This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
Full Consent Was Required
Polygamy is now banned, and Mormons do not practice it. Until it was banned in the 1800’s, a man’s first wife had to give her full consent before he could polygamously marry. There was no allowance in the church for anyone to be forced, coerced, or manipulated into anything. Personal agency is an important concept that protects members of the church. “And if her husband be with another woman, and he was under a vow, he hath broken his vow and hath committed adultery… if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified.” (D&C 132)
Skeptics claim men did not need their wife’s consent:
“The only form of polygamy permitted by D&C 132 is a union with a virgin after first giving the opportunity to the first wife to consent to the marriage. If the first wife doesn’t consent, the husband is exempt and may still take an additional wife, but the first wife must at least have the opportunity to consent. In case the first wife doesn’t consent, she will be ‘destroyed’.”
(CES Letter)
This is false.
Law Of Sarah – Perhaps CES Letter is referring to the final verses of D&C 132. This law fulfills the promise to Abraham’s descendants that their seed should “continue as innumerable as the stars,” a covenant that is still in effect. Sarah consented to give “Hagar to Abraham to wife. And why did she do it? Because this was the law; and from Hagar sprang many people.”
So, the commandment was that a wife should attempt to propagate and have children. If this meant she consented to allow an additional wife in order to make it happen, as was the unique case with Sarah who couldn’t have children with Abraham, then she was supposed to consent: “If any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of my priesthood, as pertaining to these things, then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord your God; for I will destroy her; for I will magnify my name upon all those who receive and abide in my law. Therefore, it shall be lawful in me, if she receive not this law, for him to receive all things whatsoever I, the Lord his God, will give unto him, because she did not believe and administer unto him according to my word; and she then becomes the transgressor; and he is exempt from the law of Sarah, who administered unto Abraham according to the law when I commanded Abraham to take Hagar to wife.” (D&C 132)
This did not make it okay for a man to take another wife just because he wanted to, and that is not what ever happened in Mormon history. This was a rare case in the old rules of polygamy where a plural wife was necessary to propagate any children. It was definitely not the “only polygamy permitted.” In fact, I haven’t found a single case of it ever actually happening. It didn’t turn out to be an issue. Orson Pratt explained that it was a formal procedure through legal mediation:
“When a man who has a wife, teaches her the law of God, and she refuses to give her consent for him to marry another according to the law, then it becomes necessary for her to state before the President the reasons why she withholds her consent; if her reasons are sufficient and justifiable and the husband is found in fault, or in transgression, then, he is not permitted to take any step in regard to obtaining another. But if the wife can show no good reason why she refuses to comply with the law which was given to Sarah of old, then it is lawful for her husband, if permitted by revelation through the prophet, to be married to others without her consent, and he will be justified.”(The Seer, Orson Pratt)
Obsolete Rules
Polygamy is banned in the Mormon church today. It is quite manipulative for CES Letter to use present-tense grammar when discussing this:
“The only form of polygamy permitted by D&C 132 is a union with a virgin.”
(CES Letter)
It was permitted. Not is permitted. Past tense! Additional D&C scripture superseded this polygamy policy, and now it is not permitted in any case, though the general doctrine of eternal sealing for the afterlife is very much alive.
Only Virgins? – D&C 132 states if a man espouses a virgin and seeks a second, and the first consents, then it is not adultery. There is no commandment that she must be a virgin, however. It never says only virgins may marry. Divorcees and widows were remarrying all the time despite not being virgins. Clearly, the issue here was to marry a woman who was not currently married or living an unchaste life. Anti-Mormons twist this to make it look like non-virgins were excluded, and that is totally incorrect.
CES Letter references verse 41 that “the new wife must be a virgin before the marriage,” but it says no such thing. It makes no mention of virginity, only that the woman can’t currently have a husband. Polygamy is obsolete today, but the expectation to abstain from sexual intercourse prior to marriage is still very much alive. I don’t see what is so bizarre about the expectation to abstain from sexual intercourse outside of marriage. I don’t see why this is something to complain about. The church has always expected this from men and women. I think any healthy society expects this.
D&C 132 talks to men and women equally in regards to polygamy and eternal marriage. This argument uses present tense for a superceded policy from two centuries ago. Other religious movements of the time introduced polyandry, where men and women were having with multiple people. D&C makes it clear women were to have only one husband at a time.
“Open marriage” and infidelity is celebrated in today’s culture, and pleasure is championed over family and raising children. The rules for polygamy in the 1800’s were intended to build families and promote fidelity and love.Today’s doctrine of eternal marriage likewise promotes dedication to family and passing on a heritage to future generations.
CES Letter Logical Fallacies
| Falsehood | The premise of this argument is false. Mormon scripture did not allow men to be polygamous without the woman’s consent, nor did Mormons do this. The only rare exception was if there was a compelling reason for the sake of propagation and he mediated with the church President. |
| Shifting Goalposts | CES Letter (incorrectly) condemned Joseph Smith for supposedly marrying women already married. But now suddenly CES Letter claims “the only form of polygamy permitted” was a man with a virgin. |
| Argument From Ignorance | CES Letter ignores the reason why D&C 132 directs women to have only one husband. They claim: “the new wife must be a virgin before the marriage and be completely monogamous after the marriage or she will be destroyed.” Actually, widows and divorcees could remarry. They did all the time. |
| Strawman Argument | This and the other related arguments set up a false characterization of Mormon practices in history and today. This argument seems to assume that D&C 132 approaches polygamy from a man’s perspective. Actually, it addressed men and women equally. |
| Cherry-Picking | This argument cherry-picks verses about virgins–or supposedly about virgins–but mischaracterizes what these verses are actually about and their context. |
| Etymological Fallacy | CES Letter makes it sound like women were to be physically punished, “destroyed.” But D&C 132 says it is God who “will destroy her,” presumably through natural consequences. |
| Repeition | CES Letter repeats this argument on p.69. CES Letter repeats the word “consent” within the argument to emphasize the false allegation of coercion. |
| Ad Hominem | This entire argument is an attack on Joseph Smith’s character and early Mormons. |
Appeal To Emotion – CES Letter uses an emotional argument for polygamy, whereas they used intellectual arguments against the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham. In each case, they set a rigid binary standard for right or wrong based on modern, popular sensibilities and apply that to Joseph Smith’s history, as if this is real history.
We saw their modus operandi at work as they stuck with modern Egyptologist’s translations of the facsimiles and acted like this contradicted Joseph Smith’s interpretations for the Book of Abraham. This is how CES Letter works. They give a few bits of incorrect leading evidence in a constrained context; the reader connects to dots in their mind; and CES Letter pushes it to a sweeping generalization.
Big Lie Tactic – In this argument, CES Letter approaches marriage from our modern society’s definition, ignore all historical context, and perpetuate the big lie that eternal sealings in the temple were the same as a civil marriage with a physical relationship. If Brigham Young was a prophet, why did he have children with Zina Young after Zina had been married to Joseph Smith? Because non-virgins could remarry, and Zina likely did not have a physical relationship with Joseph Smith anyway. But people are more likely to believe CES Letter‘s deception because they connected the dots out on their own, subconsciously. They are also more likely to believe the evidences for that deduction, which in this case are falsehoods.
Anti-Mormon Hypocrisy – Why do so many “pro-equality” activists, good progressives who say people should be free to marry whoever they love, condemn Mormons for their history with polygamy? The same Anti-Mormons who attack us for the old history of polygamy also endorse “progressive” ideas about marriage and love. Shouldn’t polygamy be on their list of marriages that deserve equality?
Well yes, it should, and this is why Anti-Mormons spin polygamy as something that coerces and manipulates women into subjugation. Lately, this narrative has become evens easier as there really are crazy cults that actually do victimize women and force people to marry, criminals like Warren Jeffs. Interestingly, we only seem to hear about splinter groups in Utah, however. This is why this argument’s narrative about women being victimized is so important. Opponents in the media have trumpeted this narrative since the beginning. In the 1800’s, American newspapers were putting out story after story about how women in Utah were treated as “slaves.” It led to the federal government for the first time registering all marriages, controlling the definition of marriage, and jailing Mormons who did not fit that definition. Still today, Mormons are persecuted as some kind of oppressive patriarchy that victimized women. This narrative gives opponents justification for attacking Mormons while claiming to be “pro-equality.”
Attack On Family – The key component is the claim that men are victimizing women. This frame of ‘predator versus victim’ leads us to a Marxist ideology. Marxism is all about protecting victims from the predators. Marxists think the biggest miracle about mankind is that we evolved to the top of the food chain without ever becoming predators of other animals. Economically, Marxists protect working classes from a predator class. Marxism is all about protecting the vulnerable from those seeking unequal advantage–and all about keeping people weak in order to keep them reliant on a benevolent dictator for safety.
A major part of Marxism is the deconstruction of masculinity. They seek to pick positive masculine traits that propagate the ideology, such as the gusto to fight for the cause, and eliminate “toxic masculine” traits such as the desire to marry and have children in a traditional family. They think traditional families are evil because men contribute labor to the economy while women are “subjugated” as mothers and do not perform labor. The ideal for Marxists is a state where men and women are completely equal working bees and children are grown and raised by the benevolent dictator state. Nobody is preying on anybody.
Marl Marx used the exact same argument that CES Letter uses. In the book Dominion and Wealth: A Critical Analysis of Karl Marx’s Theory of Commercial Law by D.C. Kline, we read the story of Christians manipulating women into marriage using threats:
“On the way to the church, he informed her that if she did not marry him immediately, he would blow his brains out. They went through the form of a marriage ceremony, which she later attempted to invalidate on the ground that she acted under duress. The court rejected her claim, feeling that the facts did not reveal the existence of duress.”
(Dominion and Wealth: A Critical Analysis of Karl Marx’ Theory of Commercial Law)
CES Letter wants us to believe Mormons were manipulating and victimizing women in the same way as this Marxist narrative. This is why Anti-Mormons shame Mormon men as dangerous and Mormon women as foolish. The narrative that women are coerced into marriage because of Christianity comes straight from Karl Marx, and it is nothing but an attack on the traditional family. CES Letter‘s appeal to emotion is not only about attacking the church. It is about replacing the testimony of a gospel. Marxists believe females are oppressed by men in a giant class struggle that hinders their economic output. Polygamy in the Mormon church was problem for Marxists because the higher law of eternal marriage is the perfect example of “inequality” that Marxists hate.
CES Letter uses the same big lie tactic that they used against the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham. They start of with the big lie that marriage for time and for eternity were the same. This compounds and leads to other lies to attack Joseph Smith’s character. One lie leads to another. Now they tell the lie that Mormons married other women without the consent of their wives. Each time, they hammer home the big lie: that Joseph Smith violated people’s right to consent. This lie is easier for the reader to accept after all those earlier arguments that attached the same kind of narrative about the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham. If Joseph Smith made up all these books of scripture haphazardly, isn’t it reasonable that he made up revelations about marriage in order to steal underage girls?
For the Book of Abraham, the big lie was that the book was “translated” from a recovered fragment of papyrus that we now know is the Book of Breathing. They repeat it over and over. With polygamy, the big lie likewise will be used by CES Letter to make all sorts of implications to attack Joseph Smith’s character.
Contradiction Strategy – We could see the intellectual tricks and sophistry CES Letter used to portray Joseph Smith as a fraud in their arguments about the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham. Well, even if that were all true and he were a fraud, so what? Aren’t Mormons still nice people who make the world a better place? The powerful thing with these polygamy arguments is that CES Letter tells you why Mormonism is still evil: it victimizes women. This is easy rhetoric for them to push, as the internet is filled with all kinds of false rumors about Mormon polygamy and because the fake news media labels modern-day polygamist cultists as “Mormon”. It is easy to just repeat claims over and over, not give any evidence, and make the issue personal through manipulative repetition.
Total Hypocrisy From Anti-Mormons – This argument appeals to a woman’s desire to be “free.” It appeals to a man’s desire to protect women from harm, a very strong instinct in men. Men are highly protective of women and easily shamed for letting women down. Men with weak testimonies tend to be insecure sexually and eager to be empowering to those around them. Mormon standards of chastity and modesty protect us from harm and from harming those around us. The truth is eternal marriage is the most empowering thing there is for men and women.
The arguments are contradictory–CES Letter incorrectly complained that Joseph Smith was marrying other men’s wives, but now suggests that only men and not women were allowed to by polygamous. But the narrative doesn’t need to make sense, because it is a purely emotional appeal. Just look at the vile attacks from Anti-Mormons in general against Mormon women and girls on Twitter and social media. Anti-Mormons are often ridiculing, shaming, and attacking Mormon women.
Meanwhile, the “marriage equality” crowd pushes children to make ‘choices’ about their gender and applauds drag parties for 10 year old boys. Their pearl-clutching about consent completely flies out the window when it comes to influences pushed onto children in the name of Socialist “equality.”
CES Letter says he was led to believe something different about Joseph Smith. “This is not the Joseph Smith I grew up learning about in the Church and having a testimony of.” This shows how dependent and weak CES Letter was, demanding the church to hand them all the answers instead of researching things for themselves. It also suggests that the definition of “testimony” was shallow. If a testimony is indeed crushed by new information, it wasn’t much of a testimony to begin with, because truth doesn’t change. Truth changes for Marxists and worldly Socialists, and they believe whatever narrative they need to in the moment for their ideology and universal salvation and dictatorial control, but real truth is never altered by “new” information, only solidified.
The LDS church teaches men to love and respect women. The LDS church teaches everyone to exercise free agency and not coerce or be coerced into anything. It is a liberating gospel and empowering for all classes, races, and sexes of people. Abuse and manipulation are not tolerated. We must not allow these slanderous lies to split men and women in the church. The principle of eternal marriage is a great blessing to each of us, and it strengthens family and society. We can avoid the pitfalls and perils that plague modern western society if we hold true to these covenants and standards.Complete answers to CES Letter questions about Mormons: