That is an even dumber comment still. I thought that weatherman had made the dumbest possible comment in this thread. I didn’t think it was possible to up his score. But you have broken his record.
Oh, Zerinus, we can always count on you for great insults. In the last few weeks you have called me both “evil” and “dumb.” If you have any other zingers why don’t you just spout them all at once and be done with it so we can have a serious discussion?
Okay, let’s suppose you are right, and LDS discontinued polygamy purely as a result of pressure from the American Government. If so, why should they oppose its legalization now? Surely they should welcome it, because the restriction would then be removed. There would be no more pressure or obstruction. All would be legal and aboveboard. So why should they oppose its legalization now?
If you read my earlier posts you would have noticed that I said the only way the Mormon church would push for legalization of polygamy is if they controlled the presidency, congress, and the courts–in other words, the whole government. But if a Mormon were elected president and tried to legalize polygamy, without Mormon control of the other two branches of government, then it would be suicide for the LDS church to support polygamy.
And just for a little history reminder, here is some material on the subject from John Krakauer’s book,
Under the Banner of Heaven:
The harder the Saints resisted federal control, however, the more Washington resolved to bring them to heel. In March 1887, Congress passed the harshest legislation yet directed at the Mormons, the Edmunds-Tucker Bill. Four months later John Taylor died, still in hiding, and a day after he was laid to rest, federal lawyers initiated a series of legal actions intended to bankrupt the Mormon Church. On May 19, 1890, they achieved their desired end when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on these actions against the Saints, allowing church holdings to be seized by the government.
The whole of Mormondom was wobbling on the brink. With the death of Taylor in 1887, an eighty-two-year-old apostle named Wilford Woodruff had been installed as the fourth Mormon prophet. And he recognized, with great pain, that the Kingdom of God had no choice but to surrender to Washington’s demands. After taking to his bed on the evening of September 23, 1890, Woodruff reported, he “struggled all night with the Lord about what should be done with the existing circumstances of the church.”
In the morning he called together five trusted Mormon leaders and, “with broken spirit,” informed them that God had revealed to him the necessity of relinquishing “the practice of that principle for which the bretheren had been willing to lay down their lives.” To the shock and utter horror of the other men in the room, President Woodruff explained that “it was the will of the Lord” that the church stop sanctioning the doctrine of plural marriage.
On October 6, 1890, Woodruff’s momentous revelation was formalized in a brief document that became known as “the Woodruff Manifesto,” or simply “the Manifesto.” It read, in part,
Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention of submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise…
And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain form contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.
WILFORD WOODRUFF
President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
:grouphug: :kissme: