Pahoran wrote:The constantly reiterated accusation that Joseph "had sex with a 14-year-old" or similar proceeds from no evidence; therefore it tells us about the character of the accusers rather than their target.
To avoid Pahoran being forced to defend his views on this topic on an unrelated thread, I thought I would open this one up for discussion in a thread of its own.
So, to kick off, let's see:
(1) Joseph was married to Helen Mar Kimball.
(2) Mormon apologists have stated, in defense of Joseph's marriage to a fourteen year old, that it was not abnormal for girls to marry very early on the frontier at the relevant period. See for instance Foster, Craig L (2004), "Doing Violence to Journalistic Integrity", FARMS Review (Provo, Utah: Maxwell Institute) 16 (1)
Foster 170-172 wrote:Indeed, according to Laslett’s research, in eighteenth-century Belgrade, Serbia, girls as young as eleven and twelve were not only marrying, but having children. In fact, at one point, eighty-seven percent of all women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were married.81 On the American side of the Atlantic, between 1634 and 1662 about 220 marriageable girls were brought to Quebec to marry. These girls were called les Filles du Roi, or the king’s daughters. While most of the girls were sixteen to twenty years old and the second largest group were between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, at least seventy-six (the fourth largest group- ing statistically) were between the years of twelve and fifteen. Thus it was not surprising to have women marrying and bearing children at a younger age. Indeed, it was common in newer regions of settle- ment and farming in both the United States and Canada for women to marry at a younger age.
For example, in seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay and en- virons, it was common for young women to marry at age sixteen or younger. Both brides and grooms were very young in colonial America. In fact, American marriage laws borrowed heavily from tradi- tional English common law. Under the common law, the age at which the law conferred nuptial rights on individuals was twelve for women and fourteen for men. Most states and territories accepted those two ages as the minimum ages for marriage. Even as late as the turn of the marry. Utah’s minimum age for girls was fourteen.
While the marriage age for both women and men has risen over the years in the United States and other parts of the Western world, there are still some ethnic and social groups that continue to accept and even encourage marriages between younger couples. Most recent was the international debate over acceptable marriage ages caused by the union of a twelve-year-old Gypsy (or Roma) girl and a fifteen-year- old boy in Romania: “Marriage age for [Gypsies] has been 11 to 14 years old for hundreds of years.” Simply stated, among certain groups and cultures, marrying at a young age continues to the present.
I don't suppose Pahoran will say that Foster makes the points above because of his 'nascent pedophilia', will he?
Does Pahoran have any reason for doubting that Joseph ever had sex with his new wife apart from his point that she continued to live with her parents? I mean, people usually do have sex with someone they have recently been married to, don't they? Why shouldn't Joseph Smith have done so?
If the only reason is "she was living with her parents", I have to mention to Pahoran a point of which many male and female posters on this board may be able to testify from experience: it is by no means impossible to have sex with a girl who continues to live with her parents. Since this usually happens in the case of girls who are not married to the person they have sex with, I would have thought it not at all unlikely that Smith (who was married to the girl in question) might have succeeded where so many others before and since have managed it.