`One Man, Many Wives' Alive And Well -- Polygamist Mormon Sect Is Private Affair

COLORADO CITY, Ariz. - The family seated in the song-filled Meeting Hall ready to praise the Lord looked the picture of pink-cheeked, Sunday-morning wholesomeness.

The blond man in his late 20s, wearing a dark suit, leaned first one way, then the other, chatting with his bright-eyed daughters dressed in their frilly best.

To his right sat his wife, her blond hair in braids, wearing a simple, long-sleeve cotton dress. She rested her head lovingly on his shoulder and laughed about something the children had said. The man's other wife, seated to his left, also a blonde and also in braids, rubbed his neck and laughed.

All three held hands, like young people in love anywhere.

This is the family portrait of polygamy that leaders of the Colorado City-based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are reluctant to show to outsiders, despite their new desire for acceptance by the outside world.

PRIVATE WORLD

This all-male group of old-time Mormons knows that what is normal in its flock's private world - in a vast church filled with hundreds of men and women united in "plural marriage" - is illegal.

The leaders know that the notion of "one man, many wives" is difficult for outsiders to accept.

They know that "outlanders" might object to middle-aged men taking brides barely out of high school and that they might ask questions that would embarrass devout folk. Isn't the first wife jealous of the second? Who decides who sleeps with whom? Are people free to fall in love? Why can't women have several husbands?

Dan Barlow, the urbane mayor of Colorado City, has heard all these questions before. Almost every week, he said, a phone call comes from the media in unlikely places - Tokyo, Stockholm, Sweden - asking for intimate details.

Barlow said he and his people regard such questions as an invasion of privacy. That is why residents refuse to answer such queries, he said. Barlow, for example, will talk all day about the town, and even crack a genteel joke or two. But he will not tell how many wives he has, although rumor says he has five.

Secrecy has become a habit, not surprisingly, in a town raided repeatedly by police up until 1953 and still fearful that it could happen again. On the surface, Colorado City seems a normal, incorporated community, but in reality it is a private reserve - a place in which strangers may receive a friendly wave and then be tailed down the tree-lined streets.

But at the same time, the approximately 4,000 people of Colorado City and Hildale, Utah, the largest gathering of polygamists in the United States, sense that this may be the moment to challenge the laws against their way of life. There may be as many as 25,000 to 50,000 people in polygamous families in the Mountain West, Mormon Church officials say.

Colorado City's leaders - aware that anti-polygamy sentiment may be waning - agreed to talk to the Arizona Republic, but only under their restrictions.

They arranged a visit to the town's high school on youth activities day. A reporter attended church services, but a photographer was excluded. Officials talked about the power struggle that has prompted 20 percent of the flock to set up its own rival polygamist church on the edge of town.

But the only people offering insight into family life were dissident polygamists and researchers who have won the trust of this community of industrious people. Private homes were off-limits.

Many Colorado City residents have a fierce, emotional pride in their heritage and an unshakable faith in the righteousness of their beliefs. They recount how their ancestors were jailed, or fled to Canada or Mexico. Some families trace their roots back 140 years to the earliest Mormon polygamists and to a way of life they claim duplicates what God commanded of Mormon Church prophet Joseph Smith.

Last year, the question of whether an American court would be tolerant was a question haunting a Hildale family that wished to adopt six children. A Washington County, Utah, judge ruled that polygamists were ineligible to be adoptive because their lifestyle is illegal, but the four-year case concluded in August with the judge's ruling reversed by the Utah Supreme Court.

The family consists of Vaughn Fischer, 51, father to 12 children and husband to two wives, Sharane, 45, and Katrina, 26. Like most Colorado City/Hildale residents, Fischer is the son of a plural wife.

NO HOME INTERVIEW

Fischer is a big-hearted man with a quick, warm laugh. He consented to an interview, although community leaders insisted it be done at the artificial-log plant he manages, not at his home.

Fischer's residence, with its 15 bedrooms and restaurant-size dining area, is decorated with framed photo montages of family members, according to a favorable study on the household prepared by Utah's Department of Social Services.

His problem was that the non-polygamist relatives of the six children, four of whom are girls, filed suit to stop the adoption.

Tim Anderson of St. George, Utah, attorney for the relatives, said his clients were afraid that Fischer's goal was to marry the four girls.

They are the children of Fischer's third wife, Brenda, and a previous polygamist husband, who agreed to the adoption. Court documents show that before she died of cancer four years ago - only three months after being ritually "sealed for eternity" to Fischer - Brenda wrote in her will that she wanted her six children to remain with Fischer.

"Because I married her (Brenda) as a plural wife and because I want to take care of these six children, I get `You dirty son of a gun,' " said Fischer, choking up. "These children have been told that the only reason I married their mother was so I could have the girls married to me.

"That is so wrong. These are my children."

Anderson asked, however, "If you are a 15-year-old girl and you are adopted by your uncle and then at the age of 16, he invites you to be his third or fourth wife, what freedom of choice do you have?"

That question troubles many people familiar with this community where men are kings in this world and believe they will be gods in the next.

Anderson and other critics, including disgruntled polygamists in the community, maintain that although in some cases the wants of young women are considered, in most cases church leaders decide whom they marry.

Bishop Fred Jessop, the senior church official in Colorado City, bestows his blessing on men deemed worthy of plural marriage much the way Mormon Church founder Smith - who may have had as many as 48 women "sealed" to him - gave his permission.

The more children they have, Colorado City men believe, the more they will be exalted and treated like gods in the "celestial kingdom" in the next world. Husbands strive to "train" their wives and children to be God's faithful soldiers when the "millennium" - the Mormon day of reckoning - comes.

Plural wives are "given" to worthy men to bear babies, not to satisfy a man's sexual desire. Widows "added on" by being given to a new husband, sometimes find their daughters assigned to him as spouses, too. One man is married to eight sisters.

According to fundamentalist doctrine, the only purpose of sexual relations is to produce children.

Once a woman is pregnant, she is not to have sex until her child is weaned, about two years. Older men may have up to 20 wives and 60 children.

A plural wife said the women of the household work out the timetable of who should sleep with their spouse, based on the time when each wife is fertile.