Sex pt. 1: anti-queerness, the nuclear family, and US eugenics history

"No Race Suicide in Utah" a postcard by C.R. Miller, 1907.

This is part of a three part series using mostly quotes to trace the string of history that ties together US anti-polygamy/anti-Mormonism & US/Mormon anti-queerness, anti-Blackness, anti-communism, & eugenics which all stand under the banner of Family Values.
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These “family values” are directly tied not only to eugenic history but also to settler history, as part of Teddy Roosevelt’s fear of “race suicide” was his belief that this land belongs to a white-protestant nation.
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His misogynistic anti-birth control, pro-large family, anti-immigrant, ableist stances is based on this belief.
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As I’ve written about elsewhere on this page, the US has consistently (and continues to) worked to sterilize Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, neurodivergent, & poor ppl with uteruses.
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In Mormon polygamy, like a page out of Puritanical ethics book, the richer a man was the more women he was able to marry thus the more children he was able to have.
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In the Homestead Act the nuclear family is a central part of it logic. This act created private property by stealing communally managed lands. The US system of private property requires nuclear family blood-descendants in order to keep this “free land” in the hands of individual white families—to keep this land a white-protestant nation.
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This fear is ongoing. Whether is is called “race suicide,” or “the great replacement,” or “white genocide,” it is part of the motivation behind anti-abortion laws, anti-queer laws, anti-CRT, mass-shooters, white-nationalism/Trumpism, Nazis/Neo-Nazis, and Fox News fodder.
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THE QUOTES:

• Mormons were not considered white or American bc of their polygamy practice which was consider “barbaric” by many settler-colonists. 
• In 1856, the Republican Party Platform was  “to prohibit … those twin relics of barbarism: POLYGAMY and SLAVERY” 
• After this church officially banned polygamy they worked to assimilate to US Americanism via the eugenics movement which” encompassed two main objectives.. The proliferation of the ‘white’ race [thru] Victorian gender roles & large family sizes, and…the sterilization of all people deemed ‘unfit’ because of their lifestyles & economic status. For members of the [Mormon Church]...eugenics became…a way to tie their community into national citizenry.” - Cassandra Clark
• 2 Nephi 5:21…wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. 23 And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. (1830)
• In 1851 the Mormon-controlled legislature of the Utah Territory passed Utah’s first law banning gay sex. 
• A year later, Utah passed a law prohibiting white ppl from having sex w/ black ppl. The day after it passed, church president Brigham Young explained that if someone mixes their seed with the seed of Cain, that both they and their children will have the Curse of Cain. 
• 1880 U.S. President Hayes said: “The sanctity of marriage and the family relation are the cornerstone of our American society and civilization.”
• In 1871, President Grant denounced polygamy saying, “In Utah there still remains a remnant of barbarism, repugnant to civilization, to decency, and to the laws of the United States.”
• In 1857, future President George Q. Cannon  wrote an article titled “The Improvement of Our Species,” defending polygamy as “what will produce a superior race of men and consequently a purer state of society” and asking the US to create laws to forbid “the unhealthy” from having children and punishing “illicit intercourse” with death. 
• 26 yrs later Darwin’s cousin, Sir Galton gave these ideas a name: eugenics. 
• In 1885, Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite, in a decision to deny Mormon polygamists the right to vote, wrote that “the family,” consists of “one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony.”
• And 130 years later at Gen Con Apostle Dallin H. Oaks lamented, “The US Supreme Court authorized same-sex marriage, overturning thousands of years of marriage being limited to a man and a woman.”
• In 1905  US Pres & eugenicist Teddy Roosevelt who regularly preached against “race suicide” and birth control told the National Congress of Mothers: “The primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmate, the housewife, and mother…On the whole, I think the duty of the woman the more important, the more difficult, and the more honorable of the two.”
• 11 yrs later Apostle George F. Richards wrote in an article titled, “Birth Control,” in Relief Society Magazine, “My wife has borne to me fifteen children. Anything short of this would have been less than her duty and privilege.”
  
  
  
  

Part 2 will cover mid 1900’s anti-communism in the US & Mormonism and how it ties in with the Lavender scare, spies on BYU’s campus, the BYU Honor Code & their Title XI exemptions, and the first time a general authority used the word “homosexual”