Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer Read Online Free PDF Page A

God’s most chosen. It was not for everyone. The prophet Joseph Smith said that this one principle would condemn more men than it would save. But it worked for my great-great-great-great-grandfather, who had seven wives. His sons had many wives, too, and according to Grandma, the principle of celestial marriage had been a blessing to all in our family who practiced it.
    I felt like the luckiest little girl to be one of God’s elite and a spirit who was the most chosen of all his spirits before I came to earth. Proof of that was that I had been born into a faithful bloodline. I was FLDS royalty. The culture really believes in the value of bloodlines. Only a spirit who was strong and worthy would be selected to be born into one of the royal lines.
    Understand that we were taught to believe we were better than everyone else in the entire world because of our beliefs. Since I had been selected to come to such a royal bloodline, my grandmother told me that I had the chance to become a goddess if I lived polygamy and proved worthy. It was our own version of the Cinderella story. Just having the opportunity to live in a plural marriage was sold to me as a special blessing that few would ever have.
    Grandma explained that our family always held fast to the principle of celestial marriage, especially after the Mormon Church issued a manifesto against it in the 1890s. Fearing prosecution, her family fled to Mexico with other Mormons who were devoted to polygamy and determined to keep practicing it. When she was ten years old her family came back to the United States. The official policy of the Mormon Church became, and still is, that those who practice polygamy are not in harmony with God.
    But the adherents who believed polygamy was a requirement for their salvation began a fundamentalist movement in the early years of the twentieth century. The grassroots movement slowly gained strength, and it was several years before it became an actual organization, complete with a prophet.
    The first fundamentalist prophet claimed his authority through John Taylor, who was considered the third leader of the Mormon Church after Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. It was believed that while John Taylor was in hiding, he was given the keys to the priesthood. As the story goes, he was visited one night by Jesus Christ, who told him that the principle of celestial marriage was to be preserved at all costs. Since there would be opposition to this, the priesthood would have to go into hiding. Christ made it clear to Taylor that the keys to the priesthood were being taken away from the mainstream Mormon Church. Christ told John Taylor that after he died the keys to the priesthood would go to someone other than the next in line in the Mormon Church. They would go to a man who would honor the sacred covenant of celestial marriage and from then on, God would be working only with his most elite children.
    Even after the manifesto, the Mormon Church allowed members to live in plural marriage as long as a man did not have more than two wives. Anyone who tried to marry more than two ran the risk of excommunication. That changed in the early 1920s, when the Mormons tried to get rid of polygamy altogether and soon began excommunicating anyone who practiced plural marriage.
    Listening to my grandmother talk, I felt like I was being rocked in a cradle of specialness. Grandma made me feel unique, but not in the traditional way. She taught me that I had been blessed by God with an opportunity to come into a family where generations of women had sacrificed their feelings and given up the things of this world to preserve the work of God and prove worthy of the celestial kingdom of God.
    I was wide-eyed, thinking of all those women who were now in heaven, reaping the rewards of their earthly sacrifices. I was proud to be part of such an important tradition. As daughters of God, we were bound in a covenant before we came to earth. My grandmother explained that we had