A couple of weird wrinkles to marriage in Utah surfaced last week in the guise of separate but what most mainstreamers would consider almost similarly strange manifestations:
- Polygamy, in both the historic sense of the tradition and in its modern practice.- The scandalous number of marriages in Utah involving children.
The New York Times made a splash off polygamy in a lengthy and fascinating piece headlined "A House, 10 Wives: Polygamy in Suburbia," devoted almost wholly to the practice in Utah, where it's a felony but isn't prosecuted these days.
"It's a consensual relationship between two adults," explained Washington County Attorney Eric A. Ludlow, who takes a pragmatic approach to dealing with what the Times said is the growing number of polygamist households in Utah.
Ludlow's turf isn't the only place where such arrangements occur. Utah County is noted for its numerous polygamists and the Times reported anecdotally on households in Manti, a community near Canyonlands National Park and one just across the state line in Colorado City, Ariz.
The practice is rooted, of course, in antiquated LDS Church traditions dating from the 1800s. In 1890, however, the church rebuked polygamy and today excommunicates those who engage in it.
Coincidentally, Associated Press reporter Vern Anderson almost simultaneously filed a piece on a new book just out called "In Sacred a Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith," written by Todd Compton, a practicing Mormon who lives in California.
In Anderson's story, one gets the clear sense that the book - essentially a biography of Smith's 33 wives - presents an unflattering review of what these polygamist wives endured. Dubbed the "first comprehensive examination" of their lives, it "also tracks the isolation and heartbreak that were a significant part of the Mormon female experience with polygamy," Anderson wrote.
Much of the research stems directly from the women via their letters and diaries.
Fast forward 150 years or so to 1997 and the assessment of polygamy in Utah seems, oddly enough, more distant. No place in the Times story is a polygamist wife quoted at length; all the information comes from the men of the house or from one random public official or another.
The article asserts strongly, though, that polygamy is out in the open a century after it was formally banned, and that in this age of relative tolerance it is accepted probably largely, as County Attorney Ludlow said, because of its consensual nature.
Much more troubling to me is seeing child brides as young as 14 years old enter marriage, which to put it bluntly is little more than the legalization of pedophilia. Several hundred kids - most of them girls - are married each year in Utah before they turn 16.
State Rep. Carl Saunders, R-Ogden, rightly revitalized the issue last week by saying he wanted to pass a law raising the marriage age in Utah to 16 instead of 14. This in a state where you have to be 15 years and nine months old before you can get a learner's permit to drive and in a nation where you can't vote until you're 18.
Question: Why are driving and voting considered less accessible than marriage, which certainly carries responsibilities at least as substantial?
Saunders took some heat on his proposal - a similar version of which the Legislature almost unbelievably voted down in 1994 - and has withdrawn it. He needs to exhibit some courage, stick by his original convictions now and go forth. Every lawmaker, in turn, needs to be held accountable - by name and district - on this particular issue when it surfaces in the legislative session this winter.
It bears repeating: Allowing children to marry at 14, and in some cases forcing them to do so, amounts to little more than legalized pedophilia, an atrocious arrangement that has gone on long enough and that history won't smile upon very kindly once books are written about it 100 years hence.
Compton in his new work on the century past regards frontier polygamy as a "tragic ambiguity," an assessment that rings only half true in the current debate over child brides.
That modern habit is simply tragic. There is no ambiguity about it.