My favorite piece of ironic news in the past few days:
Brigham Young professor let go for gay marriage stance
The title pretty much says it all, but a little more:
Brigham Young University’s first president was Orson Pratt (Young’s archenemy within the church incidentally, but among the most educated men in early Mormonism), the impoverished husband of ten wives and father of forty-five. , named for the 2nd president of the Mormon Church of course (and one of my biographical fixations). How many wives Young had is a matter of debate and complicated terms, but it’s known that he had 57 children with 16 of them, and he had sexual relations with a few that he did not father children with, so two-dozen consummated marriages seems a reasonable estimate. In addition to these he married anywhere between dozens and hundreds of spiritual (eternity only) and temporal (time only) marriages, some of which were performed after the death of the bride (one was for closure on his unrequited attraction for the actress Julia Deane= after her death he wed her “for eternity” using as proxy his wife Amelia Folsom Young [called “Queen Amelia” by other wives who loathed her due to her henpecking and role as favorite]) and many women who had themselves “sealed” to him after his death using as proxy a member of his family. Young’s messy divorce from one of his last wives, Ann Eliza Webb, was one of the great tabloid fodders of the 1870s. Young proudly defended his “lifestyle” even though he was jailed for it twice.
And this fellow is fired because he challenges the notion that marriages alternative to the norm of one-man/one-woman should be constitutionally forbidden and the regents of the university named for the nation’s most famous polygamist fired him. Especially ironic considering that the polygamist namesake in his sermons mocked and scorned the hypocrisy of Congressmen who were whoremongers or kept mistresses and yet felt they had the right to say what was and wasn’t a marriage and who basically said the state shouldn’t have any business in marriage whatsoever and also remarked it odd that the legislators of a nation with a war going on (the Civil War) and later with a major recession and Indian problems and Reconstruction and mass immigration leading to social problems couldn’t find something more important to talk about in Congress than the private lives of a tiny minority of consenting adults.
Religion and politics- gotta love 'em.
Well, no I guess you don’t, but they can be interesting.