Pioneer Day is today. Celebrating the first time a company of Saints entered the Salt Lake Valley to permanently settle there, it is the closest thing we Latter-day Saints have to our own church holy day (holiday.) But there is a lot to this story that we don’t tell on Pioneer Day, a lot of our history and precious truth that we leave on the cutting room floor. For example: The pioneers weren’t really pioneers. They were really refugees illegally immigrating into Mexico in order to escape the decades of pogroms, ethnic cleansings, exterminations, and genocide they had suffered in the United States. This article is an attempt to tell this story of our spiritual and literal ancestors so that we can apply to real lessons of our history to the world we live in today and make it a better place, a more Christ-like place, a Zion-place.
Tag: Mexican-American War
What Mormon Women Had To Say About Polygamy- Part 2
I pick up here right where I left off in Part 1 – in the middle of the Great Indignation Meeting. Threatened by new anti-Mormon legislation aimed at destroying polygamy and annihilating the church, the women of the church have come together in a mass meeting. In it they defend polygamy as one of the greatest revelations God had given, demand that the United States government honor and recognize their rights to believe and live how they choose, declare that polygamy and the doctrines of the church have helped them to have greater rights than any other place in the United States, proclaim their status as mutual helpmeets and workers with men, and denounce efforts to attack the church and end plural marriage as being inspired by Satan himself. When you listen to them it becomes clear that they were not oppressed or abused, rather these were powerful, intelligent, and empowered women who were acting to protect one of the most important factors in their independence, the Latter-day Saint practice of plural marriage. Their experiences, their voices, their truths counter anti-Mormon lies and show us why we shouldn’t be ashamed of our past practice of plural marriage. Instead of listening to the ignorant and liars, read the words of the women themselves who lived it. You might be surprised.