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Claim
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Response
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Author's sources
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325
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After Joseph's death, Rhoda Richards was sealed to "her cousin Brigham Young."
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- Here the author again relies on presentism to provide a hostile interpretive lens. It was not unusual for first cousins to marry. Nineteen of the present-day states permit unrestricted marriage between first cousins, and most countries have no restrictions at all on marriage between cousins. In its exploitation of the presentist fallacy, G. D. Smith’s remark is utterly irrelevant in its historical context.
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- Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Presentism
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327
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"Orson Hyde reported seeing a 'wonderful lustful spirit' on his visit to the polygamous Cochranite community….In 1834 he acquired his own lustful spirit in Marinda Johnson…."
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- The author is apparently trying to be cute. What he does not tell us is that Hyde’s attitude to the Cochranites’ free love was wholly negative, as his source for the journal indicates. Wonderful is here not being used in the sense of “excit[ing] . . . admiration” but, rather, “strange; astonishing.” Elsewhere anxious that we not misunderstand Victorian idiom, G. D. Smith here provides the reader no help (pp. 41–42). It is not clear that Hyde would have agreed that his marriage partook of the same “lustful spirit.”
- Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Misrepresentation_of_sources#.22wonderful_lustful_spirit.22
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333
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Parley P. Pratt's "last wife, Eleanor McComb McLean…was sealed to him without divorcing her legal husband, who fatally shot Parley near Van Buren, Arkansas…."
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- G.D. Smith again relies on presentism.
- Practices regarding marriage and divorce differed substantially from the 20th or 21st century. Smith also tells us nothing about McComb's tyrannical and abusive husband, making him appear the wronged party.
- GLS FARMS paper
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333
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The murder of Parley P. Pratt was "the proximate cause of the Mountain Meadows Massacre."
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- There were many causes of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, not just something that can be labeled "the proximate cause." (Smith gives links to various treatments on pp. 298–299, n.107—this is a refreshing, if rare, example of him providing links to the relevant literature which advocate different views.)
- While Pratt's murder doubtless increased the LDS sense of alienation, President Brigham Young counseled peace and patience, and Pratt's murder was "old news" before the Fancher train arrival (it went unmentioned, for example, in accounts of the Mormons receiving news of the approaching federal army).
- Far from being the proximate cause, Pratt's murder was a minor factor which played little role in the tragedy of Mountain Meadows. G.D. Smith's attempt to make a murder related to polygamy into the proximate cause of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is ahistorical. Scott F. and Maurine J. Proctor, Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (1874; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000), 586-99.
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334
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Parley P. Pratt engaged in "theological philanderings."
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345
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"though she [Louisa Chapin Rising] was not divorced from her legal husband, she agreed to marry [Edwin Woolley]" in polygamy.
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- Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Presentism
- See GLS FARMS paper
- Maybe wiki marriage and divorce in 19th century?
- [See also flyleaf.] —
- Flyleaf "Bishop Edwin Woolley…convinced [his future plural wife] to marry him. She did so without first divorcing her legal husband." Presentism
- GLS FARMS paper
- Maybe wiki marriage and divorce in 19th century?
- [See also p. 345.]
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351
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Ezra Taft Benson was "a correspondent of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover…."
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- It is not clear what relevance this has to Benson, plural marriage, or anything else, save perhaps that it associates the church president with a figure now regarded as repressive, megalomaniacal, and something of a sexual deviant.
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