Which goes back to my point that I so dearly wish that Jane Manning had agreed to be sealed to Joseph and Emma as a daughter. Or even that (having agreed to be a daughter), Jane had been sealed to Joseph as a wife with Emma’s full approbation.

Thus I will always consider that Joseph should have married one more of the amazing women of Nauvoo.

I’m not sure I’d agree with the term “forced the change.” I think there were plenty of good reasons not to make those decisions. It was made basically out of a culture of racism. (Yes, I know, quibble, but I think that terminology is important and I have to admit your terminology made me quite uncomfortable.)

How do two misbehaving black Mormons acting just like many of their white fellow Mormons (and one black Mormon contracting a legal marriage with a white Mormon) “force” leaders to change from full spiritual inclusion to partial exclusion for an entire race? Whites were even more heavily involved in the sins of spiritual wifery, and even if they regarded interracial marriage as a sin, half of that sin was committed by a white Mormon woman. I agree that those events likely played an important role in what happened. But there was no “force.” God wasn’t commanding those changes suddenly, based on misbehavior by two members of an entire race. It was an excuse for bigotry.

Good question.

“Another one: Think about Wife who is sealed to Husband 1, has a couple of kids (born in the covenant), and then Husband 1 suddenly dies. Wife 1 remarries to Husband 2, but of course they can only marry “for time.” Wife and Husband 2 have kids of their own (not born in the covenant). Wife and Husband 2 live a long happy life together, maybe 15 or 20 times longer than Wife was married to Husband 1. Death comes to both. So what do we do now with “the same sociality which exists among us here” (D&C 130:2)? Wife must be with Husband 1 and his kids, while Husband 2 and his kids go off with some other woman? Does *that* really make sense? Does Husband 2 fall in love with the other woman? Does that matter? If it doesn’t matter, why does the Church make so much of the idea, rhetorically, of “not being able to imagine being separated from . . . for all eternity,” “heaven wouldn’t be heaven if,” etc.?”

Jake, you don’t understand the doctrine, which is similar (if not identical) to the Old Testament practice of levirate marriage (c.f., Tamar and Ruth, both ancestors of Christ). When Tamar was widowed, the next son was supposed to engender children with Tamar to continue the lineage of the first (now dead) husband. Tamar outsmarted the system when Judah and his sons stopped helping her by posing as a prostitute at the side of a road she knew Judah would be travelling. In the case of Ruth, Boaz outsmarted the system by announcing that the Bethlehem property associated with Ruth’s dead husband was now available to the next of kin. When the unnamed next of kin got all excited about his good fortune, Boaz mentioned that Mahlon’s widow came along with the land (speaking of package deals). The next of kin freaked out, and Boaz suggested that he would be willing to take responsibility for Mahlon’s widow and the associated land holdings.

The business of land holdings was a definition of marriage thing that got altered in the 1050s by the Pope’s impediment of affinity and the subsequent legal changes adopted to accommodate the Pope’s position, starting in countries like Scotland (courtesy of Saint Margaret).

When a woman is sealed, all her subsequent children are born in the covenant and sealed to that first husband. If she desires to rupture the relationship with the first husband, then her children with that husband are still born in the covenant and on paper remain sealed to the woman and her first husband. Any children she bears after rupturing the sealing with her first husband would not be born in the covenant unless she is sealed again. This is why the Church dislikes terminating sealings, even when the mortal parties are divorced or even excommunicated. Typically termination of sealings is done only when a woman is engaged to a temple-worthy man, though I have heard of cases where the Church will terminate a sealing out of compassion when a woman claims the thought of being sealed to her former husband causes intense psychological pain.

However before the Church proactively retrenched, I imagine it will strenuously engage in the debate on behalf of members of the wider religious community that wish to retain an ability to solemnize only those marriages which are between opposite-gendered individuals, the class of unions that are capable of producing natural offspring that are related to both parents. Unions between same-gendered individuals cannot produce natural offspring that are related to both parents. Subdividing the class of unions between opposite-gendered individuals into those unions that can produce children (e.g., fertile young people) and those that can’t produce children (couples where the woman is not fertile and/or the man is impotent) would be fraught with nasty, particularly in a world where an intensely impaired individual like Stephen Hawking engendered three children with his first wife.

McCary was the most egregious, having passed himself off as a Lamanite. He had likely learned of the rumors surrounding Mormon ritual and sexuality when living in St. Louis. In short order he had gotten himself set up as leader of a congregation (Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, I forget). There he would conduct sealing ceremonies, keeping women and men strictly segregated. The ceremony for women involved McCary copulating with the woman three times in quick succession in the presence of his white wife.

The second prominent black convert misbehaving was Joseph Ball. Joseph Ball had the misfortune of being mentored by William Smith, who would be widely known as completely evil if he hadn’t been Joseph Smith’s brother. The rules of William’s polygamy appeared to be “I can have sex with everyone I want, whether or not I am married to them.” Joseph Ball, under William Smith’s tutelage, “has taught [the girls of Lowell, Massachussetts] that it is not wrong to have intercourse with the men what they please & Elder Ball tries to sleep with them when he can.”

The third black convert who ran afoul of 1850-era sensibilities was Enoch Lewis. Boston had recently legalized inter-racial marriage, and Enoch Lewis took advantage of this fact to marry a Mormon woman who returned his affection. His new wife was white. They had asked a Baptist minister to perform the marriage. When the local presiding Mormon authority, a William Appleby, learned of the inter-racial marriage and the mulatto child that had been born to the couple, Appleby informed Brigham Young of this marriage between a “coloured brother” and his blushing white bride. Appleby’s correspondence was openly bigoted.

Seeing the options for black members closing down, Walker Lewis (Enoch’s father) tried to get Jane Manning to agree to be sealed to him. But Jane Manning was married to another man and declined to overturn her earthly marriage to collaborate with Walker Lewis in establishing the right of Black members to obtain the highest ordinances of Mormon ritual. Jane later petitioned to be sealed in the temple, but by then it was too late to overturn the decades of stupid, which had been based in part on the unquestionably evil acts of two Black men (McCary and Ball).

The spatial sacrality of the temple is constructed by limiting access, leading to the hurt feelings of younger siblings and nonmember parents. The church could avoid this by lessening the sacralized separateness of the temple, or by diminishing the notion that eternal marriage should have real consequences.

or they could just make an exception to the spatial sacrality like they do for sealings to unendowed children. the same 10 year old kid can enter the temple to be sealed to her parents on a Friday, but be barred from entry on Saturday when her older brother is getting married.

Jonathan, you’re setting up a false choice here based on the faulty premise that there are universal laws governing sacred space, when it reality “sacred space” is whatever current church leadership says it is. there are no constants in this realm, even just within the LDS tradition.

Try attending a temple open house some time, your feelings might change.

why would that make someone feel better about the LDS Church’s exclusionary temple wedding policy?

Brigham Young stated that Joseph Smith came to him in a vision as the Saints were crossing the plains. He told him, “be sure to tell the people to keep the Spirit of the Lord; and if they will, they will find themselves just as they were organized by our Father in Heaven before they came to this world. Our Father in Heaven organized the human family, but they are all disorganized in great confusion.” Brigham Young Collection, Feb. 17,1847.

Pres. Ezra Taft Benson, referring to the above as it pertains to the spirit world, said” Righteous spirits are close by us. They are organized according to priesthood order in family organizations as we are here; only there they exist in a more perfect order. This was revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith”. Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson,35-36.

Pres. Jedediah M. Grant marveled at how well families were organized in a vision he saw of the hereafter.
“I could see every man and woman in their grade and order. I looked to see whether there was any disorder there, but there was none….The people I saw there were organized in family capacities; and when I looked at them, I saw grade after grade, and all were organized in perfect harmony”.Heber C. Kimball,
Journal of Discourses, 4:135-36.

Bruce R. McConkie, referring to the Millennium wrote, “In that day family units will be perfected according to the plans made in the heavens before the peopling of the earth.” The Millennial Messiah, page 655.

My patriarchal blessing says that “I accepted the assignment “of being born into a nonmember family understanding that I could be of help to them in finding the restored Gospel. I wonder whether some “assignments” are for this life only?

Much food for thought but with comfort that it is already “set”, so we needn’t stress over it.

…a doctrine of eternal marriage all but required polygamy as a post-life possibility in order not to render the idea of eternal marriage nonsensical.

Why? God can’t create more women/men so that everyone can be paired with someone favorable? That said, the LDS polygamy doctrine created more nonsensical pieces than it fixed, if you ask me.

Mormon ways of seeking solace at the death of others are naturally based on Mormon teachings about the afterlife and the possibility of eternal connection…

And, really, it’s an odd thing. We feel better because we talk about being together eternally, but what that looks like is a big blank to all of us and it’s particularly unromantic for all those extra wives.