Bible Girl was all ready to wax indignant about the prospect of children being ripped from their mothers, and then I read about the bed. Which is to say: the bed in the temple in Eldorado, where dirty old men got their freak on with underage virgins.
Yep, right about then all my sympathy went out the window, and I realized that the sick culture of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints needs to be busted up, deprogrammed, prosecuted, whatever.
I don’t think polygamy is the ultimate sin, as repugnant to modern sensibilities as it is. It has existed in many cultures through the millennia, including among the ancient Jews. But it’s clear to me that this sect’s practice of polygamy is motivated by plain old freakiness. Teenage virgin brides don’t complain, don’t make demands and can’t relate to their much older husbands as peers. They’re just sperm receptacles.
The Bible anticipated the problems with polygamy, and it’s interesting to walk through its pages and see the tortured family relationships that so often resulted from this practice.
Adam and Eve’s monogamous bond established God’s original intention. While the law of Moses allowed but did not encourage polygamy and prescribed certain regulations to mitigate its abuses, Jesus makes clear that divorce and, arguably, polygamy, were only permitted for a time because of the hardness of men’s hearts. People who enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, however, receive a new heart to replace the old, hard one. They’re equipped and commanded to meet a much higher standard than the Mosaic law required.
The Apostle Paul required that leaders in the church be the husband of “but one wife.” But it’s clear that he applies this expectation to all believers when he says in his first letter to the Corinthians that, “Each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.” --Julie Lyons
