Posted by:
randyj
(
)
Date: February 08, 2014 12:01AM
...but there's a ton of contemporary documentation for it, including the personal journals and/or legal testimonies of many women who were plural married to Joseph Smith and/or had sex with him, or spurned his advances. Several of those women were the leading ladies of the church late into the 19th century, so it doesn't make sense that they would lie about it. This TBM needs to study the stories of women such as Mary Rollins Lightner, Sarah Ann Whitney, Zina Huntington Jacobs, and Helen Mar Kimball.
Then there are other records such as the journal of William Clayton, Joseph Smith's personal secretary, and the testimony of church leaders who opposed polygamy such as John C. Bennett, William Law, Austin Cowles, etc. And of course, the Mormon apologetic website FAIR carries article which admit to Smith's polyandrous relationships.
The TBM you quoted needs to understand that there are no public records of plural marriages or childbirths because polygamy was illegal and thus practiced in secret. Church leaders denied that they even practiced polygamy until 1852---eight years after Smith's death. So you're not gonna find any tombstones inscribed "Here lies Jane Doe, plural wife of Joseph Smith." If he seriously wants to know the facts, he can start here:
http://signaturebooks.com/2010/11/excerpt-in-sacred-loneliness/