Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1882 — The Malarious Mormon. [ARTICLE]

The Malarious Mormon.

Our esteemed Mormon contemporary says: “It is often charged that the ‘ Mormons ’ are under bondage to their ecclesiastical leaders. The truth is that there is, if anything, too much laxity of discipline among us. The lines are very loose." This is true. We have heard little remarks going around through our best circles to the effect that in the Mormon church there was too much laxity and that the lines were loose. This is a state of affairs that is bound to exist in a society where a man has a different sized corset hanging on each of his bedEosts and a new style in each chair in is boudoir; and is proud of it. We hope we may be pardoned for speaking with some degree of freedom of the condition of affairs in Zion, because our mission on earth is to make men better. That is why we burn the midnight cigar and aim our wormwood-soaked pen at sin wherever it shows its unblushing face. And we are not making a rule which we are not willing to abide by. We have worried along now for several years with only one wife, and although we have added many household attractions to our palatial home we have never sighed for variegated collections of home ties. We never pined to make the marriage record of our family Bible look like a hotel register. 'One country, one flag and one wife, is the platform we stand on and it would be a pretty good motto for other people who are not in the cannibal business to adopt. Uncivilized nations, of course, are supposed to be more reckless and a little more extemporaneous and offhand in their marital relations, but here in the home of enlightenment, with the statutes in such case made and provided, we want to see the lines drawn somewhere. It has been urged that the Mormons took, the desert and made it blossom as the rose, and therefore they ought to get a corner on the home-tie business; but we disagree with this statement. The Mormons took the most fertile valley in tne universe and after a good many years got the watermelon, the grape, the mulbery and the camelhair kid to grow luxuriantly in the valley of the Jordan; but they nave planted i? that delightful vale, a large and vigorous smell which it will take $75,000,000 worth of legislation and perhaps hogsheads of choice gore to disinfect. There are thousands of stirring, active, intelligent American citizens of Yankee descent who are waiting till their families will hav6 a homo in Utah protected by the local laws and Caucasian social customs, and then they will iqake the modern Zion get up and hump itself with teeming industries that will make Utah think she has been slumbering for twenty years. In the language of that illustrious bard whose name has at this moment escaped our memory, we don’t believe a polygamous community ought to boss the government with so much impunit v.—Boomerang.