Recent surveys suggest that over half of the Latter-day Saints living in Utah believe polygamists should be prosecuted because of their lifestyle. This fact concerns me. It suggests that many of my fellow Latter-day Saints lack the kind of historical perspective on their own faith that would enable them to understand and tolerate that of their polygamous neighbors.
To many Latter-day Saints it seems obvious that polygamists should be prosecuted -- after all, "We believe in . . . obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law," and polygamists are law-breakers. But we also believe in "allow[ing] all men" to "worship how, where, or what they may." "All men" is a very inclusive category, one that surely cannot exclude contemporary "Mormon fundamentalists."
However wrong these polygamists' lifestyle may be, it is part of their worship, and thus something we ostensibly "allow" them to carry on without interference.
To prosecute Mormon fundamentalists under the unjust anti-bigamy statute because we believe in obeying such laws would be equivalent to forcing our religion upon them: They do not share our conviction that the law of the land must always be obeyed. Rather, they, like 19th-century Latter-day Saints, claim the privilege of keeping what they understand to be God's law on polygamy in preference to human laws.
Polygamy was against the laws of the states of Ohio and Illinois when Joseph Smith practiced it there. Laws forbidding it in Utah Territory were passed by Congress in 1862 and upheld as constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in its 1879 Reynolds decision, facts which deterred neither LDS leaders nor laymen from practicing it resolutely.
Even after the church officially terminated the practice in 1890, the vast majority of LDS polygamists, including Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant, continued to live with their plural wives. They were civilly disobedient to the laws of the United States because they believed these laws to be contrary to a higher law given by God for the protection of all human beings -- the Constitution.
Virtually all Latter-day Saints know that LDS scripture portrays God as the originator of the Constitution (D&C 101:77-80) and thus its most reliable interpreter. hat most are not aware of is that two revelations to presidents of the church actually offer divine interpretation of the Constitution, and each declares the laws against the religious practice of polygamy unconstitutional. On Jan. 26, 1880, Wilford Woodruff recorded what may be seen as a divine rebuttal to the Reynolds decision: a revelation stating that the "the Supreme Court" had "sought to hinder you from keeping my commandments or from enjoying the rights which the constitutional law of the land guarantee unto you." Then, on June 25 and 26, 1882, John Taylor recorded, in a revelation on "the law" of plural marriage, "Concerning the course taken by the United States, . . . it is contrary to the provisions of the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, for them to prohibit you from obeying it." In light of these revelations, and given the differing relative positions of deity and the U.S. Supreme Court within Mormonism, it would seem truer to the faith to prefer the interpretation offered by deity to the interpretation offered by the court.
Even setting these revelations aside, it is clear that Latter-day Saints cannot reasonably deny anyone the right to practice polygamy for religious reasons. Pre-Manifesto Mormons claimed the right to practice it as part of their constitutionally protected religious freedom.
And, so far as I am aware, no contemporary Latter-day Saint denies that they had this right. Because we cannot consistently claim a right for ourselves -- or our ancestors -- and deny that same right to those of another faith, justice demands that we accord contemporary polygamists the same rights we accord our pioneer forebears.
All deserve equal treatment before the law.
If Tom Green and other contemporary polygamists should be prosecuted for their lifestyle, then early LDS leaders, including the presidents of the church, should have been prosecuted as well.
The law cannot hold up one standard for true prophets and another for false ones. As Joseph Smith said in his King Follett Discourse, "Every man has a natural, and, in our country, a constitutional right to be a false prophet, as well as a true prophet." For the government to hold true and false prophets to differing standards would require it to pass judgment on which were true and which were false. Government would then become the arbiter of religious truth. Is this really a role we want government to take?