“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (2 page)

If Smith’s parents showed little imagination in choosing
Joseph Jr. for the name of their fourth child and third son, they could have
done worse. The evolution of American English was kinder to his name than to
that of the teenage girl. Her name was Frances Alger, but history also
preserved her pet name,
Fanny
.

Not content with just one piece of Fanny, Smith introduced
more and more female church members to his own, personal member. If he happened
to fancy a married woman, as he often did, no problem: God revealed to Smith
that the husband of his intended was desperately and immediately needed for
missionary service in a distant land. This provided two conveniences. Smith’s
chances of getting caught diminished, and pregnancies could be explained as the
husband’s doing, provided the husband hadn’t been too long absent and none of
the kids looked like Smith. Which at least one did.

God “commanded” the women to keep their marriage to Smith
secret. Which, when you think about it, was asking a lot. Women who were
outraged by the prophet’s advances fumed to husbands, parents, and friends.
Women who were flattered at being chosen for the Lord’s anointed boasted and
competed in a game of celestial one-upmanship. Either way, rumors spread. Smith
was going to have to explain just what part of “Thou shalt not commit adultery”
he didn’t understand, or—

Hold on. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and others in
the Old Testament had lots of wives. Poor Solomon must have been exhausted. The
Bible says he had 700 wives. A thousand, if you count the concubines. (I always
thought concubines sounded like something to chop up and put in a salad.) These
guys were God’s prophets, and God was all for letting them take as many wives
as they could handle.

Like Abraham et al, Smith was a prophet, too. Perhaps you
see where he was going with this.

Adultery? Perish the thought, Smith deadpanned. You cannot
commit adultery with your wife.
And these
women were his wives.

Wives?
As in
wife
, except plural, with a
v
instead of an
f
, and with an
s
at the
end?

Yes,
wives
. Let no
one accuse Joseph Smith Jr. of being a horny, big fish in a small Mormon pond.
When God raised up prophets in the olden days, polygamy was part of the deal.
As Prophet of the Restoration, it was Smith’s job—that is, it was his
burden
, the poor guy—to completely
restore not just part of the deal, but the whole deal. And without polygamy,
Smith explained, it just wouldn’t be the whole deal, now would it?

It would be an understatement to say that Emma Hale Smith,
Smith’s first and only lawful wife, didn’t buy it. Emma was as furious as she
was skeptical. Hoping to convince her, Smith wrote down the revelation where
the Lord out-and-out commanded him to become a polygamist and handed it to Emma
so that she could read it for herself. She set fire to it before his eyes.
Still, she believed her husband was a prophet. When Smith warned her that God
said to “submit” or she would be “destroyed,” she gave in. It was a
capitulation, not an embrace. Throughout her life, Emma made it no secret that
she hated polygamy.

Smith also needed to convince his closest associates. It
helped when he thought to mention that they, too, were commanded to take extra
wives. Suddenly, these men of God reconsidered. Perhaps they had been unduly
hasty, even rash, in condemning their self-sacrificing prophet. Perhaps they
could, as Smith had done, humbly submit to the will of the Lord. Even if it
meant, alas, that they would be required to have sex with lots and lots of
women.

Having learned nothing from his earlier failure at keeping
Smith’s heavenly mandated bed-hopping a secret, God attempted to place a
similar gag order on these newly ordained polygamists and their respective
multiple wives. Polygamy was only for Smith and his inner circle. The church at
large was not to know. They and the rest of the world could handle only milk.
They weren’t ready for the meat of the gospel, much less the meat market of the
gospel.

The gag order meant more than not talking about polygamy. It
meant lying about it. Asked point-blank if Mormons believed in “having more
wives than one,” Smith answered, “No, not at the same time.” That was in 1838,
when Smith was married to at least three women at the same time, and a good
seven years after he had started taking plural wives in the first place.

Despite God’s gag order, rumors raged as the years rolled
on. Reports of polygamy among Smith and the Mormons kept showing up in
newspapers throughout the country. Yet it was a local newspaper in the nearly
all-Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois, that finally did Smith in. It was
only a question of time until Smith would put the moves on the wrong married woman.
When he did, her incensed husband published a tell-all newspaper and called it
The Nauvoo Expositor
. The June 8, 1844,
inaugural edition was also the final edition. That was because Smith, whom the
overwhelmingly Mormon town had elected mayor, persuaded the Nauvoo City Council
to declare the newspaper a public nuisance. Smith and the city council marched
to the newspaper office, broke down the front door, sabotaged the press and
threw the type into the street.

Silencing newspapers has never gone over particularly well
in the United States. Something about the First Amendment. The act landed Smith
in a jail in nearby Carthage, Illinois. Two days later, an armed mob stormed
the jail and shot Smith to death as he attempted an escape through an unbarred,
open window. Which was only after he fired a few shots at his attackers from a
pistol he happened to have on him. Some jail.

Estimates vary, but by the time of his death, Smith had a
total of 30 to 50 wives, give or take.

Succeeding Smith as prophet, seer, and revelator, Brigham
Young led the Mormons from Illinois to the Territory of Utah in 1847, three
years after Smith’s death. Once there, Young brought polygamy into the open.
That’s why a lot of Mormons today believe that Young and not Smith started the
whole polygamy thing. It makes them feel better about their first prophet.

It was no surprise that, by the time Young and the greater
part of the Mormons set out for Utah, the now-bereft Emma chose not to follow.
Ever since she had set fire to the revelation on polygamy, Young had not been
her greatest fan, nor she his. You may pick up a hint of acrimony with regard
to Emma in remarks Brigham Young delivered years later in Utah. “She will be
damned as sure as she is a living woman,” Young said. “Joseph used to say that
he would have her hereafter if he had to go to hell for her, and he will have
to go to hell for her as sure as he ever gets her.”

Prior to the Mormon exodus, Nauvoo was the second most
populous city in Illinois, after Chicago. Now Emma found herself in a mostly
abandoned town.

When she married again, it was to a non-Mormon.

The United States outlawed polygamy in 1862. Three years
later, a few Mormon families would flee to Juarez, Mexico, where they could
practice polygamy prosecution-free and remain in full fellowship with the
mainstream Mormon Church. The polygamous emigrants’ leaders included Helaman
Pratt, who surely never dreamed that half a century later his descendants would
return to the United States, where eventually grandson George W. Romney and
great-grandson Mitt Romney would become prominent politicians and Republican
presidential candidates.

But the vast majority of Mormons remained in Utah Territory,
where the Mormon Church ceased practicing polygamy in 1890—officially,
anyway. In reality, the church looked the other way while phasing out polygamy
over the next several decades. Ever since, rogue groups have been breaking away
and reinstating it.

In 1993, my husband and I joined one of them.

And David took him more concubines and wives.

—2 Samuel 5:13

[Solomon] had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three
hundred concubines.

—1 Kings 11:3    

Hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any
man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none.

—Book of Mormon, Jacob 2:27

David also received many wives and concubines, and also
Solomon and Moses … and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they
received not of me.

—Doctrine and Covenants 132:38

I condemn it, yes, as a practice, because I think it is
not doctrinal.

—Mormon prophet Gordon B. Hinckley on Larry King
Live, September 8, 1998

You wonder why Mormons grow up confused?

—Me, looking back on the madness

Early in 1992, in a little group meeting held in a private
home, most of the women turned blazing eyes upon their husbands. The blaze
seemed to say, “If you so much as even look like you’re considering it, I’ll
take a bread knife to your masculinity.”

Responsible for this not particularly veiled threat was the
diminutive yet obviously brave man leading our clandestine study group. He had
just said, “To prove yourselves worthy of God’s kingdom on earth, you will be
required to live the law of plural marriage.”

Of itself, the statement wasn’t much of a surprise. The
surprise was that someone had finally owned up to it, out loud and in the open.
No one in our group was so oblivious as not to have thought about it, not to
have anticipated it. The question was when, not if. As much as the Mormon Church
might wish it away, Section 132 of its own book of scripture Doctrine and
Covenants spells out in unmistakable, no-denying-it black and white the
doctrine of plural marriage. God-mandated polygamy.

But until that moment, most of us had dared speculate about
polygamy only in our private thoughts. The few who actually uttered the p-word
did so in furtive whispers.

Unlike the women around me, I didn’t freak. Not even close.
I merely shrugged.
No biggie,
I
thought.
I can do that.

Looking back, I marvel.
What
brought me to that point?

I’d love to tell you that being raised in the mainstream
Mormon Church primed me to enter into polygamy, but that just doesn’t wash.
Millions of women and men grow up Mormon without going off the deep polygamy
end.

But certainly my Mormon roots played into it. My family took
pride in my great-grandfather, who went to prison several times rather than
give up his three wives. Jeff’s great-great-grandfather Ephraim Knowlton Hanks
was a polygamist hero straight from the pages of Mormon history. He helped
rescue a group of Mormon pioneers trapped in the mountains of Wyoming during a
treacherous winter. (He also served as a Destroying Angel, a group of assassins
sworn to protect Joseph Smith and, later, Brigham Young, though official Mormon
history disavows them.)

With or without polygamist ancestors, every faithful Mormon
woman understands that polygamy is part of Mormon history and, unavoidably, of
Mormon doctrine. You won’t hear much about it publicly, but when you grow up
Mormon, you grow up believing in a married God who is very likely a polygamist
himself. You understand that the practice of polygamy is alive and well in
heaven, knowing full well that worthy deceased Mormon men can have multiple wives
in the hereafter. You must juggle the seeming contradiction that God condemns
polygamy on Earth now, but commanded the early church to practice it and
reserves the right to reinstate it.

You needn’t like the idea of polygamy, but to be deemed
worthy of salvation you must at least appear to acknowledge a willingness to
put up with it should God see fit to bring it back.

Thus you grow up with the specter of polygamy, maybe even
the threat of it, hanging over you. Like many Mormon women, I grew up telling myself
that I didn’t much care for the idea of polygamy, but that I could accept it if
God told me to. It is part of the righteous persona that Mormon women feel the
need to project.

The Mormon Church advises its members to avoid speculation
as to if and when God might reinstate polygamy. Fat lot of good that does.

Mormon women in increasing numbers grow up strong and
independent-minded. Not me. I grew up timid, eager to let other people tell me
how to think, ready to let anyone make the least decision for me. At the very
least, Mormonism reinforced my retiring nature with its “fathers are to preside
in the home” stance, to which it still holds. It permitted me to see it as a
virtue when I let men do my thinking for me.

Mormons are taught that marrying followed by multiplying and
replenishing is a crucial step in their eternal destiny. It follows that dating
as the means to the end of finding a spouse is big in Mormon circles, too.

I managed to graduate from Brigham Young University, the
Lord’s dating capital of the world, without being asked out once. No one asked
me out in high school, either. I’d never kissed anyone. That would be tough
enough on any young woman. On a young Mormon woman, it’s worse. It means you’re
not fulfilling your God-ordained future.

I didn’t blame the guys for not being interested. I was 6
feet tall at age 10. I had a big nose. I had
hyperhidrosis,
medical speak for
really, really sweaty palms
. I had irritable bowel syndrome. If my
height and schnoz didn’t scare off the boys, I knew that getting slimed while
trying to hold hands with me and, failing that, putting up with my frequent
bathroom sprints would ward off any straggling stalwarts. That is, if any
stalwarts materialized. None did.

My Mormon high school friends and I used to sing this to the
tune of “Someday My Prince Will Come”: