So, we have drawn down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to the lowest point in forty years. Now, we are looking for the emergency that we did it for. There seem to be a lot of emergencies these days, a virtual plurality of pesky problems.

We posed questions around the Fire Ring. It is a nice morning for discussion. The storm clouds of Hurricane Ian are finally gone, so aside from the minor inconvenience of cleaning up the impressive amount of trash left in the path, we are done with that one. The actual emergency in progress is the mid-term election which is now only five weeks in the future.

That normally wouldn’t qualify as an “emergency,” and more as a “civic obligation.” But things are a little different this time in terms of voting. The last President wanted to top up the SPR when oil cost $40 a barrel, but failed to get the measure through the House of Representatives. We are now down to 40% capacity on the Reserve, and the price now required on the re-fill is supposed to be around $100 a barrel. It doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense, but we take comfort in the fact that nothing does these days.

Like this one: that Russian Ballistic Missile Submarine (SSBN) Belgorod is out in the Kara Sea, making an unusual public deployment that could be routine training. Or it could be a platform for some sort of atomic demonstration of resolve about the Ukraine conflict. Should Mr. Putin order them to do something dramatic, that probably would cause a plural emergency. But we have already drained most of the Emergency reserve, so that could be yet another emergency. There was some question about which emergency made us sell all that oil from the Reserve to the Chinese, but we defer to Washington on that. They have more Experts.

This morning, we were startled by the proliferation of new emergencies. There now appears to be one about Polygamy. That is a practice in which marriage- or something like it- applies to groups of people. The combination of XX and XY chromosomes permitted in the total is not under discussion at the moment, just the idea. We had not been overly concerned about the matter and there were some blank looks around the circle. The last time we talked about Polygamy as a National Issue was a little before our time. That discussion, 150 years ago, was in the context of permitting the territory we now know as Utah to join the United States.

It was a Constitutional fight back then. The people who lived there were largely members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They were a new church, and had some religious practices that were a little controversial elsewhere. Some of us used to live out in Utah, up in one of the little towns that had changed from silver mining to skiing as the local business activity. We are thus familiar with the term “Deseret,” which the LDS settlers proposed as the name of their new Territory. Congress preferred the name “Utah.” In exchange for accepting that name came an unspoken agreement to allow the Church’s principle of polygamy to come out in the open.

Brigham Young was the dynamic leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the first Territorial Governor of Utah. He decided to announce the practice publicly at a General Conference of the church on August 29, 1852. That event brought a private religious matter into a public policy discussion. Polygamy flourished in the Territory. Statistics are rough, but between 20% and 40% of LDS members participated in early plural marriage.

Governor Young is reported to personally have had 55 wives. His deputy had 43. The majority of those who participated were not as profligate and organized themselves in families with a single husband and only two wives. The federal government was still opposed to the practice of polygamy for a variety of grounds. Congress refused to make Utah a state while polygamy was being practiced. There was a political wrinkle, of course. Admission as a state would have made all Utah offices subject to local election, rather than appointment from Washington. In terms of local versus national control, it is a relationship not dissimilar to the controversy over Roe vs. Wade.

Plural Marriage has a similarly long and convoluted history. It pre-dated the Civil War, and became a national issue again when that horrific conflict was settled. In 1870, the Republicans attempted to pass a bill that would limit polygamy. The “Cullom Bill” banning plural marriage passed the House and stipulated that participants in “Plural Marriage” would not be allowed to serve on a jury. Plural wives could be called to testify against their husbands. The bill never gained enough votes to reach the Senate, giving Latter-Day Saints hope that the plural lifestyle would survive.

Washington was opposed and Federally-appointed judges cracked down on plural marriage. Brigham Young and 53 ladies were accused of bigamy. It made it to the Supreme Court, where the case was dismissed under grounds that jury selection in the case was unlawful. In 1874, Young’s personal secretary (three wives) was offered up as a new test case on the matter. Proponents were certain that the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom would prevail. He was convicted in three trials that went to the Supreme Court, and was ultimately sentenced to two years in prison with a fine of five hundred dollars.

That result took years and led to additional issues. In 1887 the Edmunds-Tucker Act was passed in Congress outlawing plural marriage. It additionally removed female suffrage, permitted Federal seizure of LDS Church property, required wives to testify against their husbands, replaced local judges and required an anti-polygamy oath for voters, jurors, and public officials.

There could hardly have been a more restrictive measure imposed, though demographic changes meant polygamy was dying a natural death on its own. By 1890, there was an equal number of men and women in Utah, and the number of citizens did not support plural households. The LDS leadership issued a “manifesto” in 1890 that ended the practice of plural marriage in the Church.

After that declaration of surrender, Utah was admitted to the Union as a state in 1896. The matter of plural marriage was put to rest until yesterday. There was some discussion about it this morning under the clear blue skies that replaced the heavy gray clouds.

There were plural emergencies back then. The Women’s Suffrage movement is exciting history to read, and loosely parallels some of the events in the plural marriage struggle. The associated issues about rights and families continued slowly for another thirty years after plural marriage was settled. It was not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women the right to vote. The LDS part of the struggle regarding marriage doesn’t come up in modern Suffrage accounts. But it was part of a social struggle for equality- now termed “equity” that went on for nearly a century. But it has again this morning, 132 years after the LDS manifesto on plural marriage abandoned it.

The Writer’s Section is a little disoriented. We can see arguments for permitting adults to live how they wish to live, but this one is a little complex. We were just getting used to some of the other revisions for how our social order works. We likely will not live long enough to ask our grandchildren about how we did on this issue. Should any of us decide to have them, anyway.

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