Mormon prophet-founder and his teenage brides

Told ya.
Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith’s 
polygamous wives included 14-year-old girls 
and already-married women

The Mormon Church used to handily dispatch inconvenient tidbits from its history as “lies told by Satan.” 

That’s not so easy anymore. With this thing called the Internet, where people can research and validate claims for themselves, the church now finds itself saying time and again, “Oh, about that, well, yeah, okay, it’s true.” These concessions show up in the form of essays published on lds.org, where the church admits, although not in so many words, that on many a topic Satan wasn’t lying after all. 

Six of Joseph Smith’s 30-50 wives. Click the image for larger view in the Salt Lake Tribune.

The latest essay from the Mormon Church, entitled Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo, admits that Mormon polygamy did not begin with Brigham Young but with founder and prophet Joseph Smith. It also admits that Smith took his first extra wife as early as 1831 (years before admitting as much to his lawful wife, Emma), married 14-year-old girls, married already-married women, accrued a bunch of wives by the time he died, and had sex with many if not all of them.

You will enjoy (code for “you will be outraged at”) the way the church attempts in this and other essays to make Smith’s actions acceptable.

We told you. See “It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass, Chapter 2.

Apologists praise the church for this new era of transparency. What seems lost amid the gushing praise is that to have a new era of transparency you must first have had an old era of hiding the facts. Hardly good behavior for a church that claims to embrace all truth.

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