One Utah

Today law enforcement officials raided the polygamist town of Colorado City. Yesterday, the Salt Lake Tribune published Polygamy victim project on defensive.

Several weeks ago on April 25, the LDS Church joined other religious bodies and leaders in signing the letter “to protect and preserve the institution of marriage between a man and a woman.” You may read the Church’s full statement on their website.

Follows are excerpts from the third in a series of open letters by Ed Firmage (website, bio). The full article will appear here on Tuesday.

Polygamy, Monogamy, and Monotheism: The One and the Many
The legal, ethical, spiritual, and practical problems created by the Mormon practice of polygamy, in the nineteenth century and thereafter, have occupied a significant portion of my scholarly and political life. Once again into the fray: I am not now and never have been a polygamist. But my people started the Mormon version of polygamy, i.e., Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Zina Diantha Huntington Smith Young, et al. I feel the Mormons, as good citizens, cannot at this point simply throw up their corporate hands, shriek, and try so very hard to separate themselves from what they (we) started. Citizenship just does not work that way, at least not in my book. My so very tentative thoughts:

The law, especially the criminal law, has severe limitations. Law, and the criminal law particularly, is not a scalpel. It is a big brutal meat cleaver. Anyone who has gone through a divorce knows this, let alone someone who has done time in the slammer. For the law, with the least degree of effectiveness, somehow to go against an entire people, in a huge horizontal swath, would presume a degree of totalitarian viciousness never really seen before in this country, including the shameful treatment of the Mormons in the nineteenth century. That is to say, to go after all polygamists for the simple practice of polygamy, would be intolerably vicious and, in the end, be unworkable. Acknowledge as we must, for example, the number of practicing polygamists of Mormon heritage still practicing “the Principle” within 50 miles in any direction from where I live. Indeed, such occurs notwithstanding more than one hundred and fifty years attempting to eradicate polygamy through the criminal law.

Vast numbers of people cannot accurately be typed. Stigmatizing and stereotyping polygamists is no more fair and accurate than doing the same thing to people of other religions, ethnicities, color, and nations. With hundreds of millions of polygamists: in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Islam; within the Hindu and Buddhist peoples, and Christians in every nation, and millions in Africa, of every religious persuasion, not to mention biblical practice. See, e.g., Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy , et al…Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob.

Let’s get real. In one portion of Buddhist practice, one woman may have several husbands. And vice versa. Its origins, and maintenance, has to do with the descent of land. That is, having a critical mass, beneath which one cannot maintain life. These circumstance, obviously, are fact-specific. They vary from nation to nation, religious sects, ethnic groups and traditions. AND NONE OF THIS JUSTIFIES ONE CRIMINAL ACT TOWARD ANY SINGLE PERSON. I know this. But we must be humane, within the law, and realistic of what we can do in the name of, and through, the law. Preachment from the pulpit, or the town square, or the classroom, is quite different and offer much greater hope of success. That’s my point. Keep your congregations, your classrooms, your town squares, all-inclusive. This was St. Augustine’s great gift, of so many, after he left the Manichaean group. He is our symbol, after the incomparable St. Paul, always to move outward, ever outward. Including every group. The fishers of human beings throw in their net and bring up fish of every kind. This is the real fish fry.

Times have changed. Indeed. And I happen to think a general movement away from polygamy and toward monogamy is all to the good. But let us remember, and be compassionate in dealing with, some groups caught up in a time warp. The very rate of the speeding up of time is upon us. All technology is now dated within two and one-half years. This used to happen, more or less, between wars: 1870-1914-1939. Large groups in Islam simply don’t see the world as we do. And bombing them into the Stone Age hardly reflects well on Christianity, democracy, or common humanity. Mormon groups maintaining a grim grip on the nineteenth century must be given time to react, group by group, to a vastly changing world. Ditto the Roman Catholic world, with its vast humanity in every land everywhere. And Orthodoxy. All our leaders should receive our profound thanks, even for trying to keep up with a world they hardly know. And most surely, not the world in which they grew up and spent most of their professional lives.

Vast numbers of people cannot accurately be typed, as a group or groups, as possessing corporately, somehow, the criminal and depraved inclinations of particular leaders. Such typing is both the prologue to and the incitement of the mob mentality, the pack after prey, sufficient to gain popular support for a holocaust, a crackdown and criminalization of an entire people. I first met Primo Levi, in one of his books; at almost the moment he died. I was in Canterbury, preparing the Reynolds Lecture, Ends and Means in Conflict, to be delivered later that year at the University of Utah. Primo Levi, a survivor of the Holocaust and one of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers, said it best: “Many people–many nations–can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that “every stranger is an enemy.” For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection, it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when it does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.” (Primo Levi, If This is a Man, published 1987, Abacus, p. 15 (paperback ed.)

I quoted Levi in speaking at the Capitol, supporting gay rights, and again supporting women’s rights. I now use the same statement, in my own state, in favor of recognizing the fundamental human rights of polygamists and, for that matter, immigrants, and aliens of whatever color, belief, gender, or nationality.

The Mormons, you might recall, did not come to the American West as tourists and loved it so much they stayed. We were forced out of Missouri, then Illinois, murdered and raped by gangs, state militia or policemen often, in their day job. Then the United States government made war on the Mormons. Civil rights denied, the vote, religious qualifications to hold office, jury duty, the right to immigrate, the right to be secure in one’s home: pure home and hearth privacy, as Blackstone defined it. Mormon leadership was in jail or on the lam, in Mexico, Canada, or western badlands. And a few such groups still remain, holdouts, neither wanting assimilation or homogenization. They want simply to be left alone. This CNN pogrom is a long way down, boys, from your better, far far better days, of the early 1990’s.

Nevertheless, some stories of sexual abuse are so raw–true tales of torture, of sexual slavery, of gender abuse, males dominating females, of commercial exploitation and educational deprivation of girls and women, by some groups, that legal responses simply must follow. And must not stop until the perpetrators are behind bars. Of course these situations, all too common, must be met by the state with full force of the criminal law. No one, at least in my world, disagrees. Go get them. Throw them in prison for very very long times but person-by-person. War is a very bad idea. Especially when one side, and only one side, has all the cameras. And real power. The ministry, the state and the media; all gang-raping the polygamists in the name of God and decency. I’m now thinking of all of us, me too, all living in glass houses, constantly throwing stones. When, just when, does the whole house fly apart?

I am a monogamist for precisely the same reason that I am a monotheist. A laser-like attention to The One is vital. But the law, if it is to be both effective and humane, must be only one tool we use. Our “quiver,” the metaphor of choice of our “natural family” enthusiasts, is indeed full and aquiver with educational means. And the law is rarely the best instrument of educational choice. The law can be highly overrated and overused, to our huge sadness. The law, at best, is a schoolmaster.

Edwin Brown Firmage (website, bio)
Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, Emeritus
University of Utah College of Law Salt Lake City, Utah

Excerpted from full article to appear here on Tuesday.

This entry was posted Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Ed Firmage, Human Rights, The Constitution, Utah Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.