I agree with you that this post could be more appropriately titled. The Cobb-Young marriage being a distraction to addressing the more interesting issue of interracial marriage is probably the main point of this installment of a larger series on interracial marriage, so I can not fault you for agreeing with me . My views on the ban’s origin are covered in http://en.fairmormon.org/Blacks_and_the_priesthood/Origin_of_the_priesthood_ban , although that article needs more work. So I would advise not reading too much into what I have not covered here.

Why did you entitle this “Brigham Young on Interracial Marriage”. You write very little on this topic. A more appropriate title would be “Defending Brigham Young’s Polyandrous Marriage.”

JStone,

Are you saying that there is nothing racist about Brigham Young’s Views. Keller seems to have left out most of Brigham Young statements. One being:
“Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.”
He spoke on several actions talking about death to those involved in interracial coupling.
Brigham Young spoke to the Utah state legislature encouraging them to make interracial marriage illegal.
In fact church leaders continued to peach against interracial Marriage even till Elder Mark E. Peterson in 1980.

Keller,

It sounds like you used the Cobb-Young marriage to divert attention away from the facts that clearly illustrate that the policy against blacks holding the priesthood were based on bigotry not revelation.

The guy simply believed that any resulting children would be disadvantaged. Says a lot more about the US than it says about this man.

In today’s Mexico, where divorce is so difficult for many people, divorce just doesn’t occur as a matter of law but occurs all the time as a matter of fact.

In addition, local authorities were extremely hostile to empowering Mormon elders with any sort of clerical authority. Ohio wouldn’t license Mormon elders (meaning they couldn’t perform marriages) and I’ve always suspected that Church officials thereafter decided that divorce and marriage were private, religious matters that should not involve the state, due to the state’s hostility.

Indeed, until Justinian co-opted marriage into the state with his Justian Code, marriage and divorce were not civil matters.