“successive LDS sealing”?

i’m sorry, but how can two sealings that are co-eternal be “successive”? that makes no sense.

Thanks for discussing it so far. We don’t disagree that coercion is a terrible thing, especially through religion. I’ve had it happen to me, and because of pondering scriptures like D&C 132, I was prepared and knew what to do. All I’m grateful that part is in there.

Indeed we are. Thanks for the review and comments on the demise of polygamy, Dave. I find it interesting to read LDS folks saying things that they never would have said before related to polygamy. Just a few months ago, I read an article in Meridian Magazine defending the practice of taking a teenage bride, claiming that in Joseph Smith’s days it was not uncommon. Before the essays came out, talk of Joseph Smith’s marriage to Helen Mar Kimball at the age of 14 seemed to be kept on the lowdown. The same goes for the Second Manifesto. It will be intriguing to see how discussion on polygamy unfolds in the LDS church. In some ways, members appear to have become more divided, with some rushing to defend everything that Joseph Smith did as being of God, and others proclaiming polygamy to be one of Joseph Smith’s wrongdoings.

Today was a great day. My ten-year-old daughter and I “re-queened” a beehive, and we checked on our other hives. There’s no joy on earth that compares to finding healthy looking brood in an over-wintered hive. Great day.

I also cleared out last year’s blackberry bushes. The thorns are hardened from aging. Under last year’s dead leaves–and the thorny bramble–I found new shoots. If I had to guess, I’d say we’re two weeks early here in Idaho.

You know what I kept thinking about while I was doing things that genuinely enrich my life? D&C 132:51-65. The ideas in those verses disgust me. It’s not so much the polygamy, though that is part of it. The part that really disgusts me is the use of religion to manipulate and threaten the very people it is meant to uplift. And the ideas aren’t dead. It’s not hard to see that conceiving of women in those terms has led to general attitudes that we live with today.

I thought about this as I worked my blackberry bramble, and I like to think I had an epiphany–organized religion is not my bramble bush to clean up. It’s loaded with all kinds of nasty thorns from yesteryear, but that’s not my problem. Somebody else can clean it up–or not. Maybe somebody who loves it more. Maybe somebody who finds purpose and meaning in cleaning up brambles. My solution is to forget about fixing it and simply engage less with it. If I happen upon a late summer blackberry, praise be to God. If not, I like raspberries too. And heaven knows I love honey. There’s simply too much good in this life to try and clean up the mess that is organized religion. I’m going to do other things with my time.

SilverRain, … Obviously you’re going to have to find someone else to discuss why you believe God commanded Nephi to kill Laban. I’m done engaging in that type of discussion. Now if you’d like to talk bees … :-)

Also, I’d be very surprised to discover that “Josh Smith” is Emma Smith’s online pseudonym.

Anon, I don’t know. That’s never been an actual doctrine, and I’ve never spent much time worrying about things that don’t exist yet. If and when God commands someone to do that, I’ll ponder it then.

My thoughts on priesthood are complex, and not really fit to be condensed into a blog comment. I will say that I suppose the Church as a whole has learned much regarding priesthood in the last hundred and fifty years, however slow some of her individual members may be in catching up to modern revelation.

If the situation were reversed, and your husband had a brother that was not married through no fault of his own, would you likewise welcome him into your marriage? Would your husband?

I ask this because I want to know if the blessings of exaltation come through the union of people who unselfishly love each other, or if they only flow through the priesthood of the husband. Brigham Young made assertions on multiple occasions that the husband is the lord of the wife, and much of the language in the temple reflects that line of thinking.

We can enough to reject D&C 132:51-65 outright. We can judge it on the merits. There is no reason for you or anyone else to defend the rhetoric in 132:51-65. It is morally repugnant to threaten a woman’s life in order to coerce her into marriage. It is morally repugnant to manipulate a person’s faith in God to coerce her into marriage. That is wrong. It was wrong in 1831. It was wrong in 1843. It is wrong today.

I don’t reject polygamy everywhere at all times. At one point in my life I lived in Jordan. Part of my work involved living in an amazing place called Wadi Dana. There were Bedouin tribes, semi-nomadic shepherds, who used the land to feed their goats, basically subsistence living in the desert. I shared meals with some of these families (and maybe I partook of tea and maybe even a hookah). The experience gave me enough material that I could IMAGINE a world where polygamy was a good idea. If you are a nomad in the Arabian Peninsula circa 2000 b.c., and if you want to have children, it may require more than one woman. Life is unforgiving when you’re a nomad in the Arabian Peninsula. Because of my experiences, I can conceive of that world.

Arabian-Peninsula-nomadic-tribe polygamy is fundamentally different from D&C 132:51-65. What you read in those verses is male kingdom building. Those verses are about men (or at least a man) using people’s faith and threats of violence to advance his status and gain sexual access to women. There is no reason for intellectual humility when approaching that idea. Reject it. There is no reason for patience to see how things work out in the eternities. Reject it. Those verses don’t “raise interesting questions”; those verses are morally repugnant. I’m LDS and I reject them without reservation.

(And, just for the record, I’ve rejected them for many years and have thus far avoided “destruction.”)

Until you are at a point in your life when you have to make that sort of decision, you can never understand what might have happened in Joseph’s time.

I do not doubt that, polygamous or monogamous, abuse has no place in marriage. However strong the contemporary wording in D&C 132, women are not less in marriage, polygamous or monogamous.

But I do know that if I were married to a wonderful man of God, and one of my sisters was not, I could in no way look into her eyes and not welcome her into my marriage so that she, also, might receive all blessings of exaltation. It would be hard. It would require Celestial-level charity and compassion to be more concerned about her welfare than about keeping my husband to myself. But because that is true, I believe in it.

But all that aside, no one who claims to believe that marriage should be between any consenting adults can claim that polygamy is evil. Not and maintain moral integrity. You simply have no right to judge that for someone else. No more than you have a right to judge and condemn the situation of people who lived nearly two hundred years ago.