The presidential candidates' many great-grandmothers are the talk of the compound. “Why did [Romney] have to be so strong against it?”
Image by John Gara/Buzzfeed
ROCKY RIDGE, Utah — About 60 miles south of Salt Lake City, at the end of a long, winding, dirt road off the highway, a small cluster of houses sits at the foot of a desert mountain. The neighborhood landscape is littered with children's things — plastic playground equipment, abandoned toys — and the backyards are covered in clotheslines, with denim shorts and Sunday dresses of all sizes hanging off them like ornaments.
But the houses themselves command the most attention. They look as if someone took a bunch of starter homes and glued them together with communal kitchens and shared garages. The structures’ aesthetics vary, from utilitarian ranches with unpainted decks to well-kept A-frames with manicured lawns. And virtually every structure is in a state of renovation, expanding and shape-shifting to make room for more beds, more groceries, more children — and more wives.
This is Rocky Ridge, Utah, one of the fastest-growing polygamist communes in the country, and an unlikely symbol of a genealogical subplot that links America's two main presidential candidates. While neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama is keen to talk about it publicly, the family trees of both are rooted in polygamy, a practice that, for each candidate, has defined generations of family history.
It's a connection that's been largely ignored by the campaign chroniclers this year, without any objection from the candidates, both of whom have had to grapple with far less exotic biographical eccentricities. But while reporters may relegate the men’s polygamist roots to a footnote in the broad story of the election, the candidates' common background is being celebrated across the diverse spectrum of American polygamy.
From reality TV stars to reclusive religious zealots, polygamists throughout the country are watching this presidential election with a mix of pride and frustration — acutely aware that that Romney and Obama come from "polygamist stock," and yet resigned to the fact that neither candidate is likely to defend their lifestyle. Meanwhile, a growing number of polygamists are going public with their stories, pop culture continues to obsess over the taboos of plural marriage, and the family from TLC's Sister Wives is waging a high-profile legal battle to decriminalize polygamy in Utah.
More than ever before in U.S. history, polygamists view this year as an opportunity to convince the American public that they have something to offer the world — and they're pointing to the presidential election as Exhibit A.
Call it the polygamist moment.
Rocky Ridge, Utah
Image by McKay Coppins/Buzzfeed
Anne Wilde still clearly remembers the moment she watched Mitt Romney throw his heritage under the bus.
A practicing polygamist and leading advocate for "plural marriage" rights, Wilde had watched Romney's political rise over the years with an unusual sense of personal investment. She knew his agenda wouldn’t include the polygamist equality that she’d spent years fighting for as co-founder of the advocacy group Principle Voices. She knew he was just a politician trying to win an election. And she suspected that, like most mainstream Mormons these days, he probably had complicated feelings about plural marriage, a practice the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abandoned more than a century ago.
But she also knew this was a man who came from a long family line of proud polygamists — ancestors who embodied the best qualities of the lifestyle she loved. And, in 2007, as Romney ascended to the top tier of the Republican presidential primary, Wilde found herself eagerly cheering him on.
Then, in May, Romney gave an interview to Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, where the subject of polygamy came up.
"There is part of the history of the church's past that as I understand is troubling to people," the candidate said. "Look, the polygamy, which was outlawed in our church in the 1800s, that's troubling to me. I have a great-great grandfather. They were trying to build a generation out there in the desert. And so he took additional wives as he was told to do. And I must admit, I can't imagine anything more awful than polygamy."
Wilde was crushed. A Brigham Young University graduate who grew up in the Mormon Church, she had left the faith of her childhood and turned to polygamy after her monogamous marriage fell apart. She says she spent the next 33 years as a happy second wife to her husband until he passed away in 2003. Now, she had just heard a presidential candidate dismiss the life she had chosen as “awful.”
