1900-02-26-New York Tribune-Says Polygamy Prevails

Says Polygamy Prevails

New York Tribune, 26 February 1900, p. 8, c. 4

Says Polygamy Prevails

Dr. Sarah J. Elliott Declares that the Marriages are not Recorded.

Sarah J. Elliott, who was a physician in one of the counties of Utah for a number of years and who made a careful study of the question of Mor monism, spoke last evening in St. Ann's Church on the Heights. Dr. Elliott began by saying that the Bible was not taught in the Mormon Sunday school where she lived, as the Bishop, who is the half priestly, half civil head of a community, thought that it was too bad a book to place in the hands of the young. She declared that the theology which was taught the Mormon children was that the boys would be gods and the girls would make the boys gods.

The speaker asserted that since Utah had been admitted to statehood two thousand children had been born in polygamy. Polygamous marriages are never recorded, she said, and Mr. Roberts was right when he declared to Congress that there could be found no records of such marriages. Dr. Elliott said that obscene rites are performed in the Tabernacle at Salt Lake City when a bride was prepared for marriage. She said that the bride was baptized and anointed and then passed through various ceremonies that were nothing more than orgies and the revival of Indian mys teries. In one of the rites a dialogue between Adam and Eve was the feature.

"I consider," continued Dr. Elliott, "that these Mormon women are degenerate and abnormal, not necessarily, I want you to understand, disreputable. For I never knew a Mormon woman to be untrue to her husband, even after the Edmunds-Tucker law of 1884, which prohibited polygamy in Utah and made some women husbandless.

Dr. Elliott declared that Mrs. Roberts had said to her: "The Mormon religion is a higher religion than yours. You marry a man because you love him. We marry a man because we want to raise children and save souls and make gods of them." It was explained that one of the tenets of Mor monlsm was that there are numbers of disembodied spirits in the air which are saved only by entering into the bodies of newborn children.

Dr. Elliott contended that polygamy was preva lent and cited as an example that the Bishop where she lived, had had three children born to him on the same day among his wives.

Miss Gould, Dr. Elliott said, had furnished con siderable money for the movement to stop polygamy.