SteelHead wrote:What I find interesting in this quibbling argument about the behavior of Joseph Smith, is some how we become so fixated on Joseph Smith, that we ignore the elephant in the room that is Brigham Young and his behavior in his polygamous marriages, with some women that were already married, and subsequent prophets with their teenage brides........
There is a pattern as a whole that stinks to high heaven, why get so fixated on Joseph Smith?
That's a good point and why I mentioned the wives of Young at the end of my long post on Catherine Lewis.
In answer to making assumptions... It is not an assumption, to show evidence that it was likely that Smith consummated his "marriage" with Kimball. He wrote a "revelation" of the actual ceremony he used, that survived, and it states that they were to "observe all the rights between you both that belong to that condition." That includes sex. There is no credible reason to think that this would not apply to Smith's other "marriages". We have Catherine Lewis, her own father, Heber C. Kimball, all interpreted by the historians above as supportive of the marriage being more than just a ceremony.