http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/26/joseph-smith-wives_n_6180184.html

Yes, some were coerced. Yes they had sex. Yes he had children by them. Yes Emma was often blindsided. Yes most of the women and girls had lived in their house when he "proposed."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/2014 07:39PM by Devoted Exmo.

SHAME to the man!

Now if only they would add in Joe's denials and how he had the Nauvoo Expositor destroyed for saying exactly what the church admits to now.

This article was a good start, still a lot of the details missing but enough to make most normal people think the church is a total fraud.

I clearly remember when Todd Compton was called before a disciplinary court and Kathy Worthington organized a protest in front of Temple Square to call attention to it. People from this board, back in the day, attended. She got the media there and he was not excommunicated. It was kind of like John Dehlin, where they wouldn't really say what his status was but it was clear that they'd had orders from on high to hold the court.

Now the church is referring the media to Compton, as quoted in this article. It's pissing me off that they are acting like none of these things have ever been issues and no one was ever threatened with church discipline for discussing the very things they are now owning up to. We all know they were. But they're telling the media that these things have been known and available to anyone wanting to do research. They just leave out the part that they put the fear of God into people who actually DID do research and had the balls to talk about it.

I remember that.
It wasn't very long ago either.
Thankfully people like you are here to inform newcomers.

The Mormon organization is corrupt and evil beyond anything I could ever imagine.
How could they make that kind of claim is beyond me.
No conscience.
No morals.

That was what stood out to me, his book I thought was considered anti material but now the PR department is sending journalists to him. Such bull.

I think that was Tom Murphy, not Todd Compton.

The one I'm referring to was definitely Compton. I went out and bought the book because of that.

...but I remember that FARMS wrote a "hit piece" on him, which attacked his credibility and challenged his research and conclusions. I'm unable to find that FARMS article on-line---maybe they've removed it---but I remember it well, because I had recently acquired my copy of ISL and had read it and cited it in debating with TBMs. I thought it was hypocritical and amusing for FARMS to attack Compton seeing as how Compton was already a contributing author to FARMS publications.

Here's a bit of Compton's remarks about how church leaders treated him:

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2006/01/an-interview-with-todd-compton/

"When I wrote the book, I had a hard time judging what the reception would be. Would it get published? Would people read it? Would I be excommunicated (a very real possibility at the time, as it was the era of the September 6)? Of course, I hoped for the best. It got published, and I’m pleased that people are reading it, more than the average scholarly Mormon history book, I think (but much less than, say, Mormon Enigma, or Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling). I was not excommunicated, though my stake presidency did call me in for formal discussions in which they expressed disapproval for the book. (I tried to explain to them how I believe honest history helps the church, in the short and long run, but my powers of explanation were pretty weak in that situation, I’m afraid.)..... There were two long reviews of my book in the FARMS review of books; I didn’t think any of the three authors understood or enjoyed my book as biography. They also referred to me or my work as naturalistic, i.e., rejecting God and the supernatural, which is wrong."

And now here we are, 17 years later: FARMS no longer exists; Daniel Peterson has been dumped from the Maxwell Institute; the reason given for Peterson's exit is that church leaders want to move away from the disingenuous tactics of attacking and trying to discredit all researchers who tell the truth about Mormon history; and now Compton's is cited by the church as a credible source on Joseph Smith's polygamy.

Y'all know what this means, don't ya? It means WE HAVE WON!!!

Do you have a reference, randyj, for where TSCC or YBU gave its reasons for firing Peterson?

I've been arguing with a Morgbot and he claims that Peterson WASN'T fired on orders from the Big 15. I'd love a source that I could use to shut him up.

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/54358137-78/mormon-institute-studies-peterson.html.csp

"I have had enough conversations with general authorities to know," Dehlin said this week, "that they don't view ad hominem attacks as a constructive way to do apologetics."

Peterson was dumped by the Maxwell Institute's director, Gerald Bradford, but a lot of scuttlebutt going around indicates that church leaders wanted Peterson forced out. Church leaders realize that they've lost the internet wars against us evil anti-Mormons. (The new essays are Exhibit A to prove that point.) So they've chosen to distance the church from the apologists' sophomoric tactics of publishing "hit pieces" against all scholars who tell the truth. That means that apologists like Peterson and his ilk are dinosaurs who are headed towards extinction.

Well, okay. I guess that'll have to do.

I was hoping for something more concrete than rumors and "scuttlebutt."

...a driving force in the Maxwell Institute, you can bet your bottom dollar that he'd still be there. Gerald Bradford may have been the one to break the news to Peterson, but it's highly unlikely that Bradford would have dumped such a long-time, high-profile apologists without having it cleared from above. If you want to see documentation that GAs personally ordered Peterson's dumping, you ain't gonna see that. The GAs want to maintain an image of being the "good cop," while letting underlings play "bad cop" and take care of dirty work. The same way GAs let stake presidents and bishops excommunicate high-profile dissidents, so the GAs can still appear that their hands are clean.

As the article states:

"The tipping point against that approach may have been a 100-page article about John Dehlin, a church member in Logan who launched Mormon Stories, which welcomes those who question aspects of LDS history, practice and theology. Dehlin's group has published articles about reasons Mormons leave the fold and research on gay members, among other topics.

"After hearing about the piece, Dehlin called an LDS general authority who was a personal friend. Eventually, Maxwell Institute Director Gerald Bradford pulled the article from the journal, leaving a giant hole and putting it behind in its publishing schedule."

"The time has come for us to take the Review in a different direction," Bradford wrote in a June 17 email to Peterson, who was out of the country. "What we need to do to properly affect this change in the Review is to ask someone else, someone working in the mainstream of Mormon studies, who has a comparable vision to my own for what it can accomplish, to edit the publication."

Here's Peterson's initial response to his dismissal:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2012/06/of-gratitude-and-its-expression.html

Excellent post.

Kathy Worthington is an exmo pioneer activist. She was a gay postal worker who put up a website to tell people how to resign from the Mormon church.

Like how they make it hard to find the essays, the church used to make it very difficult to resign. It took me 25 years to get my name off the rolls. You used to be threatened with excommunication if you tried to resign.

She is someone who needs to be remembered. Didn't her daughter used to post here as lucyfer?


Kathleen Waters

Amen anagrammy. We can't forget Kathy. She was such a mover and shaker in the early ex-mormon community, along with gay rights. When I waited months for my resignation letter to be acknowledged, she gave me a name of a guy to call at member records (wasn't Mr. Dodge). She told me to tell him that she gave him my name. Amazingly, he "checked" and my letter was right on the top of the stack to be sent out that day. (Yeah, right). But I did get it the following day. They didn't mess with her, she knew how to get things in the media. She was the one who initiated our highway clean up and she always showed up to clean, then we'd go out to breakfast. Getting an adopt-a-highway sign on the freeway in SLC that said The Exmormon Foundation on it was one of the ways people heard about organized exmo groups back then.

Kathy and her wife, Sarah, came to some of the early meetups. Sarah had been fighting cancer for several years, but I loved talking to them. We met up with Kathy at the exmo conference the year before I moved in 2004. She said something to me over lunch that made me wonder how she would make it after Sarah passed away. She didn't. Killed me to hear that. Her daughter did post here for awhile.

I feel very fortunate that our paths crossed briefly.

Thanks for adding more info. I had forgotten that she was the one who thought of the brilliant idea of highway cleanup signs for getting the word "exmormon" out there so people could see that they weren't alone--there were plenty of people leaving the church.

When I was on the Exmormon Foundation board, I did some research about putting billboards up and learned that the different municipalities had regulations barring any kind of sign that "demeaned" a religion or race.

They considered the word "exmormon" to be demeaning. For real.


Kathleen Waters

NormaRae,

That was my reaction too. After all the disapproval there was about Compton writing In Sacred Loneliness, they referred him to the reporters! The gall!

They know in the age of the internet, every damn lie they tell is going to be exposed. They have no choice.

Now it is hilarious that they try to find people like Compton who are willing to accept the facts and still play along.

I left my thoughts on Mormonism the way a cow leaves a pie in a field.

"Fanny Alger, age 16, single
Scholars disagree about whether Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger was a marriage or merely an affair. However, the LDS church cites Fanny as Smith's first plural wife, noting that the pair married in Kirtland, Ohio in the mid-1830s, when Smith would have been about 30 himself. Fanny lived in the Smiths' house with Emma, which caused much tension. Compton says that Emma eventually turned Fanny out of the house in the middle of the night. Fanny later married Solomon Custer, who was not a member of the LDS church."

Even though there's no contemporary documentation of any type of "marriage ceremony" to Alger, the church's apologists HAVE to call her a plural wife because the alternative is to admit that the relationship was adultery.

And of course, even if Smith DID persuade Fanny by using similar verbiage about "celestial sealings" that he used on other women later in Nauvoo, and employed some sort of a ceremony, the relationship was still adultery, because Smith claimed that he received the "sealing power" from Elijah in 1836---three years after he began his relationship with Fany.

It lists each wife, the age they married JS, and whether or not they were already married. I found it interesting that quite a few of them were single in their mid to late 20s. And yet the church still claims that it was acceptable to marry 14-yr olds at the time.

Whole cloth fabrications have design flaws. Sharp eyes find those flaws. That's when lies unravel.

I was reading the comments section on this article and saw yours. Props to you for speaking up. It's also refreshing how most of them see through JS's bull**** cult :)

I keep thinking, in the case of TSCC, there's something beyond 'Total Fraud'... Am I correct?

Mormonism, a Willful Unrepentant Fraud.

Maybe that is what troubles so many of us. They don't ever apologize and atone, they eventually cave in and then act as if it never happened, or it was a misunderstanding on the part of disaffected and former Mormons. If only we understood their intentions better.

Former Mormons hold Mormon leadership and historians more accountable than anyone, certainly the press and themselves. It seems to be the role a former Mormon can best play because we have no concern for their authority and we see them for what they are.

Well said, Gentlestrength!

The church changes the historical stances they have taken (even the temple ceremony), and the members bow their heads and say thats how it has always been.

One person writes: "What amazes me is people bought into this smoke and mirrors poppycock in the first place. Its fairly obvious 'why' Smith decided 'god wanted him to have many wives' - look at how many young women became his wives"

A TBM responds: "Tread lightly with your criticisms. Joseph Smith was and is a prophet of
God in the latter days. Polygamy is a well documented practice of Old Testament prophets."

Someone else retorted: "So was stoning."

Don'tcha just love hard-hitting one-liners?

Comment: "boy! they had it going on, passing women around like candy."

Response: "lol...all I can think of is that plen-t-pak of snickers."

Yeah, I saw that one about stoning. I'm filing that line in my mental archives for later retrieval when a TBM makes the same argument. A "restoration of all things"... Hahaha.

Funny how they always ignore the New Testament and spend their effort restoring the OT.

I am having so much fun in the comments. I might be crude but my crude words are a hell of a lot better than the crudeness being defended.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/27/2014 01:44PM by roslyn.

You go, Roslyn!

I'm stayin out of it. Youse guys don't need a grumpy old dog in there.

I'd prefer not to say on here. But I've posted a lot in that thread. I'll leave it at. Last night I had a horrible headache and was quite annoyed as some stupidity I saw on there, people not being able to read and accusing me of being a mormon defender. Kind of silly how some people can't follow a conversation.

Please understand that you're among friends here. You need not worry about being "outed." I appreciate you posting over there, you've helped out a lot. No telling how many TBMs will start questioning things because of what you write.