It’s perhaps a little unpopular to argue that Brigham Young got anything right about polygamy, but one place where I think he was onto something was to point out the all-too-common hypocrisy of many vehement anti-polygamists (see full quotes below).

Mark Twain authored that famous jab about how ugly Mormon plural wives were–but maybe that’s because the women he collected were younger.  Victorian-era Church leaders were indeed onto something about how people would preen about those awful Mormon abominations against public virtue and then visit a prostitute (London alone had over 80,000 of them, and I assume they weren’t just twiddling their thumbs in empty brothels).

Of course we all know about the infamous sexual hypocrisy of 19th-century American and English society, but there are more modern-day examples as well. Francis Mitterand, the French Prime Minister, had both a mistress and her daughter and his wife and their children at his funeral. People might make a big deal about technical legal distinctions and niceties, but Miterrand was a polygamist, full stop.  To this you can add legion other examples. Pablo Picasso was a polygamist, housing one wife and his children with her in the same neighborhood as his other wife mistress and her children. Let’s not forget Charlie Sheen’s multiple homes for his multiple families. Ernest Hemingway’s relationship start and stop dates didn’t, shall we say, fit together like blocks,  and then of course there’s the king of all polygamists Hugh Hefner. Of course, had he bothered calling them wives I doubt entrance to his mansion parties would have carried nearly the same cultural cachet. Even renowned libertine Dan Savage, advocate of all sorts of “to each their own” sexual lifestyles, engages in some creative anthropology about why polygamy is Just Wrong. 

This isn’t to say that everybody who is anti-polygamist is a hypocrite, and this isn’t a defense of polygamy itself, just that it’s a bit odd that, in the spirit of Brigham Young, a society with polycules, throuples, and every relationship configuration under the sun would pearl clutch about polygamy. 

Cultural elite discourse notwithstanding, the artificial distinctions between polygamy and these cooler family forms are flimsier than many realize. At the same time we had an explosion in the acceptance of different family forms support for polygamy tripled, and some jurisdictions are beginning to recognize polygamous relationships. And yes, I know all the little desperate distinctions made between polyamorous and polygamous relationships, but at the end of the day my polygamist ancestors had the right to vote and no-fault divorce their husbands long before their monogamous foremothers did and the purposes of, say, the famous Sommerville ordinance polygyny is simply a subset of polyamory. I suspect that on some level the same people who think that Mormon polygamy is gross but San Franciscan poly relationships are vanguard are basing their attitude more on the fact that one group dresses funny and is weird and the other group is cool, more than anything consistent or well thought-out. 

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Brigham Young

https://journalofdiscourses.com/11/41

I wish to give my views with regard to that doctrine and practice which are so obnoxious to the outsiders…They say that polygamy is obnoxious to the world. This is really not so; it is the name of it that they object to the most. In connection with this let us look at the Christian world, and I will refer to the ladies who compose a portion of this congregation. There are many ladies, probably, here, who have lived long in the outside world, previous to coming to Utah, and who are not entirely unacquainted with the usages of society there. You know that it is customary to admit a certain class of gentlemen to private parties and entertainments where they are greeted cordially and welcome….Yet it is not unknown, in the circles they frequent, that they are vile and corrupt, with regard to chastity. Yes, it is known that those beautiful gentlemen are libertines, that they do not respect female virtue any more than they do their old clothes, which they have worn and cast off. Yet, they are greeted with the most profound respect and deference, their great crimes against female chastity are winked at, and they are still permitted to frequent the best society to lead astray, and decoy from the paths of virtue, the unsuspecting and unwary female…

This is one of the inconsistencies of the refined society of the age. 

John Taylor

https://journalofdiscourses.com/23/27

Then they talk to us about our virtue. I think that some of these people had better attend to their own affairs. We do not want their system of what they call morality introduced amongst us; we can do without it very, very well. Why do we speak of these things? Because they are matters which concern us. Whilst men and women come here ostensibly to promote your welfare, they hail from places where the most outrageous infamies are perpetrated. Do we wish these corrupting influences introduced into our midst? I think not. Let them cleanse their own Augean stables where they came from, and then talk to us if they wish about purity.