Recently I saw an article somewhere that reported that a Mission President had solicited several lady missionaries to become his plural wives, telling them that the practice was shortly to be reinstated and that they were to pray to obtain their own personal testimony of this but keep it secret. One did not and called her parents. The others kept it secret and had some kind of spiritual confirmation. Has anyone else seen that? It seems to have disappeared so far as I can tell, but I am certain I saw it but can't remember where.
Someone I know WELL was in the mission. He was already questioning the lds church at the time and this was one of the final straws. This MP was about to send my friend home from his mission at the time.
I believe there were 2 female missionaries (companions) who contacted their parents who then contacted SLC. He was removed immediately.
It happened in Australia.
I know that there was a thread about it some years back on postmormon. You may be able to search for it. You may even find someone on this board who knows about it--and maybe one who was there at the time. I think it was early 1980s.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2013 08:41AM by cl2.
This MP was our bishop (married student ward at U of U) in the early 70's. He had a fetish about polygamy back then, too, which contaminated his temple recommend interviewing practices...very painful and creepy to sit alone with him in his office..(I was a young bride at the time). I felt personally vindicated when he got the axe for acting out his inappropriate fantasy of building a kingdom/harem with his innocent female missionaries. Truly a creep.
Stumbled upon this thread. My wife was one of the few sister missionaries who did't buy into Pres. Wrights craziness. However after 30+ years of marriage it is still to this day a struggle for her. What makes me saddened is that she was never offered any kind of counseling after this fiasco and was sworn to never disclose any of it to anyone. Just recently we discussed it in great detail and she is beginning to finally heal.
I met him, Feb. 1979. I was in a group of eight missionaries arriving at the Sydney, Australia airport. Two of the group were assigned to the Australia Sydney mission and the rest of us were making a connecting flight to Melbourne. He was there with one of his assistants to collect his elders. He said he knew which missionaries were his, because the rest of us were wearing "inappropriate ties". I didn't like him, he seemed strange. Two years later we met those two Sydney elders in New Zealand on the way home. They told us all about what happened, they said he also made them run while tracting. I asked about him when I got home but no one wanted to tslk about it. I stopped attending a few months later.
Hi! President Wright is my grandfather. If anyone served under him or has any information for me to learn more about this, I would be extremely grateful!
One of the glorious traditions in Utah is for the men to quickly remarry (for eternity in plural marriage for eternity) very soon after their spouse dies.
Funny you mention this. Years ago a well-respected and nice member of the stake presidency in Arizona had his wife pass away...she had been sick for a while (years?) and no idea what it was, but it finally took her life. Two weeks after the funeral he showed up in church with another woman and it was mentioned that they were going to get married and move.
We used to have a motto in the older LDS singles (my forced calling as co-chairman):
"How quickly we are replaced."
I knew women in the singles who would read the obituaries, and go to funerals of wives, in order to hit on the vulnerable widower.
My good-looking TBM next door neighbor married one of those. They had met at a party, and his wife was in a wheel chair and was dying. The woman watched the obituaries, and at the wife's funeral, the woman offered sympathy and dinners and to do his laundry, and clean his house, etc. She was over at his house every day. They would hide her car in the garage, overnight. In 3 months, they went from strangers to temple-marriage. She is a con-artist, and has bled him dry, financially, and has alienated his children.
Polygamy in the hereafter is not always a good thing for the man.
I'm assuming this story is about the New Zealand incident because Lanny Smartt wasn't called as an MP until a few months after this post in 2013. But still worth reading.
I can see polygamy being legalized in the USA in the future. There are two routes this can happen by. A test case involving Muslims, saying their religious rights are being infringed. Or by using gay marriage as a paradigm shattering precedent.
What bothers me is this incident undermines estimates of Joseph's horn doggery. Teenage girls generally can't keep secrets, so Joseph would have a hard time building a secret harem of them. He would have had a harder time covering up unintended pregnancies. The odds of keeping secrets plummets as the wife count goes up.