Well, Brian Hales and Gregory Smith have gone after Grant Palmer on his polygamy article found here: http://mormonthink.com/grant6.htm at the Mormon Interpreter found here: http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/a-resp ... ment-14972
I responded to the Interpreter Article, as follows, but it is "awaiting moderation":
grindael on October 13, 2014 at 3:04 pm said:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
I make no bones about being a critic of Joseph Smith. Having spent more than a decade in the Church, I know a lot about it, as does Grant Palmer. Unfortunately Hales and Smith feel that they must attack Grant Palmer personally (insinuating all kinds of things about him that they can’t prove) instead of sticking to the evidence and rebutting his reasoning.
What really troubles me though, is Hales and Smith claiming that Grant Palmer is some kind of sloppy or shoddy researcher and that he only uses “secondary” sources because he includes a middle initial in Benjamin Winchester’s name, which was gotten from a very credible historian, Richard S. Van Wagoner.
Now, Hales and Smith know that they have done this too, unless they poorly edit their own publications, something they accuse Grant Palmer of. This should not surprise anyone. Hales referenced Benjamin Winchester as “Benjamin F. Winchester” in an article he wrote for the Journal of Mormon History in 2009, and Gregory L. Smith did so at FAIRMORMON wiki in 2014 in big bold letters. FAIRMORMON also does this in other articles. So what does that say about Hales, Smith and FAIRMORMON? I’ll leave that to the readers to decide.
There is a saying about glass houses. I think they had the right of it when they mentioned that this kind of thing is “nitpicky”. That should have been a red flag to them right there not to include this in supposed “scholarly” article. But they had to go ahead-and they shot themselves in the foot. It is absolutely trivial and stupid (especially when they did it themselves) and only done because of an obvious agenda to use ANY excuse (no matter how trivial) to make the man look bad. If his work is that bad, THAT will speak for itself. The brilliant (if you have any) rebuttals should be enough to take care of his credibility, should they not?
So why the need for all the ad hominems? Either you are both extremely insecure, or you don’t think you have a case to make with the evidence. You also offer no link at all to Palmer’s articles. Talk about petty.
My advice is stick to the evidence and stop trying to score petty points. It makes you look like juveniles, especially when it is so easy to catch you doing the same things you claim the “shoddy scholars” are doing.
You are also comparing a three volume set of BOOKS to an article for a historical Journal. Do you even understand what a RED HERRING that is? Should I include every piece of evidence in this reply that is available out there? Of course you would object. It would then be dishonest to say I didn’t use the evidence KNOWING that I really could not in this venue. This also applies to Palmer. How do you respond in a short article to a three volume set of BOOKS?
As for the evidence, I think we may see some responses to this in the near future. In fact, look for it. I’ll include a couple of things, before I go. Hales and Smith claim that “several observations” indicate that Smith never consummated the marriage to Helen Kimball.
Ok. But that is not proof, only speculation. And actually there is something interesting that Helen wrote later in her life. On page 7 of a pamphlet she published in 1884 titled “Why we practice Plural Marriage,” she claims that Smith established polygamy and “ALL who entered into it in righteousness (including herself) had done so for the purpose of “raising up a righteous seed”.
Kimball here admits that she was married to Smith to “raise up righteous seed’. In fact, the entire pamphlet is pretty much all about how polygamy is to raise up “a righteous seed”, and this is because (she says) there are many choice spirits waiting to take mortal bodies and this is how they are provided for them. (By sex via plural marriage). https://archive.org/stream/whywepractic ... 6/mode/2up
If one reads Kimball’s pamphlet above, she claims that “some may have dragged it (polygamy) in the mire; but the principle remains pure and independent and only the wrong-doer has become degraded.”
Helen shows that these women were fixated on being called “degraded” and immoral. They were very careful later in life not to say things that would place them in any kind of a light that would insinuate that they were. But this is all obvious stuff and you use this concern to claim that there was no sex at all in some marriages which is simply a fallacy of irrelevant proof.
It is far more likely that Helen initially thought her marriage was to be for “eternity only” (as Todd Compton suggests) and then when she found out it was also for “time”, this is what upset her in Nauvoo.
And all this speculation about dynastic marriages? What good did that do when Smith died a year later? Of course, Mormons believe that he knew all about this, (lamb to the slaughter and all that) so it makes that aspect even more unlikely, unless Smith had sex with her as often as possible to propagate the dynastic line that he supposedly started with the Kimball family. It just isn’t very convincing (to some) to claim that Smith wanted to start a dynastic line between families, and knowing that his mission was almost over (as many claim he did) not do anything about it. At lds.org they write,
Most importantly, Joseph Smith, feeling that he might soon die, took great care during the last seven months of his life to carefully prepare the Twelve.
In fact, Heber C. Kimball wrote to Helen in June, 1844 and said,
“You are blessed, but you know it not. You have done that which will be for your everlasting good for THIS WORLD and that which is to come.”
What good was done in “this world” when they did not even ATTEMPT to have any children and Joseph knew he was going to die? The problem with any speculation in this area is that anyone can come along and speculate like I just did and some will agree with it or think it logical or likely.
And it IS good enough to say, “Smith probably had sex with all of his wives” without presenting all of the “new research” or speculations of those that want to promote their own agenda that he probably did not. Using the Helen Kimball quote would sufficiently answer this question that sex was the most important component of polygamy, because that it what it was practiced for. If I am to believe Hales and Smith, or Helen Kimball about that, I’ll side with Kimball on that one. She would know, she was there and got it from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and other early Mormon leaders.
It doesn’t make Grant Palmer less of a scholar to NOT lay out every speculative apologetical notion that Brian Hales puts forth in his Polygamy books or that Gregory L. Smith writes on FAIRMORMON.
Even in Smith’s Book of Mormon it claims that if polygamy is commanded by God it would be done for the purpose of raising up seed. It says NOTHING else about it, other than it is an ABOMINATION if it is not for this purpose. You can’t raise up righteous seed by not having sex with the woman who you “marry” for that purpose now, can you? Yet according to Hales and Smith, Joseph Smith married all these women for some other reason which they do not provide. To make an angel happy perhaps?
Again, Helen Mar Kimball claims that ALL who enter into polygamy have done so to raise a righteous seed and that all who “righteously” enter into it do so FOR THAT PURPOSE. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.
The fact is, there is no direct evidence either way if those two had sex, but there is evidence that Smith could have had sex with Kimball anytime he wanted to. It was not an “eternity only” marriage. It included time. Did Smith have sex with other young girls? Yes he did. Fanny Alger is one. To say that there is evidence that Smith didn’t consummate the marriage with Kimball is just making things up, something done here constantly with late reminiscences. And there is absolutely no proof at all that Smith made it some kind of policy to NOT have sex with girls under the age of 18, even though SOME did it later in Utah. It was also not a POLICY there either.
You reconstruct the most outlandish possible scenarios and then conclude that there was no sex because of something you read into these late reminiscences. You also play the game of not using certain accounts because they don’t agree with your conclusions. A good example of this is what you do with Ann Eliza Webb. It’s ok to use her to support your speculations about Fanny Alger, but not when it comes to others like Zina Huntington. Speaking of speculative theories, you write,
“it seems that they [his plural wives] either bore him children who are unknown today or that sexual relations in the marriages did not occur often.”
That is not the only conclusion that one can come to. But it may be when you try and frame the evidence to make it SEEM so. But you are trying to claim that with some it did not occur AT ALL and that those “marriages” were set up that way. This is speculation that has NEVER been proved.
Smith had thirty plus wives. Who said that he had to visit one wife per day and have sex with her multiple times as I’m sure your other examples probably had time (years and years actually) to do? He could visit 10 wives in a day and have sex 10 times a day. Please tell me how anyone can PROVE that he did not? The more “wives” the more opportunity for sex!
You are also coming to conclusions without using all the data. For example, you use Heber C. Kimball and Lucy Walker as an example. Here are the dates of their children’s births from find a grave,
Willard Heber Kimball (1853 – 1854)*
Lydia Holmes Kimball Loughery (1855 – 1928)*
Anna Spaulding Kimball Knox (1857 – 1932)*
Eliza Kimball Woolley (1859 – 1906)*
Joshua Heber Kimball (1862 – 1863)*
Franklin Heber Kimball (1864 – 1865)*
Notice that some of them are years apart. Why? We only have a one, two or three year window for Smith depending on the wife he married. He was only married to one wife for any real length of time. So how can you compare the two and be accurate? You can not. This is the kind of analysis that fills your work. Do you have the exact dates that Kimball and Walker had sex so that we know how long it took for her to conceive? How do you know that they didn’t try for two years before she had some of those children? YOU DON’T. This could easily have been the case with Smith and some of his wives. There are just too many variables to make blanket statements concerning his sex life.
The fact is, Smith married other women and had sex with them. He lied about it. He broke the law to do it. He lied to the church about it. He did not follow binding scripture. He broke his own word when he claimed that there would only be monogamy in the church in 1843. According to some witnesses he committed adultery more than once, one of which was deemed a “sealing” only years after the fact. If you feel that attacking Grant Palmer because he doesn’t agree with your own speculative conclusions, go ahead. But people who live in glass houses really shouldn’t throw stones.
As Todd Compton writes,
(1) No piece of evidence is perfect. As I wrote in In Sacred Loneliness (p. 29), contemporary evidence is very desirable, but is not perfect. Even if someone writes something in a diary (contemporary evidence), it is still biased and limited to his or her viewpoint. That person’s enemy, or even a friend, may write on the same day about the same events and look at them very differently.
Therefore, since no piece of evidence is perfect, if you do not like any piece of evidence, you can always object in some way and throw it out. As a result, it is important that one does not hold a double standard for crucial evidence, that one is consistent. For instance, if one rejects a piece of evidence whose content one does not like on the argument that it is second-hand, one should not accept another piece of evidence (whose content one likes) that is equally second- hand.
Evidence can be used, and should be used, even if it is not perfect. (Otherwise, no evidence could be used at all.) One can use evidence skillfully, but still allow for its limitations. For instance, if one has two pieces of evidence, one can balance them against each other. One limited truism of historical research is that late evidence is inferior to contemporary evidence. In many respects this is true, but not necessarily. I cited Eliza R. Snow’s contemporary diary entry for the day she married Joseph Smith, In Sacred Loneliness, 313. Nowhere is there explicit mention of the marriage in that entry. A researcher with that diary alone would never affirm or try to prove that Eliza married Joseph on that day, or at all. However, in a late piece of evidence, her autobiography, she explicitly affirms the marriage to Joseph (cited at In Sacred Loneliness, 312), and in other late evidence she gave the date. No one piece of evidence was perfect, but all were valuable. Combined, they presented a reliable, full view of the event.
I advise reading the entire article, which is found here. http://toddmcompton.com/rev.html