I really think that the government has no business at all concerning marriages other than making sure only consenting people of a legal age can get married. Anyone should be free to marry whoever the hell they want to.

Before you post questions like this it would be advisable to do some research first. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the official name of the mormon church) Has not practicied polygomy for over 100 years now. It is an excommunicatable offense if any member is found to have more than one wife. There is a group who has broken away from the church back when the decision was first made to stop the practice of polygomy called fundementalist Mormons. They are a whole seperate groups and have no affiliation whatsoever with the official church. Just like the communities of Christ (formerly the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) has no affiliation with the official church since the mid 1800's because of a dispute over who the next Propphet should be after Joseph Smith was murdered. Now you asked for an opinion on how the government can make polygomy illegal to my knowledge it is and the members of the fundementalist Mormon group to my knowledge are openly prosecuted for violating the laws of the United States. Could there be alot stronger enforcement of the law sure there could. How can this happen? By getting honest Judges Prosecutors and cops who will stop taking kickbacks from the group to look the other way when it comes to that sort of thing

Anyway, I was looking more for a academic/ legal answer than a doctrinal/ sociological answer. I spoke with a mormon lawyer between the time I posted and your comment and he came up with what sounds close to true: they don't. They are more likely to be prosecuted for other things, like tax fraud, and for the same reason that I thought: lack of evidence. Afterall, it is hard to prove that someone has a second wife if only the first has papers. That's what I was asking: how do you prove someone has a second wife if he doesn't have a second wife, just a woman he calls his wife. No need to get tail feathers in an uproar.

It seems in the late 1800s that it was Cohabitation and evidence of producing children through multiple wives that were the focus on effectively enforcing the anti-polygamy laws. The government could start requiring validated birth certificates of children in suspected polygamist families and/or DNA testing. Sterilize/castrate polygamist men so they don't produce more children raised within polygamy culture. Court required ankle bracelets for polygamist men/women so they can be tracked and to verify they are obstaining from physical contact with wives. The FLDS praise their past in secretly breaking the court orders of no contact with husbands after the raids in the 1950s.

Let me ask you something, how can society condemn someone for having more than one wife when it does not condemn people for having more than one lover at a time? You want to legally prosecute people for having multiple "wives". However, in recent decades, the legal system has basically taken the stand that what happens between consenting adults in the privacy of their homes is not criminal. People can have sex with whomever and whenever they like as long as they don't do it right out in public and no charges will be filed. It is perfectly legal for couples to swap spouses for the night, invite stranger in for a ménage à trois and the various law enforcement agencies will do nothing about it. So, given this level of license in our society, is it not hypocritical to criminalize people who chose to formalize such a relationship and call it a marriage? In writing this, don't think that I am trying to defend what the Fundamentalist LDS are doing. I am not. I think that there is a lot wrong with that group and they have grossly distorted the original religion. I just find it highly hypocritical to want to call them criminals for daring to call their relationships marriages when society wouldn't even bat an eye if they simply called it "free love".