ReligionLink

UPDATED MARCH 13, 2006

Polygamy has emerged as an issue in the ferocious marriage debates. Could sanctioning gay marriage lead to legalizing polygamy? It depends on whom you ask. Though polygamy is illegal in all 50 states, it’s thought to be practiced as matter of religion by thousands of people in the United States - particularly in the West - and is rarely prosecuted. Polygamy is back in the public consciousness for the first time in years because of wrangling over the legal definition of marriage and several high-profile criminal cases.

So far, there has been no serious challenge to anti-polygamy laws, but, as scholar Sarah Barringer Gordon puts it, culturally there is a significant disturbance in the waters. For one thing, marriage is no longer the main way people organize their lives. Living together without marriage - now extremely common - once used to be illegal, too. For another, the legal arguments from the late nineteenth-century court cases that denied a free exercise right to preach and practice polygamy have been rendered obsolete by the Supreme Court’s subsequent First Amendment case law, according to John Witte, director of Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University. The court would have to rely on other arguments to reach the same result.

In some regions of the country, many people take the attitude that religiously motivated polygamy should just be left alone as a matter between consenting adults. When polygamists are prosecuted, it’s usually for what some label “polygabuse” - charges related to crimes such as incest, underage marriage or welfare fraud. But many, including women who have left polygamy, say polygamous relationships are inherently patriarchal and tend to mistreat women. The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints outlawed polygamy in 1890, but some unofficial offshoots of the church continue to practice it.

Will polygamous communities press for legitimacy? While a number are openly hoping that they will gain standing through legalization of same-sex marriage, they are counterbalanced by those who insist on defining marriage as being between one man and one woman.

Why it matters

Both advocates and opponents of same-sex marriage sometimes cite the religious aspects of marriage to support their case. Advocates of polygamy also cite religious beliefs as a reason for the practice to be allowed. If religious beliefs are a factor in same-sex marriage, should they be a factor in deciding the legality of polygamy, too?

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National/international sources

• Sarah Barringer Gordon, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and director of the Penn Legal History Consortium, is a scholar on the historical role of religion in American political life and on the separation of church and state. She wrote The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). She says there were and are women who find happiness in polygamy because they believe they are living their religion. Gordon says that, technically speaking, permitting two people to participate in a traditional, monogamous marriage doesn’t mean opening the door to polygamy because gay marriage doesn’t change such legal-administration matters as inheritance and parental issues. Contact 215-898-3069, sgordon@law.upenn.edu.

• John Witte Jr. is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics, director of the Law and Religion Program and director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta. He specializes in legal history, marriage and religious liberty. His books include Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties (Westview Press, 2004), which includes discussion of the 19th-century Mormon polygamy cases, and From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion and Law in the Western Tradition (Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). He has written that if the basis for reforming marriage laws becomes social pragmatism and individual happiness, “then arguments against incestuous, adolescent and polygamous marriages must also fall aside.” Contact 404-727-6980 or 404-727-5588, jwitte@law.emory.edu, or April Bogle, the center’s public relations director, 404-712-8713, abogle@law.emory.edu.

• Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of religious studies and history at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is a well-known non-Mormon scholar on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her books include Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (University of Illinois Press, 1987) and Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (University of Illinois, 2000). Contact 812-336-8244 or 812-325-1580, shipps@iupui.edu.

• Kathryn Daynes is an assistant history professor at Brigham Young University in Utah with expertise on Mormon plural marriage. She wrote More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 (University of Illinois Press, 2001). Contact 801-422-3683, kathryn_daynes@byu.edu.

• Historian D. Michael Quinn is the author of several scholarly books about Mormons, including Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Signature Books, 1998). In 1997, the American Historical Association gave him a best-book award for Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (University of Illinois Press, 1996). He has worked as an independent scholar since 1988, when he resigned his tenured position as a history professor at Brigham Young University because of disputes over academic freedom. The church excommunicated the lifelong Mormon in 1993 over his writings about Mormon history. He is temporarily living in the Claremont, Calif., area. Contact 909-946-1598, mike.quinn@finefriends.net.

• John R. Llewellyn is a retired Salt Lake County, Utah, sheriff’s lieutenant who extensively investigated polygamy cults. A former polygamist, he wrote Polygamy Under Attack: From Tom Green to Brian David Mitchell (Agreka Books, 2004), A Teenager’s Tears: When Parents Convert To Polygamy (Agreka, 2001), and Murder of a Prophet: The Dark Side of Utah Polygamy (Agreka, 2000). Llewellyn is now a monogamist and muckraker, and he was lead investigator in two major lawsuits against polygamist cults. Read his article about the Elizabeth Smart case. He says truly religious polygamists treat their wives with respect and dignity, but corruption is widespread in Utah’s polygamist groups. Contact 801-446-1247 or 801-259-5415 (cell), john@polygamybooks.com.

• Dorothy Allred Solomon, a monogamist who is the 28th of the 48 children born to the late polygamist Mormon Rulon Allred, is the author of Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy (W.W. Norton and Co., 2003). She lives in the Salt Lake City area. She says that because of secrecy and isolation, as well as patriarchal tyranny, there is more of certain kinds of abuse - sexual, spiritual and mental - in the polygamous subculture, but drug abuse, physical abuse and crime are rare. Contact 801-243-5068, EmeraldDor@aol.com.

• Stephen Kent is a sociology professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who has studied polygamy. Contact 780-492-2204, steve.kent@ualberta.ca.

POLYGAMY ADVOCATES

• Principle Voices of Polygamy is an advocacy group for polygamous families. The organization has access to representatives of thousands of polygamous families across the United States, including those affiliated with various polygamous groups and/or communities. Among those are the Kingstons (Utah), the Allreds (Utah), the FLDS (Colorado City, Ariz; Hildale, Utah) and Centennial Park (Arizona). Principle Voices also has access to those who are not affiliated with any organization and who predominantly consider themselves Independent Fundamentalist Mormons. Read the group’s FAQs and Myths page. Contact directors Linda Kelsch and Anne Wilde through mary@principlevoices.org. Wilde is also co-author/co-compiler of Voices in Harmony: Contemporary Women Celebrate Plural Marriage (along with fellow Principle Voices directors Marianne Watson and Mary Batchelor), a collection of essays written by contemporary plural wives.

• Philip Kilbride, a professor of anthropology at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pa., wrote Plural Marriage for Our Times: A Reinvented Option? (Bergin & Garvey; 1994). He argues that plural marriage is not a sexual practice but a form of the family - one that is the ideal in most of the world’s cultures, though monogamy is the statistical norm in every culture. He says that considered from the point of view of what is best for children in a nation with a 50 percent divorce rate, the option of plural marriage in some cases would keep families intact and would give more children a father in the family, whereas monogamy has brought only a high divorce rate. Contact 610-526-5023, pkilbrid@brynmawr.edu.

• Mark Henkel of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, is a national polygamy advocate and founder of TruthBearer.org, a non-Mormon organization that promotes Christian polygamy. Contact media-request@TruthBearer.org.

• Shane LeGrande Whelan of Salt Lake City is the author of More Than One: Plural Marriage - A Sacred Heritage, A Promise For Tomorrow (Zion Publishers, 2002). He edits Mormon Focus magazine. Contact 801-943-1374, mto@zionpublishers.com or shane@zionpublishers.com.

POLYGAMY OPPONENTS

• Mary Mackert, a former plural wife who lives in Utah, wrote and published The Sixth of Seven Wives: Escape From Modern-Day Polygamy (xpolygamist.com, 2001). Contact xpolygamist@yahoo.com.

• Tapestry Against Polygamy, which is based in Salt Lake City, estimates that more than 100,000 people practice polygamy in the United States, with concentration in the Western states, particularly Utah. Contact the office, 801-364-6764; executive director Vicky Prunty, 801-205-6506; or Rowenna Erickson, 801-259-5200; or exwives@polygamy.org or media@polygamy.org.

• Help the Child Brides is in St. George, Utah. Contact 435-627-9582, child_brides@yahoo.com.

 

Background

• Polygamy is illegal in the United States and all 50 states. Under law, immigrants or refugees who practice polygamy are inadmissible for admission to the United States, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints outlawed polygamy in 1890. Read President Gordon B. Hinckley’s comments on polygamy on the church’s web site (see question 4).

• Listen to a March 15, 2004, National Public Radio program about polygamy on All Things Considered.

• Read “Living the Principle: Inside Polygamy,” a March 2004 special report by The Salt Lake Tribune.

• Read the article “Why just have one? An evaluation of the anti-polygamy laws under the Establishment Clause,” published in the spring 2003 issue of the Houston Law Review.

• More than 15,000 ethnic Hmong refugees now living in Thailand are eligible to be resettled in the United States, but their common practice of polygamy raises problems, according to a March 2, 2004, Reuters article posted by Yahoo News.

• A 2000 poll by Deseret News/KSL-TV in Utah found that 58 percent of the 407 people polled by Dan Jones & Associates said they strongly or somewhat favor the more aggressive prosecutions of polygamists.

• See HBO’s home page for its series Big Love, starring Bill Paxton as a polygamist with three wives. It premiered March 13, 2006.

• Read about the HBO series Big Love from the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints’ perspective.

 

LEGAL CASES INVOLVING POLYGAMY

• The Religious Institutions Group of the law firm Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons posts federal cases involving polygamy.

• Read the Feb. 9, 2004, Newsweek article “A Family’s Tangled Ties: Utah prosecutors crack down on incest and polygamy.”

• Civil rights attorney Brian Barnard has brought a lawsuit challenging Utah’s polygamy ban, according to a Jan. 27, 2004, Associated Press article posted by CBS News. The federal lawsuit, filed Jan. 12, 2004, involves a married couple - identified as G. Lee Cook and D. Cook - and a woman, J. Bronson, who were denied a marriage license by Salt Lake County clerks.

• In a power struggle within the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Colorado City, Ariz., and nearby Hilldale, Utah, church leader Warren Jeffs has been kicking out some men and reassigning their wives and children to other men, according to a Jan. 25, 2004, Associated Press article posted by The Seattle Times.

• Stanley M. Shepp of Hallam, Pa., who is Mormon, is appealing to the state Supreme Court a custody case decision forbidding him from discussing with his 10-year-old daughter his belief in polygamy, according to a Dec. 10, 2003, Associated Press article posted by CNN.

• Several hundred Arizona polygamists told Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff that his state needs to amend its “stupid, old-fashioned law” against polygamy, according to a Sept. 28, 2003, Deseret News article.

 

Regional sources

IN THE NORTHEAST

• Read the Jan. 15, 2004, Boston Globe column, “Is lawful polygamy next?“

• James J. Hughes is the associate director of Institutional Research and Planning at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where he also teaches health policy in the graduate public policy program. He is a sociologist and bioethicist and has written in defense of polygamy. Contact 860-297-2376, james.Hughes@trincoll.edu.

• Janet B. Bennion is an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at Lyndon State College in Lyndonville, Vt., who researches alternative sexuality in religious groups in the United States, Mexico and Africa. She is the author of two books about women’s lives in polygamy, Women of Principle: Female Networking in Contemporary Mormon Polygyny (Oxford Press, 1998) and Desert Patriarchy: Mormon and Mennonite Communities in the Chihuahua Valley (University of Arizona Press, forthcoming spring 2004). Contact 802-626-6234, janet.bennion@lyndonstate.edu.

 

IN THE EAST

• Keith E. Sealing, assistant dean at Syracuse University’s College of Law in Syracuse, N.Y., has researched whether the First Amendment free-exercise clause should prohibit states from banning religiously motivated polygamy. Contact 315-443-3192, kesealin@law.syr.edu.

• Audrey B. Chapman is a family therapist in private practice in Washington, D.C., and the author of Man Sharing: Dilemma or Choice? A Radical New Way of Relating to the Men in Your Lives (William Morrow, 1986). Contact 703-914-2068.

• Rick Ross is founder and executive director of the nonprofit Ross A. Institute, which is based in Jersey City, N.J., and has a mission of studying controversial groups and movements. The institute maintains a database on polygamist groups. Contact 201-222-3531, info@rickross.com.

IN THE SOUTHEAST

• Patricia Dixon is associate professor in African-American studies at Georgia State University in Athens, Ga., and co-founder of the African-American Relationships Institute. She contends that a shortage of eligible African-American men, combined with men’s natural tendency to engage in multiple relationships, makes polygamy a practical option for African-Americans. Contact 404-651-4882, pdixon2@gsu.edu.

• Daryl White is a professor of sociology and anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta who has researched Mormonism. Contact 404-270-6053, dwhite@spelman.edu.

• O. Kendall White Jr. is William P. Ames Jr. Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and has written extensively on Mormonism. Contact 540-458-8793, Whitek@wlu.edu.

IN THE SOUTH

• Hans A. Baer is a professor in the anthropology and sociology department at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and he has researched fundamentalist, polygamous Mormons. Contact 501-569-3173, habaer@ualr.edu.

• Kathleen Flake is assistant professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. She has written extensively on Mormons, and is the author of The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Contact 615-322-2776, kathleen.flake@vanderbilt.edu.

• Michele Alexandre, an assistant law professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tenn., is a 2004 Fulbright Scholar researching the legal protection afforded to women under the Haitian practice of placage, an informal form of polygamy. She is currently in Trinidad and Tobago, working with the Hugh Wooding Law School and the Centre for Gender and Development Studies. Contact malxndr2@memphis.edu.

IN THE MIDWEST

• R. Collin Mangrum is a law professor at Creighton University in Omaha who teaches on church and state issues and on the history of American legal thought. He is co-author of Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (University of Illinois Press, 1988). Contact 402-280-3092, mangrum@creighton.edu.

• Maura I. Strassberg is a law professor at Drake University in Des Moines who has expertise in sexuality law and has written about polygamy. Contact 515-271-2068, maura.strassberg@drake.edu.

• Martin Ottenheimer is an anthropology professor at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., whose research specializes in marriage and family relationships. Contact 785-532-9903, martin@ottenheimer.com.

 

IN THE SOUTHWEST

• Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has vowed to crack down on polygamy involving underage brides and abuse. His office has an investigator, Ron Barton, who specializes in closed communities, including crimes involving polygamy. Read a May 12, 2003, Salt Lake Tribune article, posted by the anti-polygamy site The Principle. Contact Paul Murphy at 801-538-1892, pmurphy@utah.gov.

• Workers with the toll-free Utah Domestic Violence Information Line, which is working with the state attorney general’s office, have been receiving training in helping victims of violence from polygamous relationships. Read a Feb. 11, 2004, news release. Contact A.J. Hunt, 801-887-1236.

• Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, as part of a crackdown on abuse associated with polygamy, plans to establish a state justice center in Colorado City, where most residents engage in polygamy, according to a Feb. 5, 2004, story by News Channel 3 in Phoenix, posted by Fox 11 in Tucson.

• Martha Sonntag Bradley, a historian who teaches architecture at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, has written extensively on 20th-century polygamy and is president of the Mormon History Association. Her books include Kidnapped From That Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists (University of Utah Press, 1999). Contact 801-581-7383, bradley@arch.utah.edu.

Irwin Altman is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and the co-author of Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

• Contact 801-581-7109, Irwin.Altman@m.cc.utah.edu.

Edwin B. Firmage is a law professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who has defended polygamists. A monogamist and a great-great-grandson of polygamist Brigham Young, Firmage teaches constitutional law. He is co-author of Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (University of Illinois Press, 1988). Contact 801-581-7819, firmagee@law.utah.edu.

• Jeffrey C. Fox is an assistant professor of political science at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., who has researched Mormonism and polygamy. Contact 970-247-7316, fox_j@fortlewis.edu.

Jenifer Kunz, an associate professor of sociology at West Texas A&M University, has researched the attitudes of 21st-century members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints toward polygamy. Contact 806-651-2597, jkunz@mail.wtamu.edu.

 

IN THE WEST/NORTHWEST

• Police say a man in Fresno, Calif., who is suspected of killing nine of his family members lived a life of polygamy and incest, even fathering two of his victims with his own daughters, reported NBC11.com of San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco in a March 14, 2004, story. Read a March 18, 2004, Fresno Bee article.

• David L. Zolman of Salt Lake City is a family historian and former Utah state representative. He advocates open dialogue and education about the polygamous culture, its strengths and weaknesses, as well as an examination of contemporary anti-polygamy laws, and whether or not such laws are effective and serve the purpose for which they were intended, or if they are discriminatory and marginalizing of an entire class of citizens. Contact 801-969-9524, zolman2@comcast.net.

• Armand L. Mauss, a professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University who now lives in Irvine, Calif., has written extensively on Mormonism. His most recent book is All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003). Contact almauss@cox.net.

• B. Carmon Hardy is a history professor at California State University at Fullerton and the author of Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (University of Illinois Press, 1992). Contact 714-278-3378, chardy@fullerton.edu.

• Erwin Chemerinsky teaches law at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He specializes in constitutional law. He says that polygamy in the United States has customarily been the practice of subjugating women and that the state has an interest in preventing that. Contact 213-740-2539, echemeri@law.usc.edu.

• Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in Stanford, Calif., whose expertise includes the culture wars. Read his article “Beyond Gay Marriage: The Road to Polyamory,” from the Aug. 4-Aug. 11 issue of The Weekly Standard. Contact Michele M. Horaney at 650-725-7293, Horaney@hoover.stanford.edu.

• Theodore C. Bergstrom holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the economics department at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Calif., and is the author of On the Economics of Polygyny (University of Michigan, 1994), which is available online. Contact 805-893-3744, tedb@econ.ucsb.edu.