Marriage law shouldn’t permit ‘poisonous’ polygamy, says ex-FLDS member

On a chilly winter morning at sunrise in Salt Lake City, the sun glints on the snowcapped mountains that surround Utah’s state capital and the dazzling white Mormon temple that dominates the downtown area.

All is quiet. But change is in the air in this deeply religious, blood-red Republican state — upheaval, even.

Same-sex marriage became legal in Utah last October, a dramatic cultural shift for many, and eyes are on the expected ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States this summer that could legalize gay marriage across the U.S.

Now some area residents are asking: If the gays can marry, why not the polygamists?

Polygamy is illegal in the United States, and in Utah its prohibition is actually written into the state constitution. But if it is deemed unconstitutional to bar consenting gay adults from getting married, isn’t it similarly unfair not to allow a man to marry his willing “sister wives,” all but one of whom are usually joined to him only in a spiritual marriage, as a way of skirting the law?

The suggestion causes alarm to Kathwren Steed, a first cousin of the infamous fundamentalist “prophet” Warren Jeffs, who is believed to have had up to 80 wives.

Steed fled the secretive sect Jeffs controls on the Utah-Arizona border, the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, in order to avoid the prospect of becoming an older man’s third wife — and because she had come out as a lesbian.

“Polygamy is poisonous,” she said, emphatically, during an interview a stone’s throw from the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City.

“I don’t think anyone should be raised with that hostility. There is jealousy and hate and anger and the women are owned. They want you to think we are all united and we are all sisters, but it’s rarely true,” she added.

But as a liberal and a feminist, as Steed agreed she is, who benefited from the change in the law when she married her girlfriend in Utah, how easy is it to support a ban on adult women in her state choosing to enter plural marriage?

Steed’s wife, Dixie Allen, intervened in a calm voice to say: “If you can separate out the religion, can you have more than one spouse? In principle I would say yes.”

Steed thought about this. “Polyamory works for some people,” she agreed.       

But to formalize the kind of family structures she grew up around and rejected early on, in multiple marriage certificates issued by city hall? Steed has her doubts about that and questions the concept of willingness, in the sense of whether a decision to enter plural marriage is a properly informed choice for adults born and bred in socially and sometimes also geographically isolated polygamous communities, where the tradition is to marry young and educate the kids at home.

“I think it all comes down to what makes a consenting adult,” said Steed.

According to one survey by a polygamy advocacy group, there are an estimated 38,000 people — mostly in Utah and other Western states — who practice or believe in polygamy, dotted in sects and clans that splintered off from Mormonism when that religion was required to ban the practice in return for Utah statehood in 1896. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith had promoted plural marriage, calling it a divine commandment.

A judge struck down the part of Utah’s anti-polygamy law in December 2013 that relates to cohabitation, which had banned adults living together in plural groupings as if married. But polygamy is still not legal.

Roger Hoole, a Salt Lake City lawyer whose firm has represented people suing the FLDS, agrees with Steed. Legalizing polygamy would not be right, he said, arguing it is a very different concept from legalizing same-sex marriage.

“Someone who is gay and just wants to marry is not only consenting, they have had to fight for their right as an individual to choose it,” Hoole said. “But polygamy is practiced through a religion that is based on absolute obedience — is that consent or, more pointedly, is it informed consent?”

In the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, for example, marriages are arranged by the head of the sect, who claims to be speaking directly on God’s orders. It’s a deeply patriarchal, hierarchical religion, and women are expected to stay “sweet” and follow the orders of the head of the household, which is always a man. Members are almost always born into the religion, not converts to it.

The culture of polygamy “causes a lot of pain,” Hoole said.

And how does Hoole see the legal landscape for polygamy?

“It’s all messed up. It really is,” he said.