Posted by:
schrodingerscat
(
)
Date: January 19, 2022 07:22PM
Ask them if they still sing the praises of Joseph Smith, who sent his followers off on overseas missions so he could make babies with their wives?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zina_D._H._YoungYoung recorded in her autobiography that she was courted by Henry Bailey Jacobs when she was eighteen years old. During this time, Joseph Smith also taught her about plural marriage in private conversations; he proposed that she become his spiritual wife on at least three different occasions.[10]: 90 [15]: 77–79 Young declined the proposals out of her respect for Emma Smith and for traditional Christian monogamy, and because such a union would require secrecy.[10]: 90 On March 7, 1841, she married Jacobs, believing she had thus avoided future proposals from Smith.[10]: 93 Nauvoo mayor John C. Bennett conducted the ceremony. Her journal from the day of the wedding reads:
I was Married to Mr. Henry Bailey Jacobs. He had been a missionary preaching the Gospel for some time. His Father Henry Jacobs was one of the first elders in the Church, faithful and true until the last.[10]: 94
Young became pregnant shortly after her marriage. However, she continued to feel concern that she had rejected God by rejecting Joseph, whom she considered a prophet and God's spokesperson. She later recorded, "I received a testimony for myself from the Lord of this work, and that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God before I ever saw him, while I resided in the state of New York, given in answer to prayer. I knew him in his lifetime, and know him to have been a great true man and a servant of God."[10]: 94 Smith wrote to her in October 1841 that he had "put it off till an angel with a drawn sword stood by me and told me if I did not establish that principle [plurality of wives] upon the earth I would lose my position and my life."[10]: 95 [15]: 80–81 [16] She and Smith were married on October 27, 1841.[15]: 81–82 [17] Her brother Dimick performed the ceremony. By that time, Joseph was married to six other women: Emma Smith, Fanny Alger, Louisa Beaman, Lucinda Pendleton Morgan, Nancy Marinda Johnson Hyde, and Clarissa Reed Hancock.[10]: 96
Young was about seven months pregnant with Jacobs' child (Zebulon William Jacobs), as confirmed by DNA evidence,[18] when she married Smith.[19] It is not clear when Jacobs was made aware of the wedding to Smith; he did, however, believe in Smith's prophetic counsel.[10] Zina and Henry Jacobs continued to live together as man and wife,[15]: 81–82 and her "connubial relations with Joseph Smith, if any occurred at all, [were] certainly infrequent and irregular."[10]: 104 She never had any children with Smith, but she and Jacobs had another son, Henry Chariton Jacobs, on March 22, 1846. Her husband Henry was constantly called on missions (he served at least eight between 1839 and 1845)[12]: 177 and was thus often absent from the house. In the face of such absences, Zina did not turn to Smith but rather sought relief from female kin. Her marriage to Henry, riddled with absences as it was, was the only time in her life that she would have a full-time husband.[12] Though many 19th- and early 20th-century Mormon biographers painted her marriage to Henry as "not proving a happy union"[11]: 33 to justify her subsequent marriages to Smith and later to Brigham Young, evidence from her diaries suggests this assertion is unfounded.[15]: 81
After Smith's death in 1844, Jacobs stood by while Young was sealed to Smith in the Nauvoo Temple.[19] Later in life, she called herself Joseph's "widow."[7]: 698 She was present at the meeting in which Brigham Young was chosen to lead the church; later, she and others recounted that Young spoke with the voice and appearance of Smith on that occasion.[20] Because she believed him to be God's chosen leader, she consented when Young, 20 years her senior, claimed he acted as Smith's proxy and proposed they be married for time (as many other members of the Quorum of the Twelve did with Smith's other plural wives). They were married on February 2, 1846, and, at the same time, she was re-sealed to Smith for eternity.[10]: 103 At this point, Brigham Young and other church leaders considered her civil marriage to Jacobs canceled, superseded by the spiritual marriages, though no formal divorce was ever documented.[10] In October 1861, Brigham would go on to assert, "There was another way—in which a woman could leave a man—if the woman preferred—another man higher in authority and he is willing to take her. And her husband gives her up—there is no Bill of divorce required in the case it is right in the sight of God."[10] In May 1846, Young called Henry Jacobs to serve a mission to England. During Jacobs's absence, Zina began living openly in a marital relationship with Brigham and continued to do so for the rest of her life.[15] : 84, 88, 90–91 [21] She had one child with Young, a daughter named Zina Presendia Young, in 1850.[2]
Jacobs struggled with the arrangement, still very much feeling that Young was his wife, and, in later years wrote to her: "the same affection is there .... But I feel alone .... I do not Blame Eny person .... [M]ay the Lord our Father bless Brother Brigham .... [A]ll is right according to the Law of the Celestial Kingdom of our God Joseph".