YahooNews runs under the headline “Romney family tree has polygamy branch” an AP piece from Jennifer Dobner and Glen Johnson breaking the shocking news that Mitt Romney’s “great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.”
They don’t run this as slow-news-Saturday trivia. Oh, no:
Polygamy was not just a historical footnote, but a prominent element in the family tree of the former Massachusetts governor now seeking to become the first Mormon president.
Romney’s great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, married his fifth wife in 1897. That was more than six years after Mormon leaders banned polygamy and more than three decades after a federal law barred the practice.
Romney’s great-grandmother, Hannah Hood Hill, was the daughter of polygamists. She wrote vividly in her autobiography about how she “used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow” over her own husband’s multiple marriages.
Romney’s great-great grandfather, Parley Pratt, an apostle in the church, had 12 wives. In an 1852 sermon, Parley Pratt’s brother and fellow apostle, Orson Pratt, became the first church official to publicly proclaim and defend polygamy as a direct revelation from God.
Romney’s father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued “The Manifesto” banning polygamy.
“When you read the family’s history, you realize how important polygamy was to them,” said Todd Compton, a Mormon and independent historian who wrote a book about the polygamous life of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith. “They left America and started again as pioneers, after they had done it over and over again previously.”
Now, I’ve noted many times that Mormonism is viewed by many Evangelical Christians as a cult and that this could be a liability for Romney among the Republican nominating electorate. I’ve even gone so far as to say that Romney’s apparent literal belief in the teachings of the Book of Mormon is a legitimate concern for secular Republicans. But my reaction to the headline was identical to Ed Morrissey‘s: “What exactly does [this] have to do with Mitt Romney and the race for the presidency?” (Well, words to that effect, anyway.)
Morrissey’s headline is dead-on: “And Brigham Young’s Great-Great-Great-Grandson Won A Super Bowl.” Indeed, Romney probably deserves more credit for Steve Young’s football prowess than he does blame for who his great-great-grandpappy married. After all, he probably donated some money to BYU at some point whereas things that happened a century or so before he was born are largely out of his control.
