I remember the teacher for the Sunday School class when I was a teenager telling us that the reason for polygamy is that women are more righteous than men. Therefore, women in the Celestial Kingdom will greatly outnumber men. In order for every women in the Celestial Kingdom to enjoy the benefits of eternal marriage, women will have to share their husbands with other women. The teacher was convinced that at some point in the future the church would start practicing polygamy again.

Hmmm, is this supposed to comfort women?
Hey, great news, you're more righteous than (most) men. But...
Either
1) you have to share your husband with other women, or
2) You have to lose him and share another woman's husband.
It's the strings attached to the "good news" that makes you go hmmm.

and...

3) if you don't follow this commandment... you will be destroyed

4) if you don't give your hubbie permission... he'll do it anyway.

Source: DC 132.

There are more male babies born than female.

But there is no more reason to think this justification holds any more water than the others.

Caring for widows and orphans is a favorite excuse, even though there were church tithing storehouses all during polygamy and there was no need to force the widows into sex to feed their kids.

The excuse that there were too many women because so many men died in the persecution is cute. No one can produce any long list of men who died, and women probably died at a faster rate on the treks because they are smaller, give birth a lot, and the equipment, schedule etc wasn't designed for them.

That leaves us with the myth that polygamy creates more babies. It doesn't. A woman in monogamy will have more kids than her sister in polygamy in the same community. Monogamous women have better access to their husband's sperm during their fertile periods. Heck, BY only averaged 2 kids per wife.

They need to stick with 'God works in mysterious ways'.

The most logical explanation of polygamy is that Joseph Smith got caught banging another woman and propositioning other men's wives. So what's a man to do? Men are pretty creative in coming up with explanations to their wives when they cheat. For a prophet, the most logical thing to do is to explain it away with a revelation ... a revelation which threatens the wife if she doesn't obey the new law.

Plain and simple, we men will act as men and come up with the best possible explanation to get us out of a sticky situation.

...all the crazy explanations for polygamy and not get what is the most logical, likely and believable of them all— Joseph made up 'revelations' to allow for his own behavior. Simple.

Of course my response is, "Then why punish them by making them do something that will induce so much misery? What a douche of a God."

I heard that one also. However, I am selecting option "B", joe was an arrogant, manipulative horn dog that used people then discarded them as was he saw fit.