This is a throwback episode with Brian Hales from 2017. Brian is the author of Joseph Smith's Polygamy, Volumes 1-3, and it's just in time for the Journal of Mormon Polygamy Conference this weekend at the University of Utah. Check out our conversation....
https://youtu.be/WVs0ypGKq5o
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Canadian Polygamy – Should it be Legal?
The Interview
GT: Well I’d like to welcome everybody out here to Gospel Tangents Podcast. I’m really excited to talk to Dr. Brian Hales. He’s the expert on polygamy, or one of the experts I guess. I’m grateful to have you here and thank you for letting me take some of your time today.
Brian: Rick it’s really a privilege for me to be here.
GT: Well thanks. One of the things I’d like to do is to introduce you to my audience a little bit. Typically I try to talk to a lot of historians who are doctors but you are the first physician, although I have talked to a physician’s assistant as well. Could you tell us a little bit about your background, even in medicine? I think you’re a Utah man. Is that right?
Brian: I am actually. I went to Utah State, grew up in Logan and got a medical degree from University of Utah, so I have a little bit of the Ute blood in me as well.
GT: Aggie and Utah, ok.
Brian: Aggies primarily. Then I had a member of my family who was involved with Mormon fundamentalism and that kind of steered me over into thinking about polygamy. This is back in 1989 so it’s been quite some time ago. At that point I was in a residency for anesthesia and I do tell people that my books are part of my full anesthesia services. You’ve probably heard me say that joke, but I got interested then in Mormon fundamentalism and published a book, co-authored a book in 1991 dealing with that topic but then later a couple of other books.
People were asking me about Joseph Smith’s polygamy, and I didn’t have answers and really I would argue none of the books did. Todd Compton’s book has some things that were very helpful but he had written biographies and it wasn’t focused specifically on Joseph, so there was still a lot of room for research and to also try to figure out some of the historical aspects that really were just big question marks I think in a lot of people’s minds.
So in 2006-2007 I hired Don Bradley who is a dear friend but also a remarkable researcher and he went out and did a lot of research for me, gathered documents, and I told him to get everything: anti-Mormon or supportive, whatever he could find. We wanted to get every known document, and it was interesting because after we had been going about six months, it became obvious that if we kept going, eventually we would be able to put either a transcript or at least a reference to every known document on polygamy within the volumes that we were putting together. So we got kind of excited about that but that was mostly Don Bradley’s work. But his help, I put together three volumes (vol 1, vol 2, vol 3) on polygamy. There’s been a few new things come out. This was in 2013 that they were published, but not a lot has come out but a few very important things that we can talk about.
GT: Yeah we’ll definitely want to talk about that. Well great! I’m glad you talked about how you got interested in fundamentalist Mormonism, I guess. There are different branches. Could you just kind of briefly give a sketch of the main ones? I guess we’ve got the FLDS, AUB. Are there any others? Could you give a background on Mormon fundamentalism?
Brian: Well do you mind if I just talk about what’s going on in Canada right now?
GT: Sure, that would be great.
Brian: I just got back last week, it was a week ago today from Cranbrook, [British Columbia,] Canada. That is where they are holding a trial right now for two leading polygamists: Winston Blackmore and James Oler. The Canadian government has kind of a different system than we have here in the United States in that they have a law against polygamy. It’s been on the books since 1899 or before. They haven’t prosecuted anybody in the last 100 plus years, but what they are able to do in Canada that we don’t do in the U.S. is they can petition their Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of a particular law. In 2012 they did this to the state, well it would be the province, British Columbia did a provincial court saying, is this polygamy law constitutional? They ruled that it was.
They are now prosecuting the two leading polygamists because there’s a group of hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds located about an hour, hour and a half away from Cranbrook where the court’s being held. So the prosecution, the attorneys called me up and said, would you come up and be an expert? They said, we don’t want you to testify for or against, and I told them that isn’t what I’m interested in doing. They wanted somebody to give an accurate history which is something that I had studied.
I can even give you a copy of a chart that I’ve updated and you can put it the show notes or however you do online if people are interested. It’s available at https://mormonfundamentalism.com, but they asked me to come up and start with Joseph Smith and go right through on authority to the 1890 and 1904 manifestos, the period between that and the fundamentalist groups coming together at the end of the 1920s, and then the branches and the breakoffs and I put together a nice little chart that talks about the different groups and of course the fundamentalists up there. The polygamists up there are, or were aligned with the FLDS, but in 2002 Winston Blackmore was excommunicated by Warren Jeffs over kind of an interesting situation where Warren, representing his father Rulon who had had strokes and was not necessarily communicating that much but Warren gave the word that Winston was supposed to actually take the life of a woman who had been involved with what he felt was a transgression within their religious beliefs and Winston refused to do it so he was excommunicated. This was before Warren had actually taken over.
James Oler is the other leader and when Winston was excommunicated as the bishop up there then James Oler took over. [It was] kind of a sad tale. My heart actually goes out to both of these guys. I don’t agree with their polygamy but the sad thing is that James Oler helped with that 2012 case where they brought up the constitutionality of the anti-polygamy law, and James Oler was just a friend of the court, or gave an opinion on that, and then it came out against the polygamists and Warren was unhappy with that and sent him out to repent from afar which takes away his wives and everything. He seems like a really nice guy. I only chatted with him, exchanged very few words but he seemed like a very humble man and again I want it known that I am not up there to testify against the polygamists. There’s been some people saying that. It isn’t true. I was totally neutral on that.
Rick I don’t know if you want to know this but personally I don’t think that we should allow polygamy either in Canada or the United States, but my reason might be a little surprising to you, because in a country or government that allows same-sex marriage, and again I’m not speaking for or against that, but if we allow same-sex marriage and we allow polygamy, you could have networks of people, hundreds of people all married to each other in a variety of ways.
If the government privileged marriage, in other words if a married man and a married woman, whatever kind of marriage it is, if they have a privilege a single person doesn’t have, then everybody’s going to want to be married in some way. I think it would force the government to basically get out of the marrying business and leave it as a social construct or a religious agreement. But in doing that it would also take away any privilege for marriage which I think could harm the family. So that’s my reasoning for saying I don’t think we should have legal polygamy. I think a society can absorb polygamy on a small scale. It obviously can’t be practiced widely because of the differences in people, male and female, the gendered differences of being born, but I don’t think a society can absorb both of the expansions or marriage at the same time. I mean you can do same-sex marriage, or you can do polygamy. I don’t think it’s good for the family to do both.
Does D&C 132 Conflict with JST Genesis?
The Interview
GT: In your book, you’ve got a three volume set I guess I should say, and one of the other things I wanted to talk about was, I had an interview with Dr. Mark Staker. I don’t know if you were able to watch those interviews? (video here)
Brian: Just a part of it.
GT: Ok, in one of those interviews with Dr. Mark Staker, he really surprised me when he said that he thought that Black Pete, who was the first black Mormon in the church, baptized just six months after [the church was organized], may have introduced polygamy to Kirtland, which kind of blew my mind. I’d never heard that before, and I wanted—you know you’re kind of an expert on Kirtland era polygamy and that as well. I wanted to get your opinion on that point.
Brian: You know Mark, who is a remarkable scholar and you don’t dismiss anything that someone who’s done his level of research comes up with, you don’t dismiss it just out of hand. You want to entertain it and see how it fits with the other building blocks, but Mark and I have actually exchanged emails and had conversations and we actually have some disagreements on a number of points.
I am aware of this from your podcast, and I think that Joseph Smith didn’t need Black Pete to introduce him to polygamy, the idea. We see this all the time with say the Book of Mormon....
