Messenger Magazine
Before You Condemn Polygamy, Realize This
by Polly Hammon
Posted on 3/22/2005 at 12:07:05 PM
Before you ask me to give up my lifestyle, show me that yours works. Show me that a monogamist marriage is sacred, that it works for at least a lifetime. Currently, more than 60 percent don’t. Show me children who don’t fret and worry about “if” and “when” their family will be torn apart.
Show me the strength and support of families. Show me homes filled with the wisdom of the aged, not institutions littered with the lonely and the heartbroken, or show me hallways of hospitals lined with family and friends to celebrate glad tidings or to walk with sorrows. Show me places of safety where I can educate my children, not schoolyards of the alienated and the abandoned. Show me children raised in the stability of family, not the sterility of daycare.
Show me heroes made of sterner stuff than what it takes to dunk a basketball or throw a touchdown. Show me the nightly news without a rundown on the latest from a society obsessed with who is cheating on whom or a marriage commitment that is measured in hours.
Show me women who are not yearning after an illusion created by Hollywood - who are not anxious about the natural progression of life, who don’t fear that each change or wrinkle is a marker of possible abandonment. Show me a society so happy with its choices and fulfilled from living those choices that it hasn’t medicated itself for depression and struggles with addiction.
Show me minds honed by principle and hearts enlarged by love. Show me that your society is willing to love more that its own - that children are not referred to as “stepchildren” or “accidents.” Show me children who are loved and nurtured from the moment of conception, instead of 40 million choices of murder.
Show me a society where motherhood is honored and a woman does not have do what it takes to be “picked” by a male more concerned with the façade of her face than the content of her character. Show me a society that does not abandon its daughters to a singles’ ward with the futile admonition of “Be patient and fill your lives with other things.”
Show me a society where religion provides an unalterable standard and Truth is not for sale or bartered for political expediency - where the words and life of the Savior and other wise men are not just glib recitations but the work of a life eager for the changes and growth wrought by their words upon the soul. Show me a religion that appeals to my intellect and provides the answers to the haunting questions of humanity:
Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going?
Show me a society that is willing to allow people the liberties and inalienable rights endowed by our Creator to worship Him at the dictates of our conscience - my conscience sees the works of Fathers Abraham, Jacob, and Moses -rather than a society that commands in the place of our freedoms the Romans’ mandate of monogamy. Contrary to the efforts of some individuals today, neither man nor woman converts a belief at the sword point of compulsion.
Show me these things so that I may worry less about you and that I may know you have some of the joy I’ve known. As for the principles I strive to live by, I love how the living of them invites me to live on a higher plane. If I were to abandon them, how would I greet Mother Sarah or Father Abraham, the Prophet Joseph Smith and countless others? How can I betray my God?
Guest Editorial, 3rd March 2005, St. George Spectrum
“Were we the stupid, degraded, heartbroken beings that we have been represented, silence might better become us; but, as women of God, women who stand not as dictators, but as counselors to their husbands, and who, in the purest, noblest sense of refined womanhood, being truly their helpmates, we not only speak because we have the right, but justice and humanity demand that we should.”
Eliza R. Snow, “Great Indignation Meeting,” Deseret News Weekly, 19 January 1870.