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3:54:00 AM EDT
Long thoughts on polygamy and Mormonism...
After my grandmother's visit from the spirit world, I have not been able to sleep. I know that she is as troubled as I am by the activities in Texas regarded the Mormon polygamist community that Warren Jeffs moved there from Colorado City both in Utah and Arizona. I am gratified that the authorities are moving in to stop any marriages of underage girls to older polygamist men as well as other forms of lawbreaking by removing women and girls. Other states have not been so vigilant when Mormon polygamists moved into their states. Perhaps Texas has acted due to Warren Jeff's conviction and jail sentence in Utah. He is also going to be tried in Arizona for other crimes he is accused of committing including molestation of a nephew when he was underage.
I am satisfied that other crimes were not recognized and dealt with as they should have been in the Mormon community where I grew up because the Mormon Church itself did not recognize polygamy as wrong and still taught that the principle would be restored in Mormon heaven. Since baptizing for the dead is a very big activity in the present day Mormon church, it can be perceived how important the church thinks Mormon doctrine is. It is taught that only by accepting Mormonism can anybody enter heaven!
A religion that teaches doctrine that people even in the same family cannot agree is true can be so divisive it is unbelievable. Mormon missions, for example, are very challenging to the young men who are called to serve. They must often learn a new language and be prepared to sacrifice and serve for two years in a way they have never had to do before. But tragically I think, what these young men are called upon to teach is fraught with the possibility of simply not being true in regard to the revelations recorded for all time by the early Mormon prophets, mainly by the most important one, founder Joseph Smith.
But it seems there is no way for a church to find or acknowledge their prophets have been wrong! Right away the all important missions to convert many people of the world to the Mormon religion would be in jeopardy. No, it can't be done. It is deemed that popularity is more important to maintain than acknowledging that prophets are human and could be wrong.
Just look at how fixed the policy in the Catholic church is that forbids priests to marry. For the first five or six hundred years they married, but then according to one historical source I read it was thought that if the priests did not marry the church rather than their families would inherit whatever wealth they had acquired. Well, the change did result in the Catholic church becoming very wealthy but it also resulted in the scandal of the pedofile priests which has threatened the power and reputation of the Catholic church as nothing else has ever done, but I still doubt that it will ever allow priests to marry. These principles get fixed in stone. So then all the ones hurt by the lawbreakers among the priests will fall away. The church will lose much. Lawsuits have impoverished some of the parishes already. Priests are needed. What is to be done?
It is any wonder that large numbers of people do not trust churches and stay away? But it is very hard for many to recognize that churches are not infallible. So members of the same family will carry on life long feuds among themselves, disagreeing about church policy.
Which is what happened in my family. While my Grandmother was right there in Phoenix she had her mind on her church as usual and failed to realize that her daughter, my mother, had lost all control of herself. She had even come on to Dean and scared him to death! Yet, we could not talk to her mother about this, nor had we been able to mention it to our Grandfather Wilson before he died, who I thought had gone quite as crazy as my mother when it came to inappropriate sexual behavior.
I was mortified when I heard that an underage student he taught in high school said that she hated him because he was always trying to touch the girls! But what was Grandmother doing? Well, she was lost in a fog as far as I was concerned. She did not deal with reality. She just went to church constantly and trusted that would get her into heaven and that seemed to be all that mattered.
I just felt so frustrated seeing my mother fall completely apart, I could hardly bear it. I didn't even know but what her father had touched her improperly, but I knew my mother was actually deathly afraid of him and would never have told anyone if he had. My Grandfather Wilson had a temper I thought made him seem demon possessed. And he told me himself that his own father had beaten him so badly in the 18 years he had had to endure him before he died, that he still hated him!
But so many Mormon women were taught to love and support their husbands without question. Everything they did was right even when it was wrong. Why not. They had embraced polygamy, accepted their husband marrying up to seven wives which was considered necessary for him to receive top honors in heaven! Grandmother Wilson had the passive attitude so common among them, as did her mother, my great grandmother Porter. Their very passivity probably caused their husbands to feel they had to find some less boring women to marry.
I would say that a passive attitude is probably necessary for any woman to accept polygamy. I wasn't passive so polyamy would have been anathema to me. In fact, the whole polygamy thing caused me to leave the church. Oh, there were other reasons but that principle still in Mormon doctrine as restored in heaven was the big one. I wasn't going to Mormon heaven, that was for sure and fight polgamy restored.
It doesn't sound like Grandmother Wilson went to Mormon heaven either. It sounds like she received a rude awakening when she got to the other side. I don't quite know what it was but her attention span in regard to her children seems to have improved considerably. I thought that her husband, my Grandfather, had long deserved to be divorced. It sounds like that has happened, too. His temper alone was so godawful it would have driven me to part from him. I never heard his kids argue with him once, he had them so thoroughly cowed.
My sisters and I would go in and participate in a shouting match with our dad at the slightest provocation. We would shout until we either exhausted him or he did us. Mother had not been allowed to shout at her dad. So she could never hold up very long in an argument with our dad. She was very apt to attack him and try to beat him up, and since he was stronger, she always lost. I always maintained that you had to fight wrong doing. If you did not fight your erring dad who else would? If you waited for the law to come and take him away, you would most likely wait forever. My dad became for too rich for anyone to arrest. Rich men rarely go to jail, it is true.
In Phoenix I soon got into the most hair rasing fights with both Mother and Dad you can imagine. They would be in there trying to kill each other, keeping me awake. I remember screaming at them one night from my apartment over to theirs, "Shut your god damn mouths so I can go to sleep." I had to work the next day, and I did indeed collapse at work one day after they had kept me awake all night. The doctor in emergency told me to go home and commit them both. Oh ha ha, I thought. If I could not do that, she said I had better leave them, so I did, for a while. I fled the scene to California, oh but I am getting ahead of my story, but it seems like I kind of have to warn the reader that rougher days are ahead. Now I hope that after writing this, these memories won't keep me awake any longer, and I can go to sleep!
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4/9/08 2:40 PM