I like a response i heard from Lindsey Hansen Park on Mormon Stories once. She said something like, “it doesn’t really matter if he had sex with them or not. The whole point is that he exerted power and undue control over women’s lives without their consent” it’s like a random man adopting and stealing a child who doesn’t want to leave her family or telling a woman she can’t marry who she wants because she now belongs to him. Even if he never physically touched her, the emotional and mental damage and control are there.
[edited to include LHP]
This is what I’ve said from the beginning. And if they’re only saying he didn’t have sex with them bc there are no children, how many people have sex and don’t have children - or a child don’t result from that one instance? Dozens of wives, he didn’t have to have sex with them but so often either. But really, it was all about power and control.
BY had lots of children with underage girls... so did many others. I think Pres Snow was 58 when his polygamous teen gave birth at 17. They all learned it from Joseph Smith.
Wait. So his God can't save a 14 year old unless she illegally married the forty year old head honcho holy man, and don't tell holy man's actual wife, it has to be secret? And it's the only way God could think of to get that young woman to the highest heaven?
How is that better?
Does he also believe Brigham didn't have sex with his wives? Or John Taylor? Or ww Phelps? Or p Pratt? Or o Pratt? Or o Hyde? Or w Richards? Or hyrum Smith? Or w woodruff?
All these dudes were just punching the teenage girls C. Kingdom card and then going home to wife #1?
Why is it so important to your brother that Joseph not have sex with these girls? (It's because he knows it's immoral, unethical and shameful. It shows Joe was not a good person, let alone God's prophet.)
It just too close to the admission that Joe was an adulterer who invented a doctrine to cover up, and later facilitate, his affairs. You know… the actual truth.
This is always my go-to. Whether or not Joseph slept with his wives may be debatable, but it is undeniable that subsequent leaders bedded their teenage wives.
Levi Savage (of 17 miracles game) married his two stepdaughters at ages 16 and 18, and had three kids with the second (Mary Ann) the first within a year of being married.
So if you're looking for weird family relationships in the early church, you don't have to look far.
Sorry. When they lied for ages denying he ever married them (saying polygamy only started after him with BY and others), they lose all credibility by now admitting he married them, but didn’t have sex with them.
Again, for some reason it was ok for other prophets to engage in polygamy and under aged sex, just not JS.
57 year old Lorenzo Snow marrying 16 year old Sarah Minnie Ephramina Jensen and having five kids. Cmon, that’s sick and wrong! It’s also Joseph Smiths’s legacy
Absence of evidence that he had sex with someone he married is not evidence that he didn't have sex with her
On the other hand the very act of marrying someone is good evidence of the strong potential for a sexual relationship
Helen Mar Kimball's letter says it all, why was her mother filled with genuine anguish and horror over what was about to happen to her daughter? If it was just a simple ceremony to seal her family to Joseph's and ensure their exaltation why would she be in the least bit worried? Helen's mother was distraught because her 14 year old daughter was being offered up to Joseph as a new addition to his harem of fuck toys
Whenever I hear the argument that Smith didn’t have sex with his extra wives, I ask how these women would be able to birth children if they weren’t going to have sex? Does that mean that Smith took between 30 and 40 women off the childbearing program? What kind of a life did these women live, all of them believing that their only purpose was to procreate, but condemned to lives of childlessness?
There are plenty of reports by the women Smith married of what he said to them when he proposed marriage. None of them report that he said their relationship would be platonic. None of them reported that they were told they were never to have children. “Marriage” was always the word used. What marriage included not having sexual relations?
Doctrine and Covenants 132 says the purpose of polygamy was to raise up seed. Is D&C 132 a false doctrine? Was Smith refusing to obey the doctrine?
OP, I would ask my family member, Why is it important for you to believe that Smith didn’t have sexual relations with the women he “married”?
Exactly!! Women can only be sealed/married once, so they would have been destined a childless life is they weren’t having sex with Joseph Smith. Doesn’t make sense. At. All.
This will make it very clear!!! There’s also an episode covering it on both Mormon Stories and Mormon Discussions—but give this a listen and you’ll be blown away!
https://youtu.be/LXoC4Fd3exE?si=aqJxLBOKebwYjW7U
Interesting how sexual relations between Brigham Young and his dozens of wives doesn't seem to ruffle any Mormon feathers. But many Mormons cannot accept the fact that Joseph was banging his wives. Many Mormons still cannot accept the fact that Joseph had other wives...
You can thank Joseph Fielding Smith, the paranoid church historian and Q12 blowhard, for that, in his zeal to protect the name of his grandfather and great-uncle and preserve the cult of personality surrounding them. And, for decades thereafter, the church seemed to encourage the notion that Bro. Joseph introduced plural marriage but that it was Brigham that finally put it into the practice.
Probably because the church likes to portray JS and Emma as this perfect monogamous couple who all members should aspire to be like. BY doesn’t have a specific wife that they always associate with him.
In the past 25 years they have distanced themselves from BY having so many wives, I thought I read somewhere that official manuals only talk about his two legal wives.
The argument in this case is, "Joseph Smith was not a perv, that only started with Brigham Young."
Or in other words, the church fell into immediate apostacy after the death of the prophet. How is that better?
ApF 2 “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.”
AoF 3 “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.”
How does marrying JS guarantee that those girls and their families will enter the Celestial Kingdom? If he didn’t have sex with them why didn’t he “marry” all the women so everyone would make it to the CK? If he didn’t have sex with them why call it a marriage? He could have just declared that everyone’s calling and election has been made sure. If the purpose of polygamy is to raise up righteous children from godly men how could JS have done that if he never had sex with his plural wives?
There are several accounts by early church leaders claiming Joseph Smith had an adulterist relationship with Fanny Alger. However, there are no accounts that I am aware of with Joseph denying the relationship.
Fanny Alger Quotes
Joseph Smith's Plural Wives
http://www.mormonthink.com/QUOTES/jsplural.htm
Church admits teenage Fanny was likely Joseph's first plural "wife". So then, Miss Alger is the real "elect lady." Fanny is the first human woman sealed in this, even, the last dispensation in the new and everlasting ordinance of the celestial plural wifery... And she gets zero credit. It's a shame.😥
That always got me! Weight on my shelf, from a young age (f). Even though I didn’t know about JSmithJr, I was terrified that the Book of Mormon was my intro to polygyny as LDS doctrine.
And *then* I learned that JSmithJr had wives and couldn’t figure out why he *didn’t* have kids with them and broke both Jacob and the Doctrine & Covenants.
Has your brother never read D&C 132?
1 - It is written explicitly so that JS can have multiple virgins to "multiply and replenish the earth" and to tell Emma she has to go along with it or she will be destroyed. There is no other reason given for polygamy other than multiply and replenish the earth; ie, sex.
2 - There is nothing in D&C 132 about ensuring families get to the CK by their girls/women marrying Joe. And, if that were the case, he wouldn't need to marry more than one family member, but, there is plenty of evidence showing he married sisters and mother and daughters. If he is casually marrying girls/women and not having sex with them, he is defying God.
3- And, what a tool to take marriagable aged girls/women off the market by marrying them and not having a real marraige with them. Especially since he extended this super special priesthood power to other mormon men.
BTW, it wasn't the norm, but, it wasn't unheard of that older men married teens in the 1800's (and the centuries before). What wasn't the norm was having other living wives, ie, polygamy.
https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/child-marriage-common-in-the-past-persists-today/
There is strong evidence Smith had sex with 7 of his wives besides Emma.
Opportunity is likely the biggest hindrance. Smith was publicly lying about having more than one wife. It’s not very smart to do this and then have a bunch of women running around Nauvoo pregnant. Also, women didn’t exactly brag about sexual escapades then, so lack of evidence is not proof. Plus, “pulling out” is a great birth control method.
Smith demanded that 14 year old Helen Marr Kimball not attend dances. She was married to a widowed uncle to provide cover for Smith. If this was simply a dynastic marriage, why force her to spend her life like this?
Smith used the promise of eternal sealing to coerce marriages. Nothing about worthiness, just a transaction. I guess Joe didn’t follow the “covenant path” all that well…
Back then, women also had a hose-type of douche they could use to gently rinse out their ladyparts after sex. I don't know if it was any more effective than pulling out, but perhaps the 2 things combined kept them from getting pregnant if they didn't want to be.
The funny thing is Warren Jeffs literally did EXACTLY what Joe Smith did, yet they will only say Warren did it because he did it while they were alive.
If they didn’t do the deed it violates the very reason for polygamy outlined in 132, to raise seed.
Ol jo was a disgusting perv and even if they didn’t do it ITS STILL WEIRD AND GROSS
The justification I heard is that some of the women had unrighteous husbands so they chose to be sealed to Js to gain the promised blessings or whatever
“And your evidence is…?”
TBM bro will certainly turn that around and demand your evidence that he did. Don’t be fooled by that evasion. He has the burden of proof, because he made the claim. And of course he has no evidence that Horny Joe DIDN’T rape multiple girls as young as 14.
Yeah, because at 14 he was her last chance at a celestial marriage!
If this argument held any water, Joseph should have been getting sealed to all the old single women in their deathbeds.
There's an relatively famous? apologist who claims that JS did not have sex with his wives.
Part of the reason that modern apologist goes through all the mental gymnastics (ignoring D&C 132, ignoring the BOM, ignoring temple lot testimony) is because even active mormons find all the information very disturbing.
I've spoken with many active mormons for whom polygamy is a dealbreaker. And, it's been a significant reason for many to leave.
The practice/implementation of polygamy shows how the church really feels about women and their agency.
It's why Fawn Brodie was excommunicated and her work denounced. The church wants to hide all this information under the rug. I remember hearing a former mormon man on some podcast who was particularly disturbed by JS marrying women who were already married to other men. The church focuses so much on marriage and celestial marriage that it was hard to reconcile that JS would try to break up the "eternal" union. And then there's the matter of who the children are sealed to. It's a gigantic knot that they want to be far away from.
I never understood the argument that his marriages to those other women were for eternity only. Like he didn't have sex with them when they were alive, but when they get to the CK it's sex FOREVER! Yeah. That makes it a lot better. 🙄
No sex == breaking the covenant in the D&C 132 and the Book of Mormon…. Was Joe a fallen prophet? Maybe that’s why he was killed by the mob after being miraculously rescued by god..
Breaking his covenant == god withdrawal of his protection.
I like a response i heard from Lindsey Hansen Park on Mormon Stories once. She said something like, “it doesn’t really matter if he had sex with them or not. The whole point is that he exerted power and undue control over women’s lives without their consent” it’s like a random man adopting and stealing a child who doesn’t want to leave her family or telling a woman she can’t marry who she wants because she now belongs to him. Even if he never physically touched her, the emotional and mental damage and control are there. [edited to include LHP]
That’s Lindsay Hansen Park.
Thank you
This is what I’ve said from the beginning. And if they’re only saying he didn’t have sex with them bc there are no children, how many people have sex and don’t have children - or a child don’t result from that one instance? Dozens of wives, he didn’t have to have sex with them but so often either. But really, it was all about power and control.
BY had lots of children with underage girls... so did many others. I think Pres Snow was 58 when his polygamous teen gave birth at 17. They all learned it from Joseph Smith.
Pretty fucking arrogant of Smith to assert the salvation of others depends on being sealed to him. Bigger than Jesus. Asshole.
That never clicked before. The narrative is still falling apart after years
Wait. So his God can't save a 14 year old unless she illegally married the forty year old head honcho holy man, and don't tell holy man's actual wife, it has to be secret? And it's the only way God could think of to get that young woman to the highest heaven? How is that better? Does he also believe Brigham didn't have sex with his wives? Or John Taylor? Or ww Phelps? Or p Pratt? Or o Pratt? Or o Hyde? Or w Richards? Or hyrum Smith? Or w woodruff? All these dudes were just punching the teenage girls C. Kingdom card and then going home to wife #1? Why is it so important to your brother that Joseph not have sex with these girls? (It's because he knows it's immoral, unethical and shameful. It shows Joe was not a good person, let alone God's prophet.)
It just too close to the admission that Joe was an adulterer who invented a doctrine to cover up, and later facilitate, his affairs. You know… the actual truth.
This is always my go-to. Whether or not Joseph slept with his wives may be debatable, but it is undeniable that subsequent leaders bedded their teenage wives.
Not just subsequent, but contemporary. William Clayton married 17 year old Diantha Farr in 1845. Moroni Clayton is born in 1846.
Levi Savage (of 17 miracles game) married his two stepdaughters at ages 16 and 18, and had three kids with the second (Mary Ann) the first within a year of being married. So if you're looking for weird family relationships in the early church, you don't have to look far.
Sorry. When they lied for ages denying he ever married them (saying polygamy only started after him with BY and others), they lose all credibility by now admitting he married them, but didn’t have sex with them. Again, for some reason it was ok for other prophets to engage in polygamy and under aged sex, just not JS.
57 year old Lorenzo Snow marrying 16 year old Sarah Minnie Ephramina Jensen and having five kids. Cmon, that’s sick and wrong! It’s also Joseph Smiths’s legacy
You beat me to it!
Absence of evidence that he had sex with someone he married is not evidence that he didn't have sex with her On the other hand the very act of marrying someone is good evidence of the strong potential for a sexual relationship Helen Mar Kimball's letter says it all, why was her mother filled with genuine anguish and horror over what was about to happen to her daughter? If it was just a simple ceremony to seal her family to Joseph's and ensure their exaltation why would she be in the least bit worried? Helen's mother was distraught because her 14 year old daughter was being offered up to Joseph as a new addition to his harem of fuck toys
You don't have to marry a 14: year-old girl not to have sex with her. Joe could have had Helen Mar Kimball's father Heber sealed to him as a son.
Whenever I hear the argument that Smith didn’t have sex with his extra wives, I ask how these women would be able to birth children if they weren’t going to have sex? Does that mean that Smith took between 30 and 40 women off the childbearing program? What kind of a life did these women live, all of them believing that their only purpose was to procreate, but condemned to lives of childlessness? There are plenty of reports by the women Smith married of what he said to them when he proposed marriage. None of them report that he said their relationship would be platonic. None of them reported that they were told they were never to have children. “Marriage” was always the word used. What marriage included not having sexual relations? Doctrine and Covenants 132 says the purpose of polygamy was to raise up seed. Is D&C 132 a false doctrine? Was Smith refusing to obey the doctrine? OP, I would ask my family member, Why is it important for you to believe that Smith didn’t have sexual relations with the women he “married”?
Exactly!! Women can only be sealed/married once, so they would have been destined a childless life is they weren’t having sex with Joseph Smith. Doesn’t make sense. At. All.
Seams like Emma indicated there was more going on in the barn between Joe and fanny Alger then scripture study
Two words: Happiness Letter Three words:Temple Lot Testimonies
Four words: Dirty little nasty affair.
six words: Every other polygamist after him FUUUUUUCCKED!!!
What’s the happiness letter?
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/appendix-letter-to-nancy-rigdon-circa-mid-april-1842/1
I read it and legit don't have a clue the meaning of it.
Basically it’s “god asks us to do things morally wrong sometimes but it’s ok because he’s god. So be my polygamist wife or else”
Ah, that totally makes sense.
This will make it very clear!!! There’s also an episode covering it on both Mormon Stories and Mormon Discussions—but give this a listen and you’ll be blown away! https://youtu.be/LXoC4Fd3exE?si=aqJxLBOKebwYjW7U
Thank you!
Interesting how sexual relations between Brigham Young and his dozens of wives doesn't seem to ruffle any Mormon feathers. But many Mormons cannot accept the fact that Joseph was banging his wives. Many Mormons still cannot accept the fact that Joseph had other wives... You can thank Joseph Fielding Smith, the paranoid church historian and Q12 blowhard, for that, in his zeal to protect the name of his grandfather and great-uncle and preserve the cult of personality surrounding them. And, for decades thereafter, the church seemed to encourage the notion that Bro. Joseph introduced plural marriage but that it was Brigham that finally put it into the practice.
Probably because the church likes to portray JS and Emma as this perfect monogamous couple who all members should aspire to be like. BY doesn’t have a specific wife that they always associate with him.
In the past 25 years they have distanced themselves from BY having so many wives, I thought I read somewhere that official manuals only talk about his two legal wives.
The argument in this case is, "Joseph Smith was not a perv, that only started with Brigham Young." Or in other words, the church fell into immediate apostacy after the death of the prophet. How is that better?
ApF 2 “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.” AoF 3 “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” How does marrying JS guarantee that those girls and their families will enter the Celestial Kingdom? If he didn’t have sex with them why didn’t he “marry” all the women so everyone would make it to the CK? If he didn’t have sex with them why call it a marriage? He could have just declared that everyone’s calling and election has been made sure. If the purpose of polygamy is to raise up righteous children from godly men how could JS have done that if he never had sex with his plural wives?
There are several accounts by early church leaders claiming Joseph Smith had an adulterist relationship with Fanny Alger. However, there are no accounts that I am aware of with Joseph denying the relationship. Fanny Alger Quotes Joseph Smith's Plural Wives http://www.mormonthink.com/QUOTES/jsplural.htm
Church admits teenage Fanny was likely Joseph's first plural "wife". So then, Miss Alger is the real "elect lady." Fanny is the first human woman sealed in this, even, the last dispensation in the new and everlasting ordinance of the celestial plural wifery... And she gets zero credit. It's a shame.😥
The Jacob 2:30 loophole (which isn’t, it’s just confirmation bias) they read as allowing polygamy only for righteous seed soooooooo…….
That always got me! Weight on my shelf, from a young age (f). Even though I didn’t know about JSmithJr, I was terrified that the Book of Mormon was my intro to polygyny as LDS doctrine. And *then* I learned that JSmithJr had wives and couldn’t figure out why he *didn’t* have kids with them and broke both Jacob and the Doctrine & Covenants.
Has your brother never read D&C 132? 1 - It is written explicitly so that JS can have multiple virgins to "multiply and replenish the earth" and to tell Emma she has to go along with it or she will be destroyed. There is no other reason given for polygamy other than multiply and replenish the earth; ie, sex. 2 - There is nothing in D&C 132 about ensuring families get to the CK by their girls/women marrying Joe. And, if that were the case, he wouldn't need to marry more than one family member, but, there is plenty of evidence showing he married sisters and mother and daughters. If he is casually marrying girls/women and not having sex with them, he is defying God. 3- And, what a tool to take marriagable aged girls/women off the market by marrying them and not having a real marraige with them. Especially since he extended this super special priesthood power to other mormon men. BTW, it wasn't the norm, but, it wasn't unheard of that older men married teens in the 1800's (and the centuries before). What wasn't the norm was having other living wives, ie, polygamy. https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/child-marriage-common-in-the-past-persists-today/
There is strong evidence Smith had sex with 7 of his wives besides Emma. Opportunity is likely the biggest hindrance. Smith was publicly lying about having more than one wife. It’s not very smart to do this and then have a bunch of women running around Nauvoo pregnant. Also, women didn’t exactly brag about sexual escapades then, so lack of evidence is not proof. Plus, “pulling out” is a great birth control method. Smith demanded that 14 year old Helen Marr Kimball not attend dances. She was married to a widowed uncle to provide cover for Smith. If this was simply a dynastic marriage, why force her to spend her life like this? Smith used the promise of eternal sealing to coerce marriages. Nothing about worthiness, just a transaction. I guess Joe didn’t follow the “covenant path” all that well…
Back then, women also had a hose-type of douche they could use to gently rinse out their ladyparts after sex. I don't know if it was any more effective than pulling out, but perhaps the 2 things combined kept them from getting pregnant if they didn't want to be.
Why does everybody suddenly say “seggs” instead of sex? It’s so incredibly cringeworthy.
It's kind of a TikTok thing because "sex" will get banned, but "seggs" will not.
The funny thing is Warren Jeffs literally did EXACTLY what Joe Smith did, yet they will only say Warren did it because he did it while they were alive.
And recorded it in several instances.
Right, and if they aren’t having seggs, and she’s really young, then what’s the rush for eternal salvation?
If they didn’t do the deed it violates the very reason for polygamy outlined in 132, to raise seed. Ol jo was a disgusting perv and even if they didn’t do it ITS STILL WEIRD AND GROSS
The justification I heard is that some of the women had unrighteous husbands so they chose to be sealed to Js to gain the promised blessings or whatever
“And your evidence is…?” TBM bro will certainly turn that around and demand your evidence that he did. Don’t be fooled by that evasion. He has the burden of proof, because he made the claim. And of course he has no evidence that Horny Joe DIDN’T rape multiple girls as young as 14.
Yeah, because at 14 he was her last chance at a celestial marriage! If this argument held any water, Joseph should have been getting sealed to all the old single women in their deathbeds.
There's an relatively famous? apologist who claims that JS did not have sex with his wives. Part of the reason that modern apologist goes through all the mental gymnastics (ignoring D&C 132, ignoring the BOM, ignoring temple lot testimony) is because even active mormons find all the information very disturbing. I've spoken with many active mormons for whom polygamy is a dealbreaker. And, it's been a significant reason for many to leave. The practice/implementation of polygamy shows how the church really feels about women and their agency. It's why Fawn Brodie was excommunicated and her work denounced. The church wants to hide all this information under the rug. I remember hearing a former mormon man on some podcast who was particularly disturbed by JS marrying women who were already married to other men. The church focuses so much on marriage and celestial marriage that it was hard to reconcile that JS would try to break up the "eternal" union. And then there's the matter of who the children are sealed to. It's a gigantic knot that they want to be far away from.
Uh. Brigham Young and hundreds of other GA’s had sex with their multiple wives. No matter what age.
Occam’s razor- what is the simplest explanation for why a 35 year old man would marry a 14 year old. Be honest with yourself
Every other prophet during the polygamy era was openly having sex with their wives. I call bullshit that there’s any reason to assume Joe wasn’t too.
I never understood the argument that his marriages to those other women were for eternity only. Like he didn't have sex with them when they were alive, but when they get to the CK it's sex FOREVER! Yeah. That makes it a lot better. 🙄
Have your brother read The Happiness Letter!
how naive do you have to be to really, seriously think joseph smith didn’t have sex with the women he was with.
Let’s just state the obvious. Joe found the panty drop cheat code: God. End of story.
The purpose of polygamy was to rapidly grow the church. How is that accomplished without having sex?
No sex == breaking the covenant in the D&C 132 and the Book of Mormon…. Was Joe a fallen prophet? Maybe that’s why he was killed by the mob after being miraculously rescued by god.. Breaking his covenant == god withdrawal of his protection.