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The Short Creek raid was an Arizona Department of Public Safety and Arizona National Guard action against Mormon fundamentalists that took place on the morning of July 26, 1953, at Short Creek, Arizona. The Short Creek raid was the "largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history". [1]
On July 26, 1953, Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle sent troops into the settlement to stop polygamy in what became known as the Short Creek raid. The two-year legal battle that followed became a public relations disaster that damaged Pyle's political career and set a hands-off tone toward the town in Arizona for the next 50 years.
Some states' statutes refer to polygamy while others use the bigamy term. Criminal sentences differ widely. Prosecutions for either violation are extremely rare. [citation needed] Polygamy is a practice difficult to define since it virtually never occurs in the context of legal licensing. Given that Mormon polygamists migrated to the Rocky ...
A former member of the church told one outlet it was the largest raid he'd seen since 1953 -- when every adult male in town was arrested for polygamy. Top polygamous leaders busted in Utah food ...
Polygamy is a crime and punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or both, according to the law of the individual state and the circumstances of the offense. [18] Polygamy was outlawed in federal territories by the Edmunds Act, and there are laws against the practice in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, [19] and Puerto Rico. [20]
As such [polygamy] “fetters the people in stationary despotism.” [6] Following this reasoning the Court considered that if polygamy was allowed, someone might eventually argue that human sacrifice or suttee is a necessary part of their religion, and "to permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the ...
Legal efforts to eradicate polygamy have persisted well into the 21st century. These efforts, such as the 1953 Short Creek Raid conducted by the state of Arizona, clandestine surveillance of suspected polygamists throughout the 1900s by Utah law enforcement, [3] and Brown v Buhman [4] in 2016 have proved to be unpopular and ineffective.
Before he undertook the Mormon practice of polygamy, Zebedee Coltrin's first marriage (1828) to Julia Ann Jennings (1812-1841) was a happy one, but as with the five children Julia ultimately bore him, she also died — at Kirtland, Ohio, at only 29 years of age. Zebedee's second wife, Mary Mott (1820-1886), gave birth to ten more children.