Item Detail
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5989
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15
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0
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English
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The Legislative Antipolygamy Campaign
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BYU Studies
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Fall 1986
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26
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107-21
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""Presumptions," Orma Linford has pointed out, "are the balancing blocks in striking a balance between majority rule and minority rights, between liberty and order, between established social rules and religious freedom." Two interrelated presumptions underlay the nineteenth-century campaign against Mormon plural marriage that is reviewed in this essay. The first was that an institution so repugnant to conventional Christian values as polygamy could not qualify as an "exercise of religion" presumptively entitled to protection under the First Amendment. The second was that Mormon plural marriage, whatever its practitioners might believe or say about it, was "an overt act against peace and good order" (Jefferson's phrase) and therefore ineligible for constitutional protection. These presumptions, Linford notes, eventually paved the way "for any kind of action Congress desired to take." She might have included acts by several territorial and state legislatures and added that the same presumptions led the federal courts to sustain almost all such measures." [Publisher's abstract]
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"A Dogged Resolve" : The Doctrine and Decline of Mormon Plural Marriage, 1841–1890
A Foreign Kingdom : Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852-1890
A Widow's Tale : The 1884-1896 Diary of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney
Before The Manifesto : The Life Writings of Mary Lois Walker Morris
Doing the Works of Abraham : Mormon Polygamy―Its Origin, Practice, and Demise
God and Country : Politics in Utah
In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents
Joseph Smith's 1891 Millennial Prophecy : The Quest for Apocalyptic Deliverance
Making Space on the Western Frontier : Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes
Mormon Polygamy : A Bibliography, 1977-92
"Prepared to Abide the Penalty" : Latter-day Saints and Civil Disobedience
Reconstruction, Religion, and the West: The Great Impeacher Meets the Mormons
Saints : The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. No Unhallowed Hand 1846–1893.
The Diaries of Mary Lois Walker Morris, 1879-1887
"We Will Admit You as a State" : William H. Hooper, Utah and the Secession Crisis