We spent decades defending this arrangement as celestial principle. We had apostles go to prison for it. We endured national humiliation. And then, when the institutional cost became undeniable, we reversed course — not just abandoning the practice but eventually presenting monogamy as what we had always really believed, the eternal ideal that polygamy was merely a temporary deviation from. We stuck the landing, as we always do. The people caught in the middle of the timeline paid the price, as they always do.
I think about the unexamined correlation between polygamy and adultery every time the church deploys its considerable institutional energy against queer members. Because something doesn't add up.
Adultery — the thing that actually destroys LDS families at scale, that is statistically happening constantly among active members in good standing, that leaves real wreckage in real wards — gets pastoral handling. A personal failing. A repentance process. Painful but manageable. Nobody is writing proclamations about it.
Queer people in committed, faithful, genuinely loving relationships get institutional warfare.
The asymmetry is so stark it requires an explanation. And I think the explanation is this: adultery leaves the architecture intact. The husband strays, repents, returns. The presiding role survives. The hierarchy survives. The whole load-bearing structure of LDS marriage — one man, one woman, eternal companionship organized around a presiding partner — survives the transgression because the transgressor still needs it. He just violated it temporarily.
Queer relationships don't violate the architecture. They simply don't need it.
Two women building a life together in genuine equality aren't failing to perform the correct arrangement. They're demonstrating that the arrangement isn't necessary — not for love, not for fidelity, not for flourishing, not for any of the things marriage is supposed to produce. The lesbian couple down the street is boring and happy and faithful to each other, and their household doesn't have a presiding partner, and it seems to be working fine.
That is a different kind of threat entirely. You can repent your way back into the framework being necessary. You cannot argue your way out of the evidence just sitting there being ordinary.
So the bogeyman has to stay monstrous. The moment queer love becomes mundane — and it has, culturally, irrevocably — the architecture is exposed as a choice rather than a necessity. And the church is still trying to figure out what to do with a monster that turned out to be neighbors.
Here is what I actually believe, as someone formed by this tradition and unwilling to abandon its deepest instincts: the cosmology we have is better than the conclusions we've drawn from it. We teach that intelligence is co-eternal with God. That the core of who you are was not assigned at birth but brought into mortality from before. That resurrection means becoming more fully yourself, not less. That God finds variety generative — the creation itself is extravagant evidence of this.
And then we ask queer members to believe that who they are capable of loving is either a mortal corruption or a trial to be transcended. That in the celestial kingdom, whatever is most essentially them will be replaced with something more convenient for the existing architecture.
That's not our cosmology. That's the architecture protecting itself.
The real moral questions have always been simpler and harder than orientation. Are you faithful? Are you present? Are you building something with another person rather than consuming them? The tradition has always known this, underneath the framework. Love your neighbor. Don't use people. Be faithful to your commitments.
Jesus, when the Sadducees tried to trap him with a marriage question about the resurrection, essentially declined the premise. The kingdom doesn't map onto your relational status the way everyone assumed. That's not nothing.
Polygamy was the church trying to make a theology out of a very human kind of appetite — the hunger for novelty, for multiplication, dressed in the language of celestial principle. We were wrong about that. Society knew we were wrong before we did, and we eventually internalized the correction and called it revelation.
I think we're in the middle of the same arc. Society's moral intuitions — that stable, loving, faithful commitment between two people is good regardless of their gender, that queer attraction is an eternal feature of persons and not a malfunction — are probably just correct. The tradition has the tools to get there. The cosmology is actually flexible enough.
The institution isn't. Yet.
But we've been here before. The wonderful people caught in the middle of the timeline are the ones who pay dearly. That's the part I can't make peace with.
PS
There is one more thing worth naming before we close.
A man who loses a wife to death or divorce can be sealed to a subsequent wife in the temple. And the first sealing remains valid. He enters eternity with multiple wives sealed to him, the precise arrangement we spent the 20th century insisting we had left behind. The cosmology never actually changed. We just stopped performing it in mortality.
A woman in the same situation cannot be sealed to a subsequent husband while living. She must wait, and choose, and the choice is hers only in the most technical sense — because whatever she chooses, she will not have multiple husbands in the celestial kingdom. The symmetry was never offered.
So the architecture of plural marriage is not merely historical. It is still load-bearing. It just operates now at the level of eternity rather than the county courthouse. The man retains options across time and beyond death. The woman does not. This has never been acknowledged as the structural problem it obviously is.
We call this the fullness of the everlasting gospel.
And then, in the same breath, we explain to queer members why their love cannot be holy. Why their commitment cannot be sealed. Why the architecture has no room for them.
The architecture, it turns out, has plenty of room. It just reserves the extra space exclusively for men.
I don't know how to call that sacred and I've stopped trying. What I know is that fidelity, presence, and genuine love are either the point or they aren't. If they are, the architecture is going to need more than a policy update. It's going to need a reckoning with what it has always actually been.
