Posted on 05/15/2005 10:05:49 AM PDT by Rummyfan
THE MARRYING KIND Owen Allred, 1914-2005
“I hate to be hated. I think everybody does. I want to be part, but I want to be myself and live the way I believe, the way the Lord told me to do.
“Now does that make me an evil person?”
Well, it depends who’s talking. A nice middle-aged gay in a committed relationship, with a weekend home in Connecticut where he serves as a popular long-time usher at the local “open and affirming” Congregational Church? Alas not. Owen Allred was a proponent of a far less fashionable minority marriage cause: he was the patriarch of the United Apostolic Brethren, Utah’s second-largest polygamous group, a church with an estimated 5,000-7,000 believers, many of them living a confetti throw from Mr Allred’s home in Bluffdale on the edge of Salt Lake City. 7,000 doesn’t sound like a lot, but there are more polygamists in Owen Allred’s municipality than gay Vermonters who’ve ever been to their Town Clerk for a “civil union” permit.
I say “home”, though The New York Times preferred “compound”. The precise point at which a “ranch”, “bungalow” or “18th century saltbox with many original features” becomes a “compound” is best left to realtors – “Extensively remodeled compound with drop-dead views of ATF agents at the tree line calling for back-up.” But the Times seems to use the term as universally accepted shorthand for “wacky cult”, and certainly Owen Allred attracted his share of lurid headlines over the decades. He came from a long line of Mormons – his great-grandfather walked with Brigham Young on the original trek to the Great Salt Lake – but Owen knew how to move with the times, the kind of stern fundamentalist patriach who, when his church needs financing to buy the recreational hangout of the old Vegas mob, is savvy enough to route the deal through Belize. Two years ago, a judge ruled that he’d laundered thousands of dollars and his church had swindled one and a half million out of Marsha Jones, a one-time South American movie star and Detroit hood’s moll who changed her name to “Virginia Hill” in honor of Bugsy Siegel’s squeeze. Poor old “Virginia” could handle the mobsters but got taken to the cleaners by the Mormons.
As presiding elder and the only “living prophet” of his church, Mr Allred was said to have learned the sacred Mormon rites directly from God. Others said he got ‘em from a fellow called Fred Collier, who had a genealogist pal with access to the archives of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Fred’s wife Bonnie pulled a Sandy Berger and smuggled microfilm of the holiest texts out in her bra and then passed them on to Allred. A third version by disenchanted polygamist and Nixon-era Secret Service Agent Rod Williams holds that he, Williams, stole the LDS holy ordinances for Allred. The living prophet conceded Williams brought them over to the house, but he told him to take them right back.
Owen came to the role of living prophet late in life, only being designated as such after the Brethren’s previous leader, his brother Rulon Allred, was murdered in 1977 when rival polygamists from the Church of the Lamb of the God went on a killing spree, after their leader Ervil LeBaron had been excommunicated by his brother, leader of another polygamous sect, the Church of the First Born. There are men who cope with the stresses and tensions of multiple marriages but apparently go bananas at the thought of multiple polygamous sects. Ervil had his teenage bride Rena pump seven bullets into Rulon at point-blank range mainly because his brother had gone into hiding and he thought this would flush him out and he could kill him at Rulon’s funeral. But 2,600 people turned up and LeBaron’s posse decided it would be impractical to launch the bloodbath.
Yet the mob moll/Belize bank/homicidal child-bride/sects’n’violence segments of Eyewitness News do an injustice to Mr Allred. For a presiding elder living in a compound, he was droll, urbane and politically shrewd: Mormon polygamist-wise, this was not your father’s patriarch. An open and engaging chap, he was especially open about all the engaging: he held press conferences and testified in legislatures on multiple marrying. He was very adroit at reminding his fellow Utahans that, regardless of how many practicing polygamists there are in the state, those part of a broader polygamous inheritance are far more numerous, and include Senator Orrin Hatch and Mike Leavitt (then Governor and now President Bush’s Health and Human Services Secretary), both men whose family history is little different from the Allreds’. Born in Idaho, the son of the Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, Owen Allred was excommunicated from the Church of Latter Day Saints in 1942, when he took his second walk down the aisle. By the end, he’d married eight wives, fathered 23 children, raised another 25 step-children, and had over 200 grandchildren.
In an age which deplores unreconstructed homophobes foolish enough to conflate gayness and pedophilia, we’re happy to assume that, if some hatchet-faced patriarch with nothing but a compound in one of the less chic zip codes can find eight women prepared to marry him they must be 14-year old cousins he keeps in the cupboard under the stairs most of the week. One of Owen’s nieces, Dorothy Allred Solomon, wrote an expose of her life within the church, under the title of Daughter Of The Saints: Growing Up In Polygamy or, if you prefer (as the publisher evidently did), Predators, Prey And Other Kinfolk: Growing Up In Polygamy. Mrs Solomon couldn’t quite live up to the latter billing. She was the middle child – 24th of 48 – of Rulon Allred, and the vicissitudes of her life seem to derive from the secrecy and isolation that necessarily attends such communities – the psychological damage of the polygamous closet.
But, if you’ve got 48 kids and only one is disaffected enough to go public, that’s a better strike rate than most celebrities manage, or, indeed, many two-child monogamous couples. At Allred’s funeral, six of his sons carried his coffin and as many daughters celebrated his memory with a rendition of “Oh, My Papa” and, given that most of them aren’t exactly spring chickens, I doubt that’s because he was keeping them chained out in the dog pound. There’s less verified child abuse among all the Utah churches than among priests who passed through Cardinal Law’s diocese in Boston. It was the state that permitted marriage at the age of 14, and Owen Allred who campaigned for the legislature to raise the age to 16. “For 50 years now,” he said, “the rule among our people has definitely been that girls should not even start courting until they are at least 17.” At 88, he told The New York Times, “People have the wrong idea that we’re old-time kooks who prey on young girls. I suppose I’m guilty of that. My youngest wife is 64. My oldest girl is 93.” They lived in four houses, lined up side by side, and all eight marriages were till death did them part.
He died on Valentine’s Day. And before you add “which must have saved him a fortune at the florist” or “he collapsed under the weight of the stack of heart-shaped chocolate boxes he was carrying”, Mark Woods, the Florida Times-Union’s sports columnist, did most of the polygamous Valentine gags three years ago, finding himself in Salt Lake City for the Olympics and in need of a Utah-themed romantic column. So he called up Owen Allred:
“He wouldn’t come to the phone. The man who answered said that Allred’s not doing any interviews these days. And that he was busy.
“I bet.
“Eight wives. Do you buy valentine gifts in bulk? (‘Yes, the same message, just change the name to Sally.’)”
Etc. For feminists, the practice of polygamy is inherently abusive. But to guys it’s mostly an easy laugh – the Old Testament elder who’s hit the swingers’ jackpot. Journalists kept his number handy when they needed a quote for a light item on a Utah brewery’s introduction of Polygamy Porter (slogan: “Why have just one?”). Mr Allred was not minded to order a crate for his next wedding toast: “We do not believe in alcoholic drinks of any kind,” he said.
Utah is said to operate a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on polygamy, the conventional wisdom being that the likes of Allred are left alone because of official sympathy. That may have been true once, but I doubt it’s the reason now. I was told recently that provincial officials in British Columbia have decided to let be their own polygamous community of Bountiful because of a general feeling that, if they hauled everyone before the judge, by the time it wound up at the Supreme Court of Canada all their lawyers would have to do is read out the judges’ recent ruling giving the go ahead for gay marriage. Whatever the merits of gay nuptials, it’s hard to see why, if gender is irrelevant, the central immutable feature of marriage should now be the number of participants.
The activists get all huffy about being compared to some stump-toothed backwoods wives-beater. And that might suffice if it were just a matter of Owen Allred and his ilk. But last summer Le Monde leaked a government report revealing that polygamy was routinely practiced in Muslim ghettoes in France. An informal survey of the Islamic communities of Ontario found much the same. In Britain, the Inland Revenue is considering recognizing polygamy for the purposes of inheritance law, so that a Muslim husband’s estate can be divided tax-free between several wives. And if it’s a Muslim who finally makes it to an American state Supreme Court with a polygamy case, bet on the traditional deference to “multiculturalism”.
Unlike the overtaxed Islamists of the United Kingdom, Owen Allred did not believe in legalizing polygamy. He fretted that if the law were changed it would be practiced more carelessly – as legal monogamous marriage is - and its holiness would be diminished. His detractors said he’d figured out that, like bootleg hooch, it’s more profitable outside the law. As things stood, Allred had sole authority to bless polygamous unions and you had to agree to tithe your income to him before he’d give you the nod. A ten-dollar permit from the municipal courthouse could have dramatic implications for the Brethren’s coffers.
“It takes twice as good a man to have two wives as it does to have one,” Allred liked to say. On another Valentine’s Day, February 14th 2001, he brought over a hundred polygamists to the state legislature for the biggest public hearing on the subject in Utah’s history. “The man who wants several women to be his sexual partners,” said Allred, “can have children by them, and the state will support those children. He remains free of any legal accusation - until he marries more than one wife. Marry them, and he becomes a criminal.”
Owen Allred was born in 1914, barely a generation after the LDS abandoned Joseph Smith’s injunction to go forth and multiply multiply. For the best part of a century Allred kept it going, ensuring polygamy’s survival into an era of hitherto unknown “rights to privacy” and modish “tolerance” and “multiculturalism”. Demographic reality suggests that the new face of plural marriage in North America will not be Owen Allred’s or his kind. Still, he might take some comfort in knowing that his sacred covenant and/or lifestyle choice is almost certain to endure and prosper in the years ahead. The Atlantic Monthly, May 2005
Ping - a - roo!!!
Logical conclusions.
Somehow I can't seem to convince my wife that I need a second wife. She seems to think two husbands would be OK, but that just doesn't appeal to me at all.
It has always been difficult for me to understand how the United States Government could outlaw polygamy in Utah, when the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. It is not as if they are practicing human sacrifice or any other religious rite that actually hurts another person without their consent.
Well, I live in a compound with my second ex wife and her husband. The kids (3) play in the yard between the houses. I take my son over to the front house in the AM before I go to work and they homeschool him. On weekends if they need to get out, I act as a babysitter. My daughter will spend the night on occasional weekends. It works for us.
As opposed to my first wife who divorced me to live with her girlfriend, then (falsely!) accused me of horrible things when she got jealous of my second wife.
It's just like Roe v Wade. Imposed by Federal Courts, right? Gay marriage is next, it's already happening needless to say.
bttt
Doesn't the New York Times and the MSM refer to the Kennedy's Hyannis Port home as a "the Kennedy compound?"
For the purposes of accuracy, the decision to ban the states from making an abortion illegal, in Roe v. Wade, was based on "viability" of a fetus.
A fetus is a non-human according to the Supreme Court in 1972 until it is "viable" outside of the womb, approximately after 6 months of preganancy.
Until that point, the fetus has been declared, in effect, human tissue or an organ, such as a kidney.
And just as all citizens have the "right to privacy" to determine what they do with their own kidney, a woman has the "right to privacy" to dispose of the "non human" as she wants.
The "people" can fix Roe V. Wade, by having the Congress declare a fetus, from conception, a human being.
Then the fetus has a "right to privacy," as well and cannot be murdered.
Such legislation has been introduced by Cong. Ron Paul.
Call your federal rep and make sure he/she supports and votes for this legislation.
They didn't. The US just refused to admit Utah to the Union as a state until Utah outlawed polygamy. I suppose Utahansof the day believed that the advantages of being a state outweighed the advantages of having more than one wife.
I have a problem with these guys having several wives and many children -- that I have to support. If they want to support them, fine. If I have to, they are no different from any other low-life welfare cheat.
They tried the same type of thing in Arizona, where the state Constitution called for the ability to recall judges. The federal government would not let Arizona become a state until this provision was taken out.
After the provision was taken out, and Arizona became a State, Arizonans promptly held a referendum at the next election and put it back into the State Constitution.
Whatever the merits of gay nuptials, it’s hard to see why, if gender is irrelevant, the central immutable feature of marriage should now be the number of participants.
BANG! Mark puts one in the black!
Can't come up with an argument there!
The Kennedy compound immediately comes to mind here. Next time the NYT mentions the "Kennedy compound," it will make more sense to me.
A "compound"?
Steyn, baby!!! What a fascinating and witty tale.
It is also interesting that there is apparently no instances of polygamy that work the opposite way - that is, women marrying multiple men.
I want multiple husbands.
three is a good number.
I want one who can fix stuff, one who can cook, and one who looks cute in tight jeans!
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