Polygamy -- the practice of men marrying more than one woman at the same time -- is demeaning to women and an affront to equality and fairness. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality has denounced polygamy in the strongest terms:



"Polygamous marriage contravenes a woman's right to equality with men, and can have such serious emotional and financial consequences for her and her dependents that such marriages ought to be discouraged and prohibited." (Emphasis mine).



Polygamy remains Mormon doctrine. Despite issuing public statements appearing to end the pracitce, the LDS Church continues to teach in its scriptures that polygamy is moral, correct, and divinely sanctioned, and will again be the true order of marriage in the eternities.

Today’s LDS Doctrine and Covenants Section 132:61 reads:

“And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else.”



Indeed, despite the church's current insistence that the union of one man and one woman is "ordained of God", these verses of scripture enshrining polygamy as a celestial form of marriage have never been removed or edited. Such movements away from polygamy should also be balanced against proclamations from the church's most famous polygamist President Brigham Young, who taught that monogamy was itself an evil, the root of prostitution and would be the downfall of humanity.

While fully aware of these historic teachings, Apostle Dallin Oaks recently proclaimed that the church cannot change its policies; “. . . unlike other organizations that can change their policies and even their doctrines, our policies are determined by the truths God has identified as unchangeable.”



Despite this, most people will agree that the church abandoned polygamy years ago. In fact, in 1890 Church President Woodruff offered a statement claiming that he would end the practice of polygamy in the US, but he mentioned nothing of denouncing the belief. In fact, polygamous marriages continued, often secretly, leading to a second statement by the First Presidency in 1904. However, polygamous marriages were still performed in Canada and Mexico by church authorities. Henry B. Eyring, the church's current first counsellor in the First Presidency, is a descendant of the post-Manifesto polygamous marriage of Edward Christian Eyring, who married his wife's living sister about 1911. The church still had a polygamous president until 1945, Heber J. Grant, who had to publicly remove apostle Elder Richard Lyman from the Council of the Twelve when Lyman's secret polygamy was exposed in 1943.



In addition to this, current church policy permits men to be sealed to more than one woman in the temple, while women can only be sealed to one man. This is evidence of the ongoing Mormon belief that polygamy will continue after the grave.



Despite church-produced PR videos which attempt to distance the church from polygamy, church scripture and official doctrine are very clear: the Mormon Church still claims polygamy in this life and in the hereafter is correct, moral, and divinely sanctioned.



We urge the LDS Church to take this opportunity to live by its public declarations of gender equality by clarifying its position on the belief in polygamy.