Law of Chastity

The Law of Chastity is presented as a rule governing sexual conduct in Mormon fundamentalist communities, where it reaches beyond prohibitions on premarital relationships to regulate intimacy within marriage. The account describes boys and girls as forbidden to date or flirt before marriage, while children are taught to regard their bodies as shameful and keep them covered. Most starkly, intercourse is officially forbidden even between spouses unless the woman is ovulating. The rule thus links sexual behavior to religious discipline and reproduction, while operating within a system in which religious authorities also influence whom people marry and whether they may remain with their families.

The Rule and Its Setting

The book describes a surrounding culture of strict gender roles: women are expected to serve their husbands, bear children, and raise them within the faith. Long clothing and sacred undergarments are prescribed for both sexes, and restrictions on dating and flirtation shape relationships before marriage. These measures frame chastity as a public discipline of dress and conduct as well as a private rule about marital sex.

That code exists alongside plural marriage, which is illegal in Utah and Arizona. In Colorado City, men typically legally marry only their first wife; additional wives are considered spiritually married but remain unmarried under state law. The distinction matters: the Law of Chastity is not simply another name for plural marriage. Rather, the book places both within a religious order that governs intimacy while confronting state law and organizing family relationships under priesthood authority.

Marriage and Religious Authority

The accounts of women’s marriages show the unequal setting in which the rule is applied. Debbie Palmer was fourteen when she felt impressed to marry a community leader. Her father passed the matter to Prophet LeRoy Johnson, who approved the match; a year later, Johnson married her to the fifty-seven-year-old man as his sixth wife. She became a stepmother to his children, most older than she was. Her experience illustrates how decisions about marriage could be made through religious authority when the young woman involved had little control over the arrangement.

After her first husband died, Debbie was ordered to marry another man, and later, when she fled to her father’s home, LeRoy Johnson commanded her to return. She came to understand that the earlier marriage had served the men’s purposes, rather than being an instruction from God. This history does not make the chastity rule itself the cause of each marriage or command. It does, however, show the hierarchy in which sexual and marital life was regulated: religious leaders could direct women’s marriages, while women’s wishes could be overridden.

Application and Blame

The rule’s application is particularly visible in accounts of pregnancy. After Debbie became pregnant soon after her wedding and miscarried, her husband told her the loss resulted from violating the Law of Chastity by having sex during pregnancy, and made her feel wicked. The account presents this as his accusation, not as an established explanation for the miscarriage. In this instance, a religious rule became a means of assigning personal blame for a pregnancy loss.

A later episode involving Debbie’s household shows the rule’s reach into the relations among sister wives. Michelle, one of her husband’s other wives, learned that he had had intercourse with Debbie while Debbie was pregnant. Michelle treated this as a serious violation, accused Debbie of tempting her husband, and threatened to report her to Winston Blackmore. She did report her, and Debbie got into trouble. The episode shows how the rule could become a source of conflict between women even when the man’s conduct was also at issue.

Meaning and Tension

The Law of Chastity is presented as a comprehensive standard for sexual conduct, but the experiences described in the book expose an imbalance between the rule’s demands and the distribution of power. Girls may be placed into marriages by older religious leaders, wives may be ordered to return to husbands against their wishes, and women may be blamed for pregnancy-related events or for a husband’s breach of the rule. These examples make chastity more than a private moral ideal: it is part of a broader system that regulates marriage and family life.

The result is a sharp tension between an emphatic language of sexual purity and accounts of women and girls with limited agency in their intimate lives. The book does not suggest that every abuse described is authorized by the Law of Chastity itself. Instead, it shows how a restrictive code can operate within a hierarchy that claims authority over marriage, and how its interpretation may fall unevenly on women.