Marriage and American Citizenship: Polygamy and Same-Sex Marriage

In the United States, American citizenship and national identity are central components of debates about marriage.  "Marriage and American Citizenship:  Polygamy and Same-Sex Marriage" interrogates the critical crossings of queer and Mormon politics in the context of debates over the relationship between citizenship and sexuality.  It frames nineteenth-century debates over plural marriage and twenty-first-century debates over same-sex marriage as contests over the nature of the imagined community that constitutes America.  Queer theorists and historians have argued that American citizenship has depended on the exclusion of non-normative sexualities.  In nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century contexts, both sides of debates over plural and same-sex sexualities claimed that their vision of sexuality was central to American identity.  Nineteenth-century polygamists argued that American values protected their non-normative sexualities, while opponents of polygamy claimed that plural marriage and those who practiced it were un-American.

In 2008, members of the LDS (Mormon) church donated over 20 million dollars to the Proposition 8 campaign that, for the moment, enshrined normative sexuality in California law, marking the church's most recent and most manifest example of its reversal of its nineteenth-century position.  Contemporary Mormons count themselves among the opponents of same-sex sexualities, claiming that the definition of marriage "between man and woman" is an American tradition central to American identity.  Disavowing its own history of non-normative sexualities, the twenty-first-century Mormonism has counted itself among the opponents of same-sex marriage.  This paper argues that this disavowal has been central to Mormonism's desire to "mainstream" into American conservative Christianity; Mormons have betrayed the radical vision of sexual citizenship rooted in its nineteenth-century theology.  As Mormons struggle to be accepted into a conservative Christian consensus, the price they have paid is perhaps the greatest contradiction in the history of the church:  its opposition to non-normative marriage.