:Hehe, good point. ;-) Whoever gets around to really fleshing that section out will have to clearly document exactly what was really going on. Personally I don't know the intimate details, so I can't say which of these is what JS did. --Dmerrill |
:Hehe, good point. ;-) Whoever gets around to really fleshing that section out will have to clearly document exactly what was really going on. Personally I don't know the intimate details, so I can't say which of these is what JS did. --Dmerrill Current version looks like parody. Should we move it to Humor and replace it with a serious article? --Ed Poor Saints |
Dmerrill, IIRC, Joseph Smith was sealed to a number of women posthumously, but not concurrently with their marriage or sealing to another man. This does not seem to be polyanderous. I don't recall encountering mention of doctrine or practice of polyandery in Mormonism?, even in the early days. --BrantEaton
This is of course a contriversial subject, and I have read the primary sources, and have found that Joseph Smith was seeled to women who were already married to non-members. The idea was that sealing to someone was essential for exaltation. There is no evidence that Joseph actually cohabitated with these seelings, and it seems that they were no more than a religious formality. --James L. Carroll
Can we at least use the words correctly here, folks? Polygamy is plural marriage, of any form. Polygyny is one/many women (in marriage or breeding). Polyandry is one woman/many men (in marriage or breeding). Polyamory is plural dating/cohabitation (that one is well-established but hasn't made it into most dictionaries yet). --LDC
Yes, I think you were using "polyandry" correctly when you asked the first question (note the spelling, though), but I think most of the other text here assumes you were asking about something different.
Even if Joseph Smith married women already married to other men, it is only polyandry if he thought their original marriages were valid. I honestly don't know what he thought. But I doubt that he would have viewed himself as practicing polyandry. -- SJK
Dmerrill: Well, if they were already legally married he couldn't legally marry them, under U.S. law. Everywhere in the U.S. polygamy is a legal impossibility. (Sure, Mormon polygamists have more than one wife in a cultural sense, but legally they do not.) And legal marriage is really irrelevant to polyandry -- polyandry is a anthropological, not a legal, concept. Of course, as an anthropological concept legal considerations can be relevant, but they are not determinative. -- SJK