MARRIAGE WARS: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, “RESERVED RIGHTS,”
AND MORMON POLYGAMY
by Robert J. Morris, JD, PhD1
(Copyright 2012 by Robert J. Morris)
“I say God speed everybody that is for freedom and equal rights!”2
1
University of Hong Kong Department of Law (retired 2011); MA Brigham Young University (1972);
JD University of Utah S. J. Quinney College of Law (1980); PhD University of Hong Kong
Department of Law (2007); contact: <www.robertjmorris.net>.
22
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 13:274 (July 24, 1870). This 26-volume set, variously
published by the church in England and Salt Lake City between 1854 and 1886, will hereafter be
abbreviated as JD and cited in traditional scriptural format by volume and page.
The Journal of Discourses was considered by its contributors and editors to be scripture because it
contained the words of the “living oracles.” It was one of the Standard Works of the church.
Apostle and member of the first Presidency George Q. Cannon, Preface, JD 8:iii (1861); Brigham
Young, JD 9:297 (May 25, 1862).. The doctrine that the words of Mormonism’s living prophets is
scripture is found in Doctrine and Covenants 68:4 (D&C). Their words are the words of God. D&C
1:38. In this essay, I have necessarily excerpted quotations and references in short form. I have tried
to give something of the context for each of these, but readers are encouraged to consult the original
sources as given in the footnotes. Most American libraries have the Journal of Discourses, and it is
available in several versions online and on CD-ROM. The “discourses” were not given titles in the
usual sense but rather head notes summarizing the main topics. I have omitted these from my
citations.
The last official sermon recorded in the final volume 26 of the JD was dated March 6, 1886. The
four-year gap between that date and 1890 (the year of the Manifesto that “ended” polygamy) is
supplied by the first two volumes of Brian H. Stuy (comp and ed), Collected Discourses Delivered by
President Wilford Woodruff, His Two Counselors, The Twelve Apostles, and Others (Burbank, CA:
B.H.S. Publishing, 5 vols., 1987-98), abbreviated hereafter as CD. Although these five volumes were
not published officially by the church as was the JD, the materials are collected from official church
publications such as newspapers and other periodicals, and they, like the JD, can be verified by
recurring to those original sources.
Virtually all of the speeches referred to in the above sources were delivered in the church’s semi-annual
General Conference by its General Authorities. Today, conference speeches are officially reported in
the Conference Reports and in the Ensign magazine. Whatever is said and done in the general
conference is official and may be taken as doctrine. Former church president Harold B. Lee, speaking
at the conclusion of a general conference, said this:
“Now, you Latter-day Saints, I think you have never attended a conference where in these
three days you have heard more inspired declarations on most every subject and problem
about which you have been worrying. If you want to know what the Lord would have the
Saints know and to have his guidance and direction for the next six months, get a copy of
the proceedings of this conference, and you will have the latest word of the Lord as far as
the [Latter-day] Saints are concerned. And [also] all others who are not of us, but who
believe what has been said has been “’the mind of the Lord, the will of the Lord, and the
voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation.’” (See D&C 68:4.)”
Harold B. Lee, “Closing Remarks” (January 1974) Ensign 125; emphasis added.
The church has four “standard works” of scripture to which I refer. They are the King James Bible
Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon (BoM), the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C), and the
1
—Brigham Young
I. Introduction
a.
Viewers of the 2010 documentary, 8: The Mormon Proposition,3 will know that
one of the primary linkages drawn to same-sex marriage is the connection to Mormon
polygamy. The film tracks, inter alia, the story of a male same-sex couple in
California, one of whom is a descendant of Mormon polygamists. The irony is
poignant. Both are stories of hatred directed at a minority because of its sexual
practices and pleas for marriage equality. The participation of prominent Mormons
Mitt Romney (himself of an honored polygamous lineage)4 and Jon Huntsman in the
2012 presidential campaigns, has brought into scrutiny the political position taken by
their “Mormon faith” on these subjects and its special definitions of marriage, family,
and equality. It is therefore crucial to understand accurately and fully the larger
context of the specifically Mormon argument about the definition of “marriage,” and
especially its claims for the historicity of that argument.5 Viewers of the HBO
television series, Big Love,6 will know that polygamy is very much a living issue
today. Beyond the historical, theological, and political concerns, same-sex marriage
has invoked a practical debate over the possible resurgence of polygamy.7 The
Mormon church has never eschewed the doctrine of polygamy, only the practice8—an
Pearl of Great Price (PGP). The official text of all four Mormon scriptures may be read online at
<http://lds.org/scriptures?lang=eng>. The entire Mormon database may be searched at
<http://scriptures.byu.edu>.
3
Reed Cowan, 8: The Mormon Proposition, documentary produced by Red Flag Releasing/David v.
Goliath Films (2010).
The family connections and lineages, arising in the “Mexican Mission,” where they had fled to avoid
arrest for polygamy in the United States, are well documented, but see generally Jennifer Moulton
Hansen (ed), Letters of Catharine Cottam Romney, Plural Wife (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press,
1992); Dale F. Beecher, “Rey L. Pratt and the Mexican Mission,” (1975) 15(3) BYU Studies 1 <
https://byustudies.byu.edu/PDFLibrary/15.3BeecherReyLPratt-a4701581-623a-40d5-ba13-e16e25a00f
23.pdf>.
4
Of the kind detailed in George Chauncey, “What Historians Taught the Court: The Historians’
Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas” (2004) 10(3) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 509.
The text of the amicus brief itself may be read at < http://hnn.us/articles/1539.html>; seen May 12,
2011. See also Laurence H. Tribe, “Lawrence v. Texas: The ‘Fundamental Right’ That Dare Not
Speak Its Name,” (2004) 117 Harvard Law Review 1893; Heather K. Gerken, “Symposium: Larry and
Lawrence,” (2007) 42 Tulsa Law Review 843.
5
6
HBO, Big Love <www.hbo.com/big-love/index.html>.
7
Eugene Volokh, “Same-Sex Marriage and Slippery Slopes,” (2005) 33 (4) Hofstra Law Review 1155.
M. Russell Ballard, “The Importance of a Name,” address at general conference, October 2, 2011;
<http://lds.org/general-conference/2011/10/the-importance-of-a-name?lang=eng>.
2
8
essential point made in 8: The Mormon Proposition and verified by the fact that the
full text the “revelation” on polygamy, D&C section 132, remains a part of the
scripture and is frequently quoted in official texts to this day.9
All of these threads may be brought together in the increasingly frequent
invocation of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution—the so-called
“popular sovereignty” or “reserved rights” amendments. Both state that rights and
powers not delegated to the government are reserved to “the people,” and also, in the
Tenth, to “the States.” The recent California bankruptcy case of Balas and
Morales10 (a male married couple) relied upon the quintessential Ninth Amendment
case of Griswold v. Connecticut11 to hold that the federal Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA)12 was unconstitutional because it “violates the equal protection rights of the
Debtors’ as recognized under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.”13
The application of the Ninth Amendment to same-sex marriage via Griswold, and the
connection of same-sex marriage to Mormon polygamy, leads us, then, to a discussion
of the Mormon position on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments during the era of
polygamy14 which remain relevant today.15
b.
All of these issues of sexuality, family, and marriage arose during various stages
of what is often roughly called the “Utah Period” of the church from 1847 to 1890
when the Mormons practiced polygamy under the presidency of Brigham Young
(1847-1877), successor to church founder Joseph Smith (1830-1844), and two of
Young’s successors—John Taylor (1880-87) and Wilford Woodruff (1887-98).16
The
Nathan B. Oman, “The Story of a Forgotten Battle: Reviewing The Mormon Question: Polygamy and
Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America,” (2002) 2002(3) Brigham Young University
Law Review 745.
9
10
Gene Douglas Balas and Carlos A. Morales, Debtors, Case No. 2:11-bk-17831 TD (June 13, 2011),
United States Bankruptcy Court Central District of California.
11
381 US 479 (1965).
12
1 USC § 7.
13
Balas and Morales, p. 20.
For a general background and discussion vis-à-vis “queer theory” and Mormon doctrine, including a
bit on polygamy, see Alan Michael Williams, “Mormon and Queer at the Crossroads,” 2011 44(1)
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53.
14
General summaries of both sides of the issue may be found in Randolph G. Muhlestein, “The Case
Against Same-Sex Marriage” (2007) 6(1) Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1; H. Wayne Schow,
“A Case for Same-Sex Marriage: Reply to Randolph Muhlestein” (2007) 6(1) Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Thought 40. Both give a brief nod to Mormon polygamy.
15
16
Official biographical data may be seen at <http://lds.org/churchhistory/presidents/leaders.jsp>.
3
overriding legal issues of the entire period were polygamy and the status (with its
attendant constitutional mandates and limitations) of the federal Territory of Utah.
Congress provided an Organic Act of 1850 for Utah which provided some rights that
were “limited” and “clipped.”17 These two issues inflected each other in powerful
and surprising ways. In 1890, Wilford Woodruff issued the “Manifesto” that
purported to end the practice of polygamy.18 Polygamy, of course, went on, and
does go on, but the approximate dates of 1847 to 1890 will be a convenient frame for
this study.19 Brigham Young and John Taylor, along with Apostle Orson Pratt
(1811-1881), were the primary exponents of Mormon doctrine on the Ninth and Tenth
Amendments.20
Mormon scripture holds that the US Constitution—the whole Constitution,
including the Bill of Rights—is divinely inspired,21 as indeed is the Declaration of
Independence22—each to be interpreted in light of the other pari passu. Both were
sources of substantive liberty and equality claims. Aligning the two and reading
them together constitutionally was both common and necessary in the early era,23 in
order to “proclaim liberty to the world; equal rights, liberty and equality; freedom of
conscience….”24 “There are many rights that are named in the Constitution,” said
17
Apostle Erastus Snow, JD 23:87 (April 7, 1882).
18
D&C, Official Declaration 1 (Salt Lake City, October 6, 1890). The main precipitating event was
the US Supreme Court’s decision in Davis v. Beason, 133 US 333 (1890), eight months earlier,
disfranchising polygamists.
19
Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot,
Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 134-35.
Robert J. Morris, “Both ‘New’ and ‘Everlasting’: Law and Religion in the Creation of Neo-Mormon
Doctrine on (Homo)sexuality” (2005) 6(2) Rutgers Journal of Law & Religion;
<http://lawandreligion.com/sites/lawandreligion.com/files/Morris.pdf>; Robert J. Morris, “‘What
Though Our Rights Have Been Assailed?’ Mormons, Politics, Same-Sex Marriage, and Cultural Abuse
in the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i)” (1997) 18 Women’s Rights Law Reporter 129. See also Kath
Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
The plasticity of “family” and “marriage” is discussed in Robert J. Morris, “The Crossroads of the
Pacific: The Development of Multicultural Families in Hawai‘i,” paper for the World Conference on
Records, “Preserving Our Heritage,” sponsored by the Mormon church at Salt Lake City, August 12-15,
1980; which may be read at <www.robertjmorris.net/WorldConference.pdf >.
20
D&C 98:5-7, 101:80. Dallin H. Oaks, “The Divinely Inspired Constitution,”
<http://lds.org/ensign/print/1992/02/the-divinely-inspired-constitution?lang=eng&clang=eng>; seen
November 30, 2011 (recognizing the “equality of all men before the law” and the need to protect
minorities, but then exempting marriage and the Equal Rights Amendment).
21
22
See, e.g., Brigham Young, JD 7:14 (July 4, 1854); Apostle G. A. Smith, JD 7:71 (July 4, 1855).
Apostle Moses Thatcher, JD 23:206 (April 8, 1882) (“the Declaration of Independence is the highest
bill of rights which man has ever bequeathed to man”).
23
24
Church President John Taylor, JD 21:350 (Jan. 2, 1881).
4
Apostle Orson Pratt, “and many that the Constitution says nothing about.”25
Apostle
George Q. Cannon, Utah’s delegate to Congress who would near the end of his life
become the chief official exponent of Mormon homophobia, stated in 1875:
”I have been taught to believe that the constitution of the United States was
revealed of God; and that the destiny in store for the Latter-Day Saints was
to uphold constitutional government upon this land…. But there is a class
of men who consider everybody disloyal who does not dance to their tunes,
and who does not re-echo the sentiments which they express and seem to
entertain.”26
This “Constitutional faith,” with the concomitant right to be one’s own self, is
what makes the early unqualified Mormon support for locating new and malleable
marriage, family, and sexual rights in the popular “reserved rights”27 of the Ninth and
Tenth Amendments so valuable a study for same-sex marriage now, and for answering
objections to it.28 “How true it is,” they lamented, “that, when any new principle, or
any new idea concerning an old principle is promulgated, the human heart seems to
rise up in rebellion against it….”29
II. Civil Rights, Natural Rights, and Human Rights
Polygamy was, as James Clayton puts it, “the most fundamental, intense and
prolonged challenge to that institution [marriage] in our history….”30 Like same-sex
marriage, it was a fighting faith that included politics, power, religion, sex, sexuality,
family, and marriage. Unlike same-sex marriage, however, it was never legalized
25
26
Orson Pratt, JD 8:113 (July 4, 1860), emphasis added.
George Q. Cannon, JD 18:6 (April 8, 1875).
from Utah in the US Congress.
In 1872, Cannon became the non-voting delegate
Apostle John Taylor, JD 5:155 (Aug. 23, 1857) (“we stand on our reserved rights as citizens of the
United States”). The Tenth Amendment’s reservation of rights “to the States” was not claimed as
Utah did not become a state until 1896.
27
Sherif Girgis, Robert P. George, and Ryan T. Anderson, “What Is Marriage?” (2010) 34(1) Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy 245.
28
29
D. H. Wells, JD 13:351 (May 5, 1870), emphasis added.
James L. Clayton, “The Supreme Court, Polygamy and the Enforcement of Morals in Nineteenth
Century America: An Analysis of Reynolds v. United States” (1979) 12(4) Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Thought 46.
30
5
anywhere.
To any who denied polygamy practically, doctrinally, or emotionally,
Brigham Young said, “I promise that you will be damned.”31 By the rhetoric and
practice of polygamy the Mormons attempted to redefine marriage, and they chafed
against the preaching of their religious and political enemies about the wrongfulness
of their conduct. They wished to be protected from the “freedom of religion” that
allowed their enemies, often other religionists, such license to attack them—and they
went on the attack themselves. The church’s arguments were not based solely upon
constitutional jurisprudence, but also upon sexual, marital, and familial theory.
A century ago the church identified the “Mormon system of marriage” as the
very “institution of marriage” itself,32 and denounced as “this doctrine of devils” all
those “who fight against Zion [the Mormon establishment]33 and her institution of
marriage.”34 Plural marriage was the essential mark of the true Church of Jesus
Christ. The leaders condemned the “false tradition” of the “monogamic system” of
marriage.35 They damned one-man-one-woman marriage as being responsible for
the evils of the “Christian nation”—America—and held that marriage to a
non-Mormon “is not a marriage in our estimation.”36 “This polygamic form of
marriage,” they taught, “is far in excess of the monogamic.”37 Again and again, they
damned “Christian” ministers and churches for exerting influence over
politicians—being in cahoots with them—to condemn and outlaw their marital
arrangements.38 Indeed, politicians in Congress, they said, were the “hireling
Priesthood of the age,” obedient to their churched pulpit-masters39, and the Mormons
relentlessly preached against the influence of religion in politics.40 They accused
their religious and political enemies of “pandering to the prejudices of an ungodly
31
Brigham Young, JD 3:266 (July 14, 1855).
32
Apostle Erastus Snow, JD 26:222-23 (May 31, 1885).
33
Apostle Orson Pratt, JD 16:78 (June 15, 1873)
34
Apostle Erastus Snow, JD 20:374 (Oct. 8, 1879).
35
There are hundreds of statements by church authorities to this effect, but see, e.g., the official
speeches given by Mormon Apostle and member of the First Presidency George Q. Cannon in the
church’s General Conference at JD 20:1 (April 7, 1878) and JD 20:195 (April 6, 1879). The year
1879 was a turning point with Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879).
36
Apostle Orson Pratt, JD 15:251 (Dec. 15, 1872).
37
Apostle H. W. Naisbitt, JD 26:121 (March 8, 1885).
38
Apostle Erastus Snow, JD 26:221 (May 31, 1885).
39
Apostle and member of the first presidency George Q. Cannon, JD 24:44 (June 25, 1882).
40
Apostle Erastus Snow, JD 23:232 (February 26< 1882).
6
age”41 and of “making a bugaboo about polygamy.”42
“It would be a poor thing,”
they said, “if we should be under the necessity of calling in the Devil [politics] to help
us to do the Lord’s work”43—and yet they did. The “apostate” churches, particularly
the Catholic Church and its “hireling priests,” had adopted the evil monogamy that
“has been taught from the days of heathen Rome down to the present time, which has
resulted in the prostitution of many of the fair daughters of Eve as mistresses.”44
They noted that marriage was not always a sacrament of religion but that the
“Established Church” (i.e., the apostate Christianity) took over the control of
one-man-one-woman marriage in order to gain political and economic power.45 But
when the polygamous Mormons wanted their own political power in
Washington—the same sort of political “coalition of churches” that is today the
mainstay of their heavy involvement in such projects as Proposition 8 and other
activities46—their religious enemies denied it to them. “There can be no fellowship
between Mormon and Christian,” one Protestant newspaper wrote. “They cannot
exist under the same social system. They cannot be partners in political power.”47
To which the Mormons replied:
“Here the line is drawn!
All fellowship is denied us. No social relations
are permitted…. If outsiders do not like us to endorse their paper, they
should not present it; and when we endorse it to a limited extent, it ill
becomes them to object to their own doctrine when the tables are turned.”48
They objected to the melding of church and state by the “federal Christianity that
has been introduced among us…by our good, kind, pure, pious Christian friends.”49
They objected to the fact that someone would consider someone else disloyal who
disagreed with their version of the Constitution and did not “dance to their tunes, and
41
Apostle Orson Hyde, JD 20:98 (November 3, 1878).
42
Apostle F. D. Richards, JD 26:344 (October 1885).
43
Church president John Taylor, JD 20:40 (August 4, 1878).
44
Apostle George Teasdale, JD 25:21 (January 13, 1884).
45
Apostle H. W. Naisbitt, JD 26:125 (March 8, 1885).
See, e.g., “Church Readies Members on Proposition 8” at
<http://beta-newsroom.lds.org/article/church-readies-members-on-proposition-8>.
46
47
Quoted by Apostle Orson Hyde, JD 2:207 (March 18, 1855).
48
Ibid. pp. 207-08, emphasis added.
49
Church president John Taylor, JD 23:54 (April 9, 1882).
7
who does not re-echo the sentiments which they express and seem to entertain.”50
Their enemies exhibited “an animus—a united operation against justice, equity and
law, and, in our case, against the Constitution of the United States, and the rights and
privileges and immunities of the Latter-day Saints.”51 Great anger, wrath,
indignation, and animus;52 persecution and opposition,53 came against them because
of polygamy. There are “people that are coming here to reform us,” said President
John Taylor, who “are so disgusted with our corruptions.”54 Perhaps most
significantly—and ironically—when the Mormons were fighting for their
Constitutional rights of equality as residents of a federal territory, they noted that the
“other” non-Mormon churchmen were not opposed to polygamy if only it were to
remain just the Mormons’ private little immorality:
“‘If you were to protect immorality and not call it religion,’ I have been told
many and many a time, ‘we should not object to it; but you are sanctioning
by the forms of religion that which we cannot endure, and which is hateful
to our civilization. It is the marriage ceremony, that is the offensive part of
it; it is, in other words, the marrying that excites dislike and hatred.’”55
“‘Your marriages,’ says the objector, ‘are founded upon principles entirely
new, and different from the Christian world.’”56
The marrying was the rub—just as today the same-sex marriage excites the
disgust and fear.
As Apostle Dallin Oaks told his associates in 1984:
“The major objective of the gay rights homosexual movement is to win
legitimacy and public approval for the homosexual ‘sexual preference’ or
50
Apostle and member of the First Presidency George Q. Cannon, JD 18:6 (April 8, 1875).
51
Church President John Taylor, JD 25:311 (Oct. 6-7, 1884).
52
Church President Wilford Woodruff, JD 22:342 (Oct. 23, 1881).
53
Church President John Taylor, JD 22:140 (July 3, 1881)
54
Church President John Taylor, JD 25:316 (Oct. 6-7, 1884). Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to
Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press,
2010, has explored this element of disgust with regard to homosexuals.
55
Apostle and member of the First Presidency George Q. Cannon, JD 24:41 (June 25, 1882), emphasis
added.
56
Apostle Parley P. Pratt, JD 1:308 (July 10, 1853).
8
‘lifestyle.’ Nothing would accomplish that objective as effectively as legal
recognition of homosexual marriages.”57
“The best way,” he told them, “to oppose further anti-discrimination legislation
protecting homosexuals is to propose well-reasoned exceptions rather than to oppose
such legislation across the board.”58 As in the 19th Century, the specific target was
to be the marriage itself. “We claim the same rights,” the polygamous Mormons
said, “as other folks, and no more.”59 This, of course, was not true, but they saw it as
true. They perceived no discontinuity between their rather novel claims and the
rights of any other ordinary Americans. When Congress passed anti-polygamy laws
(the counterpart of which is today’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)), the
Mormons condemned them: “I hold that if Congress has a right to enact a law in
relation to marriage, it might just as consistently make a law affecting baptism, or
prescribing, if at all, the manner in which the sacrament of the Lord’s supper should
be administered.”60 They defended their practice of polygamy by arguing the “God
made us do it” defense. “I cannot help it. Can you? Can anyone?”61 “If they
[our enemies] could only tell us how to get out of the dilemma they have placed us in
we should be very much obliged to them, we really should like to get out of it.”62
And yet the church went to law—Congress, judges and courts whom they expected to
be activist, the White House—to get their definition of “marriage” and “family”
enacted into law. They exerted enormous political pressure as a uniform voting
block. But to claim the “same rights as others, and no more” meant no less,
either—the same rights—and new additional rights as well. In their argument for
polygamy as being among the “same rights,” they said:
“We have to contend for our liberties and the rights of the people before the
courts, wherein we strive to maintain the Constitutional rights to which we
are entitled, both civilly and politically. We have not gone to the
Dallin H. Oaks, “Principles to Govern Possible Public Statement on Legislation Affecting Rights of
Homosexuals,” Internal Memorandum dated August 7, 1984, available at
<http://affirmation.org/pdf/oaks_paper_02.pdf>; p. 17; seen January 23, 2012. Such exceptions were
recognized anew by the US Supreme Court in Hosannah-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and
School v. EEOC No. 10-553 (Jan. 11, 2012); <www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-553.pdf>.
57
58
Ibid, p. 15, emphasis added.
59
Apostle Charles W. Penrose, JD 25:229 (July 26, 1884).
60
Apostle Moses Thatcher, JD 25:115 (April 4, 1884).
61
Church president John Taylor, JD 21:67, 70 (January 4,1880).
62
Ibid. p. 70, emphasis added.
9
authorities that are over us in the nation and supplicated them saying: ‘Will
you please give us some extraordinary liberties or privileges—we contend
for the rights of every American citizen, which are our rights.’ We have
not cut ourselves off from the rights of citizenship.63
This was at bottom a claim for equality, for as the Book of Mormon says, “the
great inequality of man is because of sin and transgression.”64
III. Reserved Rights; Privileges & Immunities
The Mormons were willing and anxious to contend for “new” rights, specifically
under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution as inflected through the
First Amendment, and vice versa.65 Both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were
included in the Bill of Rights specifically to counter the argument that the listing of
specific rights in the first eight amendments would automatically preclude the
recognition of other but unenumerated rights.66 These amendments state:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to
the people.
In other words, it is expected that “new rights” will be identified. Indeed, the
word “new” is a misnomer because, as the two amendments make clear, there are
“other” rights and powers already in existence which are retained and reserved to the
63
Apostle F. D. Richards, JD 26:101-02 (January 18, 1885), emphasis added.
64
BoM, Alma 28:13.
65
Church President John Taylor, JD 23:67 (April 9, 1882).
66
Richard Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 217, 229-31; Kurt T. Lash, The Lost History of the Ninth
Amendment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Daniel A. Farber, Retained by the
People: The “Silent” Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don’t Know They
Have (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
10
states and the people, and which may not be denied or disparaged.
The speakers
often couched these claims in references to their “privileges and immunities” or
“rights and privileges,” echoing the language of the Privileges and Immunities Clause
of Article IV, Section 2, Clause 1; and of the first clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment, respectively:
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of
Citizens in the several States.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States….
All this is consistent with both Madison’s and Jefferson’s views of a priori rights
which the government could not negate by “abridging,” and this has been the
assumption since Jefferson wrote of the Creator-endowed “unalienable rights” in the
Declaration of Independence. When Brigham Young couched these references
specifically in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights,67 he
adopted the common view of both Jefferson and Madison that human rights are
organic—inherent, inborn, “unalienable” in Jefferson’s term, and belonging to “all
mankind”68 in Joseph Smith’s term—not bestowed by any government or person or
law, but a pre-existent part of human nature itself. Such rights “do not belong to
politics” because they are “born in us.”69 Apostle Orson Pratt gave the Tenth
Amendment the broadest possible reading and placed it centrally in the interpretation
of the Constitution:
“A few years sufficed to demonstrate the inadequacy of the ‘Articles of
Confederation,’ to obviate which the Constitution was established,
conferring increased power upon the General Government. That its power
might be clearly understood, Article X of the amendments was ratified as
follows—‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states
respectively, or to the people.’ It will be perceived that there are no
prohibitions upon citizens outside the boundaries of States.”70
67
Brigham Young, JD 10:39-41 (July 4, 1860).
68
D&C 98:5.
69
Apostle Charles W. Penrose, JD 25:220 (July 26, 1884).
70
Orson Pratt, JD 8:111 (July 4, 1860), emphases added.
11
Brigham Young’s doctrine was that both the “spirit and letter of our Constitution
and laws,” including the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as well as the Declaration of
Independence, contained new yet unenumerated rights specifically regarding sexual
conduct and marriage—among many other such rights as then claimed by the
Mormons as federal citizens in the Territory of Utah.71 Young’s position was
supported by other general authorities, including Apostle (later Church President)
John Taylor72 and Apostle Orson Pratt.73 This was consistent with the sentiments of
Young’s immediate predecessor, church founder Joseph Smith, speaking in the same
year that he formally introduced polygamy74, who said, “Powers not delegated to the
states or reserved from the states are constitutional. The Constitution acknowledges
that the people have all power not reserved to itself.”75 When the church authorities
read the Ninth and Tenth Amendments together in the Utah Territory, they necessarily
omitted the “to the states” clauses of the Tenth Amendment, leaving only “the people”
as the repository of the unenumerated rights and powers guaranteed in the
amendments. And they were “the people”—the insular sexual, marital, familial, and
political minority.
When the Mormon leaders spoke of the traditional “old rights and privileges” of
the people as well as “other rights” and “greater rights” which the Mormons claimed
and would continue to claim,76 they spoke of both “civil rights” and “human rights,”
not confounding the two, and claimed these rights as human beings, as citizens of the
United States and the federal Territory of Utah, and as “cosmopolitans,” “children of
God,” and “citizens of the world.”77 They were anguished by the constant awareness
Brigham Young, JD 10:39-41 (March 9, 1862). The background and context of the Brigham’s
remarks may be found at Nate Oman, “The Ninth Amendment Argument for Monogamy” (Tuesday,
December 5, 2006) Times and Seasons, which may be read online at
<http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2006/12/the-ninth-amendment-argument-for-monogamy/>; seen
May 23, 2011. The Valley Tan newspaper article for November 6, 1858, mentioned in that source,
may be read at <http://udn.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/valleytan&CISOPTR=0>;
seen May 23, 2011.
71
72
John Taylor, JD 5:155 (Aug. 23, 1857); JD 11:92 (Mar. 5, 1865); JD 23:67 (April 9, 1882).
73
Orson Pratt, JD 8:111 (July 4, 1860).
D&C 132 headnote; the revelation on plural marriage was “recorded 12 July 1843.”
point out that it was practiced in secret long before that.
74
Historians
75
Joseph Fielding Smith (ed), Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book,
1938), p. 279. (Feb. 25, 1843); Joseph Smith, History of the Church (Salt Lake City: Mormon Church,
vol 5, 1858), pp. 289-290.
76
Apostle John Taylor, JD 5:186 (April 30, 1857).
77
Apostle John Taylor, JD 5:186 (Aug. 30, 1857); JD 11:55 (Jan. 18, 1865); JD 11:354 (April 6, 1967).
12
of their less-than-equal legal status:
“In this respect we act as others do—that is, we are placed pretty much
under the same laws, not quite; pretty much under the same form of
government, not quite; we have certain rights and privileges ceded to us, not
like others have exactly; but to a very great extent similar to others. In this
respect we act and operate as other citizens of the United States do, and in
this respect we have rights, privileges and immunities as others have so far
as they go. But they don't go with us quite to the extent that they do with
other people under the same circumstances…. [We] differ materially in
many respects from those of other people.78
But on top of this, their words also adumbrate today’s “marriage lite” argument
which says that “domestic partnership” and other such arrangements are “just as good
as “the genuine article (marriage itself).” Apostle Joseph F. Smith, who would later
become church president, grudgingly acknowledged that a monogamous heterosexual
“marriage” would be acceptable “so far as it goes,” but added:
“… it is useless to tell me that there is no blessing attached to obedience to
the law [of polygamy], or that a man with only one wife can obtain as great
a reward, glory or kingdom as he can with more than one, being equally
faithful.
Patriarchal marriage [polygamy] involves conditions, responsibilities and
obligations which do not exist in monogamy, and there are blessings
attached to the faithful observance of that law, if viewed only upon natural
principles, which must so far exceed those of monogamy as the conditions
responsibilities and power of increase are greater….even admitting the
eternity of the monogamic marriage covenant.”79
One hears in these words a foreshadowing of what today is the accepted rule of
legal equality—that people “similarly circumstanced are entitled to be treated
alike”80—as well as the painful truth that something like “domestic partnership” and
78
Church President John Taylor, JD 26:69 (Nov. 30, 1884), emphases added.
79
Apostle (and later church president) Joseph F. Smith, JD 20:28-30 (July 7, 1878), emphases added.
80
Balas and Morales, p. 8.
13
real “marriage” are “not quite” the same, but are “limited” and “clipped.”81
Church
President John Taylor said:
“We need the protection of law wherever we are, or under whatsoever
circumstances we may be placed; and in placing ourselves in this position
we are only doing just the same as others of our fellow citizens similarly
situated are doing. This is a matter which has grown out of our religious
ideas.”82
All these pronouncements spanned the decades from the 1850s to the 1890s and
thus stretched across the adoption of the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and
Fifteenth (1870) Amendments to the Constitution after the Civil War, and the
enormous changes those amendments wrought upon the whole “field” of its meaning
and interpretation83—all before polygamy ended in 1890 and before Utah achieved
statehood in 1896.84 The living Constitution—amended and amendable, interpreted
and interpretable, adjudicated and evolving—was in their view “a progressive—a
gradual work”85—and so church president John Taylor said in a wide-ranging speech
on polygamy and the law:
“We will contend, inch by inch, legally and constitutionally, for our rights as
American citizens, and for the universal rights of universal man. We stand
proudly erect in the consciousness of our rights as American citizens, and
plant ourselves firmly on the sacred guarantees of the Constitution, and that
This theme is dramatized with poignancy in CBS Television, Northern Exposure, “I Feel the Earth
Move,” Season 5, Episode 21 (May 2, 1994).
81
82
John Taylor, JD 20: 351 (Nov. 30, 1879), emphasis added.
Felix S. Cohen, “Field Theory and Judicial Logic” (1950) 59(2) Yale Law Journal 238, 249 n. 13;
Mark W. Cannon, “The Crusades Against the Masons, Catholics, and Mormons: Separate Waves of a
Common Current,” (1961) 3(2) BYU Studies 23, esp. pp. 39-40; available at
<http://byustudies.byu.edu/PDFLibrary/3.2CannonCrusades-fde64f94-14ed-4dc3-8a41-a337d37c4c57.
pdf>; seen June 2, 2012; see also Holning S. Lau, “Formalism: From Racial Integration to Same-sex
Marriage,” (2008) 59(4) Hastings Law Journal 843.
83
A point noted with approval in J. Reuben Clark, Jr., “The Constitution,” Conference Report, April
1957, pp. 44-52;
<http://scriptures.byu.edu/printPage.php?url=http%3A//scriptures.byu.edu/gettalk.php%3FID%3D889
%26era%3Dyes> (“The Constitution, as approved by the Lord, is still the same great vanguard of
liberty and freedom in human government that it was the day it was written”). Clark (1871-1961) was
an apostle and member of the church’s First Presidency. His life spanned both the era of polygamy
and the modern day
84
85
Brigham Young, JD 7:14 (July 4, 1854).
14
instrument, while it defines the powers and privileges of the President,
Congress and the judiciary, also directly provides that ‘the powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the
States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the People.’”86
Taylor says these unenumerated powers are “directly” provided. On a later
occasion he said they are “emphatically” provided.87 In either case, his
jurisprudence of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments is crucial because terms such as
special rights, equal rights, old rights, new rights, other rights, and greater rights are
sometimes difficult to identify and define. For example, despite the early reliance
upon both amendments as substantive sources of rights, BYU law professor James
Gordon88, writes flippantly:
“The Ninth Amendment states that enumerating certain rights in the
Constitution does not deny other rights retained by the people. If you can
figure out what those other rights are, you are a genius. Or a liberal.”89
Under polygamy, the Mormons’ right to define and create their own “natural
family” and their own “marriage” as they saw them and as they themselves declared
them to be, to love whomever and however they wished within those definitions, to
enjoy official sanction and proof of that status, were thus organic rights against which
the government could “make no law” under the First Amendment, and which could be
circumscribed, identified, and expanded within the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and
reference to the Declaration of Independence. All these things—these expansive
possibilities and self-definitions—were so because they, “the people,” believed and
said they were so—and, most crucially, because they could petition not only
executives and legislatures, but also “activist” judges, to say they were so.90 These
things were not unreasonable, illegal, or illusory—there were no dichotomies between
86
Church President John Taylor, JD 23:67 (April 9, 1882), emphases added; accord Apostle Erastus
Snow, JD 25:72 (Feb. 24, 1884).
87
Church President John Taylor, JD 26:349 (Feb. 20, 1884).
Which are briefed in Raoul Berger, “Suzannah and —the Ninth Amendment” (1994) 1994(1)
Brigham Young University Law Review 51; and Calvin R. Massey, “Abstention and the Constitutional
Limits of the Judicial Power of the United States” (1991) 1991(2) Brigham Young University Law
Review 811.
88
James D. Gordon III, “An Unofficial Guide to the Bill of Rights” (1992) 1992(2) Brigham Young
University Law Review 371, 373.
89
90
Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879) is the primary, but only one, example.
15
rights issues and moral issues, between what one did and who one was.
When the
courts refused or failed to take a radically activist role in their favor, they condemned
them saying “the courts dreaded the power of public opinion, which was adverse to
dealing justly with us.”91 Indeed, “public opinion is often the worst tyrant this world
has ever known.”92 They petitioned the president and Congress, but so important
was the matter of specifically petitioning judges to take an active role that the New
Testament “Parable of the Importunate Woman,” who petitions “at the feet of the
judge,”93 is repeated and reified in Mormon scripture94 and sermon.95
The insistence upon “free exercise” as the core of “religious freedom”96 stems in
large part from the Mormons’ traditional chafing at the holding in Reynolds v. United
States.97 It was their own test case, brought in the certainty that the First
Amendment protected their practice of polygamy. It was the first case in which the
Supreme Court brought the Jeffersonian “wall of separation” into its constitutional
jurisprudence—something that Apostle Dallin Oaks today decries as a “concept that
has gotten up outside the four corners of the Constitution.”98 The Reynolds holding
came as a shock—You can, it said, believe whatever you want, but you cannot act
upon it. It is your practice of polygamy—it is the marriage—that the First
Amendment does not protect. This was a dichotomy that the early Mormons felt
was discriminatory nonsense.99 Oaks reiterates this idea today: “Freedom of religion
91
Apostle and member of the first presidency George Q. Cannon, JD 22:136 (July 3, 1881).
92
Apostle Moses Thatcher, JD 26:208 (Apr. 13, 1885).
93
Luke 18:1-7 (the “unjust judge”).
94
D&C 101:76-88.
95
Apostle and member of the first presidency Heber C. Kimball, JD 8:240 (Nov. 25, 1860) is but one
example of many.
For a collection of recent representative statements on “religious freedom,” most incorporationg
anti-homosexual teachings, see the main article, sidebars, and links at “What Religious Freedom
Means” (Jan. 23, 2012) <http://newsroom.lds.org/article/what-religious-freedom-means#_ftnref2>.
96
97
Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879).
“Interview with Elder Dallin H. Oaks Regarding Chapman University Speech on Religious
Freedom” at
<http://newsroom.lds.org/article/interview-with-elder-dallin-h-oaks-regarding-chapman-university-spee
ch-on-religious-freedom>.
98
99
Apostle Erastus Snow, JD 24:73 (Apr. 6, 1883); Apostle Charles W. Penrose, JD 25:218-19 (July 26,
1884); James L. Clayton, “The Supreme Court, Polygamy and the Enforcement of Morals in
Nineteenth Century America: An Analysis of Reynolds v. United States” (1979) 12(4) Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 46.
16
includes the right to act upon one’s religion, the right to exercise it.
Exercise is the
word in the First Amendment.”
So it seems hypocritical when the Mormon
authorities today counsel homosexuals with the same voice as the holding in Reynolds.
Bruce Hafen, a colleague of Oaks, says: “You may not have consciously chosen to
have same-gender attraction, but you are faithfully choosing to deal with it.
Sometimes that attraction may make you feel sinful, even though the attraction alone
is not a sin if you do not act on it.”101 “Congress,” said Apostle Orson Pratt, “have
no more constitutional right to pass a law against polygamy than they have to pass a
law against monogamy, or against a man living in celibacy.”102
100
Conclusion
The early Mormons defended their practice of polygamy by arguing. “I cannot
help it. Can you? Can anyone?”103 Equality for them meant to “claim the same
rights as other folks, and no more.”104 In a way, it might also echo the kind of
push-back that gay people refer to as “coming out.” Here is a Mormon
“coming-out” story from the days of polygamy:
“Many of you thought, when you heard the Gospel, and your hearts had
been made glad by obedience thereunto, that all you would have to do
would be to tell your particular friends and relatives of these things, and
that it would cause their hearts to rejoice as it did yours…. But lo and
behold! the moment you opened your mouth on this subject, you were set
down as imposters. You were probably before this a decent man or a
decent woman; but now you became ostracized and cut off in many
instances from association even with members of your own family. Was it
because you had become corrupt? No. Was it because you had become
unsocial? No. Was it because you possessed principles that were at
variance with the principles of truth, virtue, honor, and the Word of God?
No. And if you had asked them what the reason was, for their coolness
100
Oaks, “Interview”; original emphasis.
Bruce C Hafen, “Elder Bruce C. Hafen Speaks on Same-Sex Attraction” which may be read on the
church’s official Web page at
<http://newsroom.lds.org/article/elder-bruce-c-hafen-speaks-on-same-sex-attraction>; emphasis added.
101
102
Orson Pratt, JD 6:362 July 24, 1859).
103
Church President John Taylor, JD 21:67, 70 (January 4,1880).
104
Apostle Charles W. Penrose, JD 25:229 (July 26, 1884).
17
and the feeling of ostracism that they manifested, they could not tell, only
that you were a ‘Mormon.’ You have all of you experienced this. If this
is the case, then, with your most intimate friends—with your relatives, with
your fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts, with whom
you had been on the most friendly terms heretofore—how can you expect
the world to look at things in any different manner.”105
LBGT people today might substitute “found yourself” in place of “heard the
Gospel,” and “gay” for “a Mormon” in the story and feel it describes their experiences
exactly.106 “We are a poor, isolated people,” said Heber C. Kimball, apostle and
counselor to Brigham Young, “driven over one thousand miles from our native
land….”107 “We have been in the minority for upwards of 50 years,” said Brigham
Young, Jr.”108 They chafed at the “discrimination”109 and the lack of “fairness”
with which they were treated.110 In light of all this, LBGT people today might
reasonably expect the support and compassion toward them of those who, like the gay
couple in 8: The Mormon Proposition, were and are of polygamous lineages—if only
for the sake of avoiding hypocrisy. They would be disappointed. Even so, they
might choose to follow Brigham Young, who said: “This is the greatest gift that ever
was bestowed upon mankind, to know how to preserve their identity.”111 “In
reality,” he later noted, “we are nothing only what the Lord makes us.”112 “We must
preserve our identity before the Lord….”113 Indeed, the Mormons celebrated the
sometime salutary effect of their coming-out on the rest of the world in language that
is prescient:
“The persecution that is being waged against us is having the effect to open
the eyes of thinking men, and of calling forth the attention of many who
105
Church President John Taylor, JD 25:85-86 (February 10, 1884), emphasis added.
106
Something, in my view, like the cross-historical work done in Craig Harline, Conversions: Two
Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
107
Heber C. Kimball, JD 5:130 (Aug. 2, 1857).
108
Apostle Brigham Young, JD 25:191 (June 22, 1884).
109
Apostle and member of the First Presidency George Q. Cannon, JD 24:365 (Dec. 2, 1883).
110
Apostle Erastus Snow, JD 25:108 (March 9, 1884).
111
Brigham Young, JD 5:53 (July 19, 1857).
112
Brigham Young, JD 5:343 (October 18, 1857).
113
Brigham Young, JD 8:155 (August 26, 1860).
18
have never thought of these things before. And so it is in these lands;
while we are so persecuted, the justice of our cause is quietly taking effect
in the hearts of many of the people. It is not true that the fifty-five
millions—the estimate of our nation’s population—are against us; not by
any means. The priests that are among us, it is true, join in the common
cause of opposition, publish lies and succeed in stirring up the feelings of
many against us. They have moved members of Congress by threatening
that they should not be re-elected if they did not take a position against us.
This is not, however, the feeling of the whole people, though it is to a very
terrible extent.”114
These words could as well be spoken with similar emotion by leaders of the
same-sex marriage cause today, for research indicates that homophobia is not “the
feeling of the whole people.”115 The post-Manifesto church was somewhat
chastened by its bitter defeats. “I caution you to be careful and to avoid that trickery
which is called politics by the world,” said Apostle Moses Thatcher six months after
the Manifesto.116 A year after the Manifesto, Apostle and counselor Joseph F. Smith
said, “Never let politics take such a deep root in your hearts that it will embitter you
against human rights. Politics are for governments of men, and governments of men
do not enter into our spirituality.”117 When the law of monogamic marriage was
declared by properly constituted legal authority to be the sole legal form of marriage,
it was the duty of the Latter-day Saints to “conform to the requirements of the law of
the land”118—even if that was the “false tradition” of the “monogamic system” of
marriage that they had previously damned as devilish.119 “[W]e will to the best of
our ability,” said George Q. Cannon six months after the Manifesto, “accommodate
ourselves to the changed condition of affairs.”120 “We have failed,” he said, and are
114
Apostle Franklin D. Richards, CD 1:7 (April 7, 1886).
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Mormons in America: Certain in Their Beliefs,
Uncertain of Their Place in Society,” <www.pewforum.org/mormons-in-america/>; seen Jan 22, 2012.
See also Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and
Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
115
116
CD 2:234 (May 31, 1891).
117
CD 2:305 (Nov. 2, 1891).
118
Apostle and member of the First Presidency George Q. Cannon, CD 2:293 (Nov. 1, 1891).
119
Apostle and member of the First Presidency George Q. Cannon, JD 20:1 (April 7, 1878) and JD
20:195 (April 6, 1879).
120
CD 2:214 (April 6, 1891).
19
now resolved that “we will comply with the law—that we will do our best to carry it
out having done all in our power up to the present to vindicate our rights.”121 And
“the law” to be complied with included not only the legislation made by Congress, but
also the decisions of the courts.122 Cannon admitted that the former policy of
making a line of distinction between religious and civil obligations had been
wrong.123 The appeal to both civil and human rights because of their status as
“cosmopolitans,” “children of God,” and “citizens of the world”124 suggests a
precedent for the modern church to recognize all the protections for sexual orientation
and marriage equality in international covenants and charters,125 and in the evolving
jurisprudence of equality in the United States.126 The recognition of rights as
unalienable and a priori means that they “do not belong to politics” but are “born in
us.”127 It might also suggest that in whatever jurisdictions same-sex marriage, as a
“new principle, or any new idea concerning an old principle,”128 is declared to be
legal today,129 the same result—compliance—should, by parity of reasoning, and by
official instruction, apply for the same reasons, and that Oaks’s “well-reasoned
exceptions” be voluntarily foregone. In 1947, Church President George Albert
Smith responded to the presence of polygamous groups calling themselves
“Mormon.” He told the Saints that the 1890 Manifesto’s ban on the practice of
121
CD 2:213 (April 6, 1891).
122
Apostle John Henry Smith, CD 2:353-54 (Jan. 24, 1892).
123
CD 2:212 (Apr. 6, 1891).
124
Apostle John Taylor, JD 5:186 (Aug. 30, 1857); JD 11:55 (Jan. 18, 1865); JD 11:354 (April 6,
1967).
125
Man Yee Karen Lee, Equality, Dignity, and Same-Sex Marriage: A Rights Disagreement in
Democratic Societies (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2010).
Kenji Yoshino, “The New Equal Protection,” (2011) 124 Harvard Law Review 747 (“liberty-based
dignity jurisprudence” is supplanting suspect classifications of “group-based equality” as the analytical
paradigm):
126
“The new equal protection paradigm stresses the interests we have in common as human
beings rather than the demographic differences that drive us apart. In this sense, the shift
from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ equal protection could be seen as a movement from group-based
civil rights to universal human rights.”
In other words, Brigham Young’s “freedom and equal rights!”
127
Apostle Charles W. Penrose, JD 25:220 (July 26, 1884).
128
D. H. Wells, JD 13:351 (May 5, 1870), emphasis added.
129
As of this writing: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and
the District of Columbia.
20
polygamy was still in force, because the law had made polygamy illegal.
But he
added this crucial injunction: “We desire our people to obey the law of the land in
reference to marriage.”130 In doing this, they would “only [be] doing just the same
as others of our fellow citizens similarly situated are doing.”131 That would seem
fair, even as regards same-sex marriage, for as Brigham Young taught in 1870, “I say
God speed everybody that is for freedom and equal rights!”132
George Albert Smith, “Closing Address,” Oct. 1947 Conference Report, pp. 164-67;
<http://scriptures.byu.edu/printPage.php?url=http%3A//scriptures.byu.edu/gettalk.php%3FID%3D319
%26era%3Dyes>; emphasis added; seen January 31, 2012.
130
131
John Taylor, JD 20: 351 (Nov. 30, 1879).
132
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 13:274 (July 24, 1870).
21