Posted by:
amos2
(
)
Date: June 19, 2013 05:36PM
My view of polygamy was that it's a necessary inconvenience to compensate for more men ultimately rejecting the gospel than women. It wasn't just based on a temporal earthly shortage of men, but based on the eternal factor that women are naturally more apt to become exhalted. God can't force an equal number of men to accept exhaltation, and marriage is required for exhaltation...so polygamy actually gave women a way out of manlessness, so as to respect their agency to become exhalted and respect the agency of men to not be exhalted.
Polygamy is more problematic in life because of our "infirmities", that is, jealousy etc. But in Heaven, we won't have jealousy by definition (or we wouldn't be there)...so it's not an issue there. Women aren't jealous of each other because they're all perfect, and men don't play favorites because all their wives are perfect goddesses. Everyone just understands there. Polygamy was inequitable in life because we didn't live the "higher law" under which it works. So, I thought the reason polygamy was discontinued was that we weren't "ready for it". It was tested, because God being just cannot deny a blessing for which we haven't actually demonstrated our unworthiness for.
So I viewed polygamy as a utopian ideal, not in itself, but that to make it work you needed to be free of worldly trappings like jealousy and insecurity and favoritism. I believed perfect people could do it happily, just that the church wasn't collectively perfect enough to pull it off. By extension, I believed polygamy would be restored in the millennium and a normal part of exhalted life in CK. Even if you didn't actually ever become a polygamist, everyone in the CK could do it as perfect beings by definition if it were necessary.
I bought the "flaming sword" story of Joseph Smith's entry into polygamy, and the myth that he didn't typically if at all consummate his plural marriages. I thought his plural wives were older, needy, or were simply to lock in their election to the CK.
I didn't know that he actively trolled and prowled for young women and teenagers as wives, was observed having sex or sharing a bed overnight and implying he had sex, propositioned women who were appalled by it, defamed women who rebuffed him, used obvious coercion like take-or-leave-your-whole-family's-salvation-now, and that some of his wives were miserable and traumatized by it, lied about it to Emma, publically lied, used obvious deception on converts, and a number of abuses.