"We are supposed to write a paper defending a spoken-against position," said one of my sons during a phone call from college. "I chose polygamy. The professor challenged me. Can you help me? Many of those heroes we were taught to admire in the Bible had more wives than one -- sometimes many more. Where does the Bible say that they should stop the practice?"

Oops: where does it? The best anti-Mormons could come up with was a text in which Jesus links leaving parents and clinging to spouse in one flesh. On that frail basis, those who argued against polygamy in the nineteenth-century said that only "uncivilized" races had done what "the Japhetic race" shunned. In upholding laws against polygamy in Reynolds v. United States (1879), Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite wrote that "Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people."

Bible-believing Mormons in the nineteenth century followed biblical exemplars and mandates from their prophet Joseph Smith. They knew, everyone knows, that politics was the main factor that forced change so that their Utah could become a state. So today's Mormon "fundamentalists" today have religious precedent, tradition, and what they thought divine command on their side. The U.S. government said no-no. Utah law also says "no bigamy."

With a new, flamboyant trial just conducted and concluded in Utah, we are once again confronted with an issue pitting firmly held theological commitments against "earthly" law. Our sentiment is all on the side of punishing polygamists. Enough stories leak out revealing varieties of abuse and "robbing the cradle" to dampen any impulses to argue for allowing the fundamentalists a free ride. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself vehemently opposes polygamy now. Defendants in a Supreme Court case in 1946, Cleveland v. United States, argued that "plural marriage is one of the laws of heaven that has been restored." No more.

It is interesting to read the arguments against polygamy made between 1852 and 1890, and to be made aware of the cultural context. Judge John T. Noonan Jr., in The Believer and the Powers that Are, entitles a chapter "The Civilization that Christianity Has Produced: Marriage."

Much of all that, alas, sounds quaint in 2001. In the same week that we were disapproving of polygamy and its practitioners, Hugh Hefner and a harem of seven nubile maidens -- presumably noncelibate -- showed up in Vanity Fair and in other fair and vain places. They get the free ride that church and state both disapprove. There are few laws and not many taboos against cohabitation; the injunction is only against formal plural commitments. Had the Utah defendant gone the path of Mr. Hefner, he'd be a celebrity with plenty of unhampered imitators, unharassed by prosecutors in this "civilization that Christianity has produced."