You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Mormon

Every time I hear someone use the term "natural", I think if the Wigstock documentary and the drag queen Tabboo:













She sings this song where she brays the refrain "It's Natural!" over and over in an obnoxious Bronx accent.

I don't think the City Council of Kanab, Utah exactly had this in mind when the passed a recent resolution supporting the "natural family". They probably meant something more, well,













Here's what the Salt Lake Tribune had to say:

After unanimously endorsing a conservative think tank's resolution supporting the "natural family," Kanab's City Council is coming under fire - naturally.
Gay-rights advocates and even some residents are scolding city leaders for embracing a nonbinding proposal that:
* Labels marriage between a man and a woman as "ordained of God."
* Sees homes as "open to a full quiver of children."
* Envisions young women "growing into wives, homemakers and mothers and . . . young men growing into husbands, home builders and fathers."

Open to a full quiver of children. Insert Neverland Ranch joke here.

Of course, a story like this is never complete without the requisite ironic twist. The headline in the same newspaper today?

AG is pressed on polygamy

It seems that there is an entire population of "lost boys" in Utah, young men who are kicked out of polygamist communties on some minor pretext so as to eliminate the competition for pretty young brides. They often end up homeless, abandoned, cut off from the only families they know.

Polygamy is widely practiced in the Kanab area, so maybe the Kanab City Coucil had something more like this in mind when they decided to support the "natural family":














Yeah, that looks like a full quiver all right.

I'll say it again: Because they once widely practiced polygamy, Mormons were chased out of three states, persecuted, prosecuted, and invaded by the U.S. Army; they routinely saw their leaders jailed, and on one occasion, murdered by a mob. Mormons were, after all, the original "corrupters of marriage" in America, greeted with as much hysteria then as gay marriage is now. Because religious conservatives at the time managed to get reactionary legislators to outlaw polygamist marriage, it continues only as a twisted underground faith, hidden from view and prone to abuse. You would think that such a horrid history might breed a lesson of tolerance into the bone, tolerance earned at the price of suffering. But no.

Historical obliviousness is a bitch.