liz3564 wrote:The same goes for Joseph Smith and polygamy. Joseph getting caught with Fanny in the barn was just an awfully convenient catalyst for the "plural marriage" revelation.
Joseph Smith's involvement in polygamy, especially with relatively young girls, is the second most thing that bothers me about the LDS Church. I can see the temptation to brand Smith as a womanizer and be done with it. But the more I look at the issue the more I think something odd is going on, that Smith as a womanizer wouldn't fully explain.
I read a little over half of Todd Compton's book
In Sacred Loneliness about the plural wives of Smith, and there was kind of a pattern there. The book told the stories of the wives in the chronological order Joseph Smith married them in, but for each wife it told the complete story of her life (as far as Compton could determine it), so the narratives of the different chapters overlapped each other. But the pattern was, Smith married the plural wife, there were a few years, Smith died, in many occurrences one of the apostles married the wife, and the wife had child after child after child.
This didn't happen
all the time. Some of the plural wives didn't remarry, and some of them didn't have any children at all. But this pattern happened often enough that I got thinking, Smith as a womanizer doesn't really explain this. Granted Joseph Smith only lived one to five years after marrying each plural wife, whereas many of the wives themselves and the apostles who married them lived out their normal lifespans. But still. Joseph Smith was a very fertile man. Over the space of the 17 years he was married to Emma, Emma got pregnant nine times. And yet there is only
one well documented child born to Smith by his plural wives. I'm talking about Josephine Lyon, whose mother Sylvia told her that Joseph Smith was her father. If Joseph Smith was as much a womanizer as the critics claim,
why in the world didn't he end up having more children by his plural wives?
Of course, some of this gets kind of fuzzy. If you go to the website "http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/DNA.htm" you discover that Mary Elizabeth Rollins said she knew of at least
three children born to Joseph Smith by his plural wives, and later at that website it says historians "have previously identified eight possible children of Joseph Smith borne by his plural wives." But then the website goes on to state that DNA testing has proven that three of those eight
are not children of Smith, and to state that DNA testing hasn't confirmed that Smith fathered
any of the eight, though it says that test results for Josephine are "promising," and it appears that the tests are currently ongoing, so we don't have the last word yet.
But I kind of appeal to the thoroughness of Compton's book. Smith married his about forty wives in as much secrecy as he could manage, and yet Compton has done a reasonably good job of documenting possibly
all of them. How could Smith and those wives hide from Compton
births that could have coincided with Smith's lifetime? And yet the only birth that Compton comes close to confirming is Josephine's. How is it possible that Mary Elizabeth knew of three children that could have been Joseph's but Compton found no record of them?
So I ask again, why so few pregnancies? Why so few births? What's going on here?
Also, I'm going to be
very interested in the eventual outcome of the DNA testing on Josephine Lyon.
The thing that
most bothers me about the LDS Church also involves women. I was working as an assistant clerk in a ward in Spanish Fork, Utah, with the clerk and another assistant clerk in the clerk's office, when my eleven-year-old second daughter Lizzie wandered over and asked us if she could help us with what we were doing. None of us knew what to reply, so a brief period of silence followed. "Or," I paraphrase Lizzie, "can't I help because I'm eleven, and I'm a girl?" Some hours later I drew Lizzie aside and told her that yes, at eleven she can't really do any clerk stuff, but when she turned twelve and became a Beehive then she could do things like be secretary of the Beehives and then do clerk stuff for them.
Still, Lizzie's question has haunted me ever since. I'm not such a liberal that I want to see women as bishops or stake presidents, but I would welcome a change in church policy that let women become clerks, assistant clerks, Sunday School presidents, or ward mission leaders.