Salon.com "But I'm a good Mormon wife"
Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2012 4:09 am
Yeah.
Wow.
Thank you for sharing that, mms.
Internet Mormons, Chapel Mormons, Critics, Apologists, and Never-Mo's all welcome!
https://discussmormonism.com/
zeezrom wrote:Yeah.
Wow.
Thank you for sharing that, mms.
“Did you know that Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old girl against her will?
“The prophet’s marriage to her seems to have been largely dynastic—a union arranged by Joseph and Heber to seal the Kimball family to a seer, church president, and presiding patriarchal figure of the dispensation of the fullness of times" (Compton 1997, p. 486).
Helen describes her reaction to this proposition,
“My father was the first to introduce it to me, which had a similar effect to a sudden shock of a small earthquake. When he found (after the first outburst of displeasure for supposed injury) that I received it meekly, he took the first opportunity to introduce Sarah Ann [Whitney] to me as Joseph's wife" (Whitney 1880-1883).[2]
.The marriage was kept secret, and Kimball continued to live with her parents (Anderson & Faulring 1998).
Helen Mar's writings, an important source of LDS history, were published by BYU's Religious Studies Center in 1997 in a book entitled A Woman's View: Helen Mar Whitney's Reminiscences of Early Church History. The book also includes her 1881 autobiography to her children wherein, concerning her marriage to the Prophet Joseph Smith, she wrote:
I have long since learned to leave all with [God], who knoweth better than ourselves what will make us happy. I am thankful that He has brought me through the furnace of affliction & that He has condesended to show me that the promises made to me the morning that I was sealed to the Prophet of God will not fail & I would not have the chain broken for I have had a view of the principle of eternal salvation & the perfect union which this sealing power will bring to the human family & with the help of our Heavenly Father I am determined to so live that I can claim those promises. (Holzapfel, 487)
However, historian Todd Compton does not hold this view; he criticized the anti-Mormons Jerald and Sandra Tanner for using his book to argue for sexual relations, and wrote:
The Tanners made great mileage out of Joseph Smith's marriage to his youngest wife, Helen Mar Kimball. However, they failed to mention that I wrote that there is absolutely no evidence that there was any sexuality in the marriage, and I suggest that, following later practice in Utah, there may have been no sexuality. (p. 638) All the evidence points to this marriage as a primarily dynastic marriage.
But let the MDB myths continue unabated.
Stormy Waters wrote:What myth? The article never asserts that he had sex with her. Let's not derail the thread with this debate. If you want to fight it out start a new thread about it and I'll be more than willing to fight you on this. but the main point on this article is important and I want this attempted derail to die here.
“Did you know that Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old girl against her will?"
Stormy Waters wrote: but the main point of this article is important and I want this attempted derail to die here.