The LDS Church’s publication of essays on its practice of plural marriage represents a good first step in acknowledging the history of the controversial doctrine (see Peggy Fletcher Stack, "New Mormon Essay: Joseph Smith Married Teens, Other Men’s Wives," Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 22,). While the essays are presented as news releases, they exhibit an informed grasp of the growing number of the relevant scholarly articles and books that have appeared since the 1980s.
The authors of the essays, though anonymous, tackle head-on some of the most problematic aspects of the church’s embrace of what it once called "celestial marriage." This includes church founder Joseph Smith’s marriages to young women, at least one of whom was 14 (the essays characterize her as just shy of 15); Smith’s marriages to other men’s wives (which the essays contend may not have included sexual relations); Smith’s concealing most of his plural marriages from his civil wife, Emma Hale; Smith’s and the church’s carefully worded denials regarding the practice of polygamy; the church’s "civil disobedience" in performing the illegal marriages; and the church’s clandestine attempts to keep plural marriage alive for a decade or more even after publicly disavowing it in 1890.
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