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If anyone here is following my posts, you’ll roll your eyes when I say that I am totally in favor of polyandry and will welcome it any time. 
🙄 Seriously – look at section 132 again. Find the verse that says that a woman CAN have a second husband. Yes, I know that the Lord has to “give permission”, but hey…at least it’s a start and it’s permission more than that. We’d have a hard time finding a man in today’s society who is “okay” with sharing his wife (just like it’s hard to find a woman who is really “okay” with sharing her husband), but I’d like to know that the permission and, dare I say, blessing is there for me to take on another partner should I ever feel the need.
Personally, I don’t believe that 132 was divinely inspired. I think it was written by a man to explain behavior. This is only problematic for me b/c 132 is the only scriptural place that I can find where eternal marriage is mentioned. I am fully prepared to accept that eternal marriage is not “real”, but for now…I’ll focus on surviving the marriage I have here.
It’s hurtful to think that we are treated differently because we have vaginas, but… “suffer it to be so now”.
Nothing will be solved today – or even tomorrow.
Hang in there – you aren’t alone and you are in extremely good company.
DontKnow wrote:I don’t mean to bump up a really old thread, but I have a few quick questions.
What would be different in the church if Sect. 132 was never included in D&C in the first place? Would temple sealings and endowments be the same as they are today? Or would temples have a different purpose?
Sorry if these questions have been answered before.
What an excellent question!!
I’ve wondered what the purposes of ancient temples were.
Washing and Anointing were part of them, I believe, but beyond that…what did people do there?
I am not sure that they were involved with eternal sealings.
If 132 were never published, I think that our temples would serve a very different purpose.
QuestionAbound wrote:Seriously – look at section 132 again. Find the verse that says that a woman CAN have a second husband. Yes, I know that the Lord has to “give permission”, but hey…at least it’s a start and it’s permission more than that. We’d have a hard time finding a man in today’s society who is “okay” with sharing his wife (just like it’s hard to find a woman who is really “okay” with sharing her husband), but I’d like to know that the permission and, dare I say, blessing is there for me to take on another partner should I ever feel the need.
IMO, plural marriage in a religious context is evil and deplorable. If a person wants to have more than one spouse, fine… whatever… I don’t care. But, making it a religious sacrament and attaching God’s ‘will’ or ‘permission’ to it is disgusting. We only have to look at our own history to see the terrible effect. It was a disaster for women. It was a disaster for children. It was even a disaster for many men. It was certainly a disaster for the Church. I don’t believe God gave anyone ‘permission’ to cause such heartache.Plural marriage in the Mormon context is something for which there is no remedy other than disavowal. I don’t expect it from the Church anytime soon, but I have disavowed it for me. I don’t support it. I don’t defend it. I don’t excuse it. I don’t want it to return. It was wrong. It was an abuse of people who didn’t deserve it.
and yet, as I’ve said previously, there are people who have been married to and loved deeply more than one spouse who would love to be able to continue those relationships after death and whose spouses wouldn’t mind the arrangement either – and that applies to men and women Again, I don’t condone or like nearly everything associated with polygamy / polyandry / plural marriage / whatever in this life, due to all of the complicating factors that make it what it inevitably ends up becoming, but I absolutely can see ways after this life that the general concept of loving and being “sealed” to more than one person can have great power and meaning. Since I don’t believe sexuality will continue in the next life in any way like it exists here, and since I believe in a Council of the Gods organization rather than each couple off doing their own thing, that is a lot easier for me to say than for others to say – but I don’t have to reject the conceptual foundation entirely just because I reject its application in the here and now.
Curtis, yep, I agree. Let people envision what they will about the next life. Let sealings happen however best suits the adherents. But as a practical matter, we don’t live in the next life, we live in this one. Projecting the expectations of the next life onto this one is how we got polygamy in the first place. I believe we should stay as far away from it in this life as we possibly can, because it is a charged issue for our Church. To me, we have to avoid ANY allowance that a person could be told that they need to enter into plural marriage because it’s what God wants. We need to get God out of the the dialog of earthly plural marriage. Because of the history, I believe, further, that it is better to say that we have no idea what the next life will be and then to stop justifying polygamy and the like as an element of our religion. The love affair with plural marriage that some members have is embarrassing… and it serves no constructive purpose, IMO. I agree – especially with the following: Quote:To me, we have to avoid ANY allowance that a person could be told that they need to enter into plural marriage because it’s what God wants.
On Own Now wrote:Plural marriage in the Mormon context is something for which there is no remedy other than disavowal. I don’t expect it from the Church anytime soon, but I have disavowed it for me. I don’t support it. I don’t defend it. I don’t excuse it. I don’t want it to return. It was wrong. It was an abuse of people who didn’t deserve it.
I can’t spend too much more energy on it, but I’m amazed to find my middle-aged self in this position. It’s not that I don’t or won’t support, defend, etc.; I can’t. I am not
ableto. I’d have to have some kind of break with reality. Other people can, and that’s fine. I’ll be sad if they put out another fresh, digital lds.org God-commanded-this essay because it will mark a huge shift in my relationship to the institutional church. But I see now more than ever that people gotta do what they gotta do. +1,+1 for both On Our Own and Ann’s posts!! Want to hear something funny? When my wife and I were dating, we read scriptures together, and when we got to D and C section 132, we both put on lipstick and kissed each other’s scriptures, so we still have lip prints in our scriptures, at the bottom of the page. We did that because the section was about love and eternal marriage. I vote for keeping D & C 132 in the LDS canon, but just ignoring the bad parts. If we’re still going to preach eternal marriage, we have to keep some of Section 132 in there. That’s really the only place in the scriptures that talks about eternal marriage.
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