronouncement(we mean it this time!) but then secretly some were still doing it until they then again had to be like, "No, for real, for real."

It's at least given me dates to hunt after, so, thank you very much for that.

My pleasure, good sir.

"Renounced" seems a little strong to me. More like "suspended" or "discontinued".

They talked it up so much they can't renounce or disavaow it. They only say a "new revelation" orders them to punish anyone caught practicing it. Carefully worded indeed.

Agreed.

Kind of hard to turn your back on ghawd's "New & Everlasting Covenant.


And one serving apostle was caught in a polygamous marriage and booted out of the church.


"In 1943, the First Presidency discovered that Lyman had long been cohabiting with a woman other than his legal wife. In 1925, Lyman began his relationship with Anna Jacobsen Hegsted, which he defined as a plural marriage.

Unable to trust anyone to officiate at the wedding due to the church's ban on the practice, Lyman and Hegsted exchanged vows secretly. By 1943, both were in their seventies.

"Lyman was excommunicated on November 12, 1943, at age 72; at the time, his legal wife, Amy B. Lyman, was the general president of the Relief Society.

"The Quorum of the Twelve provided the newspapers with a one-sentence announcement, stating that the grounds for excommunication was a violation of the law of chastity, which was the standard interpretation of new plural marriages performed since the 1904 Second Manifesto. (Plural marriages performed between the First Manifesto in 1890 and the Second Manifesto were tolerated by the church.)"

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_R._Lyman#:~:text=Richard%20Roswell%20Lyman%20(November%2023,apostle%20to%20have%20been%20excommunicated.

The word on the street was that 'acting' head prophet J. Reuben Sandwich Clark heard a rumor about Lyman having a second home at which to lay his head at night and so he called the SLC Chief of police and ordered a tail on Lyman. And (this part I'm making up) after a day of sessions of temple work, the cops followed Lyman to a beer joint down by the railroad station, and then to a dance hall, and finally to his second love nest, where after a 15 minute wait, the coppers saw him in his night gown and sleeping cap, walking from the kitchen to the bedroom with a dildo filled with hot water! So the busted in and saved the dildo!

Lyman did get baptized back into the church before he died, and then had his priesthood ballsack reattached posthumously.

At the time his official wife was president of the Relief Society (and probably grateful getting help in 'relieving' Lyman. He met his second wife when he was counseling her for her addiction to sexual insatiability. (Okay, I made that up, too. I wonder what it takes for a single female to be 'counseled' by an afosil of the lord?)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2020 06:21PM by elderolddog.

It's a novel based on this subject. The polygamy in the mainstream church is covert and only tolerated by mormon officials because they don't want to bring attention to the humiliating situation.

Yes, read it. I highly recommend it. A great, shocking read.

Nice to see you Cheryl, hope you and your Aspoustate ;-) are keeping safe and well.

Tom in Paris

Church should have re-located to Hawaii as soon as USSC ruled against them, avoided a number of headaches.

It's not too late!

Lookit what I found: https://hemlockknots.com/monogamy-polygamy-timeline/#:~:text=Timeline%20of%20polygamy%20in%20the%20restored%20church%20,the%20%20...%20%2026%20more%20rows%20

*grins triumphantly*

Very, very nice find! That link goes into my Hall of Fsme!

One gets the impression that JoJu knew he was a hound dog and tried to fight it, but then said, 'heck with it!' and decided ghawd and his dick knew better.

That is like reading a sexual history of abuse coverups. This is a great find. Thanks for sharing it.

The sister of our neighbour back in the 40s was polygamously married. I was informed without any proof that David O'McKay was the first prophet not to authorise a polygamous union. After David O'McKay, who knows what was authorised?

It is my understanding that the re-organized LDS church still practices it. Plus, they still wear the long dresses.

Does anyone know whether or not this is so?

Nope.

In fact, the Reorganized Church (now the Church of Christ) never admitted that JS taught or practiced polygamy. The Brighamites tried to persuade them of that fact so that the two churches could merge, including an effort in the 1870s (The Temple Lot Case) to use affidavits by Joseph's now elderly wives to prove the point. But the Church of Christ did not accept that argument and absolutely does not practice plural marriage.

Other offshoots did and the modern fundamentalists do, but not the CoC.

I know brother jake on youtube has a good video on the different branches.

Part of the issue is that in the church, we aren't taught about all the different offshoots. At least, I wasn't. Maybe "that other group of fundamentalist Mormons" came up on occasion to contrast with, "Those creeps still practice polygamy and they're super wrong." But I was always given the impression that there was just one other group that folks called Mormons and got confused with the LDS. Just another one of those murky things of the past that you have to leave the church to gain any clarity about.

Even today, a man in the Mormon church can have as many wives as he wants to have, as long as only one of them is living at any given time. The church recognizes all temple marriages and the polygamy they may create as valid, since temple marriages are supposed to be (according to the church) eternal. Of course, the same is not true for the women. Any woman can only have one valid eternal marriage in her eternal existance.

I don't think that the Mormon church secretly practices any polygamy of living people today and for only one reason. There is one thing that is sacred most of all in the mormon church, above all else. That is the church's tax exempt status. The church will tolerate child molesters, back stabbers, liers, and pretty much any other kind of vice and those who do any king of wrong-doing. They only excommunicate people to protect the church's image when the actions of a church member causes embarrasment on the church or somehow harm the church. One way to harm the church and the biggest sin of all is to put in jeopardy, the church's tax exempt status. If the church tolerates polygamy amongst its members, the IRS will take away the church's tax exempt status. The IRS has threatened the church in the past of losing their tax exempt status if they don't stop polygamy from taking place inside of the church. So the church enforces non-polygamy among the living for that reason. The church takes the IRS seriously on this one. You can offend God and it's not such a big deal according to the Mormon church. But if you piss-off the IRS on behalf of the church, heaven help you. It's hard to come back from that.

There was no income tax in either 1890 or 1904, nor was there an IRS until 1913, excepting a brief stint during and shortly after the Civil War. The IRS could not have threatened to withdraw their income tax exemption prior to either "Official Declaration".

As I understand it, the federales threatened to disincorporate the church and seize all its property unless it abandoned polygamy. I don't know if that also applied in 1904.

Under the Edmonds-Tucker Act, the mormon church was disincorporated and all properties over $50,000 were subject to confiscation (among other provisions). This was a significant factor in the church's financial problems during Lorenzo Snow's reign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmunds%E2%80%93Tucker_Act

Ah yes, Lorenzo Snow and the advent of mandatory tithing. It's remarkable how it all fits together.

Brilliant! I didn't even know that. This is like genuinely the best live mystery game ever. All these layers to the history, you could spend years linking connections.

On a side note, that's probably another reason they don't talk about or teach about the history of the polygamy manifestos. Finding these odd connections would be another big shelf item for people.

The 1904 “this time we mean it” declaration was fostered by the hope that it would help get Reed Smoot seated in the Senate after his election in 1903.

Yep. Because God wanted him in place to enact a tariff that would contribute greatly to Hitler’s rise.

Mysterious ways, Congressman Hawley!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2020 03:54AM by Lot's Wife.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There was no income tax in either 1890 or 1904,
> nor was there an IRS until 1913, excepting a brief
> stint during and shortly after the Civil War. The
> IRS could not have threatened to withdraw their
> income tax exemption prior to either "Official
> Declaration".

Agreed. But polygamy existed in the Mormon church long after the church officially capitulated to the government over the issue of polygamy. Even some church leaders wouldn't give polygamy up. This didn't even include the polygamous marriages that were grandfathered-in from before the passage of the law. There were many new polygamous marriages in the church after the law was passed. There was always plausible deniability and that the church could always claim that they didn't know about the polygamous relationships in specific cases, and had no part in it.

But this came to an end relatively recently (somewhere between the 1950's to 1970's). The IRS did threaten the church's tax exempt status over this very issue. At one point, questions about polygamy were routinely asked in temple recommend interviews. So instead of silently condoning polygamy or simply not caring about polygamy, the mormon church became an active participant in helping the government to put an end to polygamy amongst church members. Not condoning polygamy became a part of mormon culture which is why we always heard growing up, about Joseph's wife Emma, to the exclusion of his twenty-seven other wives. This was motivated by the mormon church's desire to keep their tax exempt status after the US government threatened to take it away if they didn't put a stop to polygamy amongst its members.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/05/2020 11:03PM by azsteve.

Do you have sources for this still occurring/being an issue between 1950-1970 or at least past 1950? Not casting doubt on you or nothing, just I'd be VERY interested to see any information about such a recent example. I was born in 1988; 1960 wasn't that long ago, you know? Even with the sources I have putting a mostly end to it at 1940-1950, that is still really recent. Much more recent than Sunday school would lead us to believe(and omg! They never told me that there were 2 manifestos!!!).

Multiple branches of the Mormon church still practice polygamy, and even the LDS branch intends to practice it in the “celestial kingdom.” Anyone who claims differently is lying or ignorant.

I forget which apost-hole it was who said he’s looking forward to spending eternity with both of his wives. ???

Any Bishop or SP who was knowing of a polyg family in his ward or stake would be Gone faster than yesterday's news.

Or avoid seeing the evidence.

the last MORmON church president to be a practicing polygamist ......was NOT 118 years ago......, IN FACT it is the current LDS Inc president / MORmON PRofit, Russell M Nelson.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNHB9Rv6X4Y