USA – The average viewer of HBO’s hit series Big Love, which concerns a fundamental Mormon polygamous family, probably does not know all that much about the history or real-life current practice of polygamy in general or of Mormon fundamentalist plural marriage in particular.

            Polygamy is an issue that has long riveted people in the United States.   From Joseph Smith’s founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in the 1830s, Mormons’ practice of plural marriage – a man taking more than one wife for both material, but especially spiritual purposes – provoked more interest and outrage than any other doctrine or practice of the Mormons, now one of the nation’s and the world’s fastest-growing religions.   In fact, for much of the nineteenth century, polygamy was a considerably more contentious issue than chattel slavery, since more Americans opposed the former than the latter.  While, unlike slavery, plural marriage did not trigger a civil war, it was a catalyst for the often violent persecution of Mormons by “Gentiles” for roughly half a century, violence that included the assassination of the Prophet Joseph Smith himself and also Mormon acts of violence that are still taboo topics among Latter-Day Saints today, especially the 1850s Mountain Meadows massacre.

            Though LDS abolished polygamy in 1890, which smoothed Utah’s path to statehood,  and has since excommunicated any members found to be engaging in it, many adherents of the creed of Smith and the Book of Mormon continue to believe in it, if not practice it.   The leaders and rank-and-file members of LDS and other mainstream Mormon churches, such as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (RLDS) are ardently anti-polygamy and are extremely uncomfortable with being associated in the non-Mormon mind with the practice.   In fact, LDS President Gordon Hinckley and most other mainstream Mormons insist that fundamentalists are not even Mormons at all.  Instead, LDS members refer to them simply as “fundamentalists” or “polygamists.”

            However, many of those who have kept the principle – as they often refer to plural marriage – alive, believe that it is mainstream Mormons who have strayed from the way of the Prophet and are not authentic Mormons – apostates, even.   There are believed to be tens of thousands of Mormon fundamentalist polygamists in the United States and Canada today – roughly 37,000, according to Anne Wilde, a widowed plural wife and one of the founders of Principle Voices, an education and advocacy group for polygamist women.    In interviews, Ms. Wilde, who is an independent fundamentalist, has said that the figure of 100,000 polygamists sometimes cited includes Muslim, non-Mormon Christian, and secular polygamists as well as Mormon fundamentalists.  She has said that 37,000 is the most accurate figure for fundamentalists.

            Of these, roughly 8,000 to 10,000 are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which has recently attracted notoriety thanks to the arrest and impending trial of FLDS leader Warren Jeffs, who faces sexual abuse and other charges.   Mr. Jeffs had been on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list after he fled Colorado City, Arizona/Hildale, Utah, also known as Short Creek, a fundamentalist community that he had led as “prophet.”   Detractors of Mr. Jeffs and his late father and predecessor, “Uncle” Rulon Jeffs, have characterized these men as running a totalitarian, Taliban-like dictatorship in Colorado City.  The sheriff, mayor, and entire police department of the city were FLDS members and had answered to both Messrs. Jeffs prior to Warren Jeffs’ downfall.   The largest proportion of fundamentalists, however, consists of independents.

            Recently, the US Supreme Court stepped into the fray, refusing to hear an appeal by Utah polygamist Rodney Holm of his bigamy conviction, on February 26.   In so refusing, the high court upheld a May 2006 Utah Supreme Court decision that Mr. Holm was liable to prosecution even though he did not hold more than one marriage license.   Fundamentalist polygamists have had mixed feelings about the Holm case, since it involved his marriage to Ruth Stubbs, begun when he was 32 and she was 16.  Stubbs later left Holm.   Holm’s lawyers saw to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1879 anti-polygamy Reynolds decision.   However, last year’s Utah ruling was not unanimous; Chief Justice Christine Durham found Utah’s bigamy statute unconstitutional in the light of Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 US Supreme Court that struck down Texas’s and all other states’ anti-sodomy laws.   Justice Durham interpreted Lawrence to mean that all state laws regulating relationships between consenting adults violated citizens’ privacy rights.

            Mr. Holm was also convicted in August 2003 of two counts of unlawful sex with a minor and one count of bigamy.  He was incarcerated for a year.

            “We do not agree that a man who doesn’t legally engage in marriage should be prosecuted and charged with bigamy,” Mary Batchelor of Principle Voices was quoted in a recent Salt Lake City Tribune article as saying.

            Many people have linked polygamy to the issue of same-sex marriage, with opponents of gay couples’ right to wed pointing to the move toward permitting same-sex marriages and civil unions will inevitably start a “slippery slope” of eventually decriminalizing or legalizing polygamy and other controversial marital and sexual arrangements, including adult incest and bestiality.   Most supporters of marriage equality for gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals oppose polygamy and deny that granting legal sanction to same-sex marriages will lead to the legal recognition of plural marriage.  Other gay marriage advocates, however, accept the linkage and have no objection to polygamy.