[Vision2020] Polygamists need a voice

[Glenn Schwaller]

Religious convictions aside, it seems like a natural progression of
the "marriage movement"

CENTENNIAL PARK, Arizona (Reuters) - When Ephraim Hammon returns home
from a day of working construction near Arizona's border with Utah,
he's greeted by his wife SherylLynne. And then by his wife Leah.
	Polygamy, once hidden in the shadows of Utah and Arizona, is breaking
into the open as fundamentalist Mormons push to decriminalize it on
religious grounds, while at the same time stamping out abuses such as
forced marriages of underage brides.
	The growing confidence of polygamists and their willingness to go
public come at an awkward moment for mainstream Mormons, who are now
in the spotlight as Republican Mitt Romney, a prominent Mormon, seeks
the U.S. presidency.
	The Salt Lake City, Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, or Mormon church, introduced polygamy before the Civil War but
banned it in 1890 when the federal government threatened to deny Utah
statehood. Today, about 40,000 "fundamentalist Mormons" in Utah and
nearby states live polygamy illegally.
	Romney, whose great-grandfather had five wives and whose
great-great-grandfather had a dozen, has dismissed the practice as
"bizarre" -- a comment that infuriates Hammon, whose father and
grand-father practiced plural marriage.
	"If it was me, I wouldn't apologize for my past. My ancestors did
what they did. I can't help that," said Hammon, 36, who legally
married SherylLynne, 32, in 1994 and was joined with Leah, 21, a
decade later as his "celestial bride" in a religious ceremony that has
no legal binding.
	Leah bristles at the idea of women being forced into polygamy. "The
women in this society are educated," she said.
	Her husband likened the struggle for acceptance with the civil rights
movement. "It's like the work Martin Luther King did in relation with
African Americans," he said, holding year-old Ava, one of his eight
children, in the living room of his three-story home in Centennial
Park, a dry, dusty Arizona town run by polygamists near the Utah
border.
	Excommunicated by the church, they see themselves as true believers
in Mormonism as practiced by founder Joseph Smith. Historians say
Smith took at least two dozen wives, some of them before 1843, the
year he announced a revelation from God saying polygamy was a crucial
key to entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
	"I don't think the revelation that Joseph Smith received came from
Christ," said John Llewellyn, a retired Salt Lake County policeman who
once practiced polygamy but now campaigns against it. "I think it came
from his Y (male) chromosome."

'TERRIBLY WRONG'

	Llewellyn, an author of several books on polygamy, said the
mainstream church could do more to stop it. Its "Woodruff Manifesto",
which banned polygamy, never revoked Smith's revelation on plural
marriage, which remains in section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants,
a Mormon book of scriptures.
	"We believe in this continuing flow of revelation, and it's (God's)
right to authorize and de-authorize -- to turn it on or turn it off,"
said Elder D. Todd Christofferson, a member of the Presidency of the
Seventy, a leadership body of the mainstream Mormon church.
	To revive polygamy, he added, the church's 96-year-old president,
regarded as a living prophet, must receive a revelation from God
sanctioning it.
	"That's where we think that those who have left the church to pursue
a polygamous lifestyle have gone terribly wrong. They assume their
right to choose that and to authorize it when there is only a divine
sanction possible to authorize that."
	Polygamist advocate Anne Wilde said the church has the right to its
beliefs, just as polygamists should be allowed their interpretation of
Mormonism without persecution.
	"As consenting adults, which is the key, we ought to have that choice
to live that lifestyle. We live it because of strong religious
convictions," said Wilde, 71.
	The attorneys general of Utah and Arizona said in separate interviews
they had no intention of prosecuting polygamists unless they commit
other crimes such as taking underage brides -- a practice authorities
said was rampant in a Utah-Arizona border community run by Warren
Jeffs before his arrest in August.
	"We are not going to go out there and persecute people for their
beliefs," said Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard.
	Adds Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff: "We determined six or
seven years ago that there was no way we could prosecute 10,000
polygamists and put the kids into foster care. There's no way that we
have the money or the resources to do that."
	The last big prosecution, in 1953, backfired. Arizona's National
Guard raided a polygamist colony on the Utah/Arizona border, but
images of kids split from mothers, with fathers jailed, provoked
national sympathy for the polygamists.
	"No matter how much persecution the people have endured because of
their belief, history has borne out that it will survive," said
Ephraim Hammon's mother, Marlyne, who was a four-month-old baby in the
colony when it was raided.
	A turning point for polygamists came in August 2003 when dozens made
a public stand by showing up en masse at a "polygamy summit" in St.
George, Utah, organized by the Utah and Arizona attorneys general.
"Before then, we discussed all these things in private," said Hammon.
	Many are finding they have an unlikely ally in Hollywood, since the
start of "Big Love," HBO's series about a fictional polygamous family.
	But many polygamists still live discreetly in middle-class
neighborhoods next to conventional families, fearing the stigma of the
practice could threaten careers and cause their children to be taunted
at school.
	Although encouraged by the state's reluctance to prosecute them,
several expressed fears of the future and want some legal protection
in case the public mood turns against them.