The word is out, as LDS Inc desperately tries for damage control – too little and too late – in finally officially admitting that Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith was a womanizing sex addict whose targets included young girls. The secular press is all over Joe Smith’s sex ...
‘Thousands of Nauvoo Mormons search[ed] for Orson Pratt after discovering a suicide note. They find him distraught because Smith, according to Pratt’s wife, had tried to seduce Pratt’s wife Sarah.’
Not only did Smith have a reputation as a ladies’ man, he also had a record of defending friends of his who were sleeping around.
According to the ‘Minutes of the High Council of the Church of Jesus Christ of Nauvoo Illinois’ (6 February 1841), Smith directed the Nauvoo high council not to excommunicate Theodore Turley for ‘sleeping with two females,’ requiring him only to confess ‘that he had acted unwisely, unjustly, imprudently, and unbecoming.’
Eventually, Smith’s sexual excess caught up with him in court. On 23 March 1844, William Law filed suit against Smith for committing adultery with Smith’s foster daughter and plural wife:
‘William Law file[d] a formal complaint with the Hancock County [Illinois] circuit court charging Smith was living ‘in an open state of adultery’ with Maria Lawrence, Smith’s foster daughter and polygamous wife. Maria Lawrence was a teenaged orphan who was living in the Smith household. In fact, Smith had secretly married both Maria, age 19, and her sister Sarah, age 17, on 11 May 1843 and was serving as executor of their $8,000 estate.
‘William Law apparently hoped that disclosing Smith’s relationship with the young girls might lead him to abandon polygamy but Smith immediately excommunicated Law, had himself appointed the girls’ legal guardian and rejected the charge in front of a church congregation on 26 May 1844, denying that he had more than one wife. Steve Benson, citing History of the Church 6:403 & Richard Wagoner’s Mormon Polygamy: A History p66
Smith’s first known sexual affair was with a teenager named Fannie Alger, who was living with Smith and his first wife Emma in their Kirtland, Ohio, home. Fanny was also Smith’s first confirmed plural wife [see LDS.org]. Smith ‘came to know [her] in Kirtland during early 1833 when she, at the age of 16, stayed at his home as a housemaid.’ Described as ‘a very nice and comely young woman’, according to Benjamin Johnson, Fanny lived with the Smith family from 1833 to 1836.
Fanny eventually became the target of Smith’s sexual advances, with Smith's predatory behavior soon becoming the talk of the town ...
Smith further cemented his reputation for fooling around by making moves on a then-married teenager, Zina D Huntington, who he asked on 25 October 1841 to become another of his multiple wives. Smith informed her (using a line he also employed with Emma and others) that he was ordered to do so by a sword-wielding angel who was threatening to kill him if he disobeyed ...
Smith also secretly hit on another teenager, 19-year-old Nancy Rigdon, daughter of his close confidant Sidney Rigdon, in Nauvoo on 10 April 1842 ...
As part of Smith’s brimming quiver of teenager brides, in May 1843, in Smith’s Nauvoo store, he married an underage 14-year-old female named Helen Mar Kimball. Helen’s father, Heber C Kimball, officiated the wedding of his underage daughter to Smith.
Helen was the youngest of Smith’s brides – and according to Helen, he had sex with her.
Helen wrote about how her marriage to Smith was orchestrated by her father:
‘Having a great desire to be connected with the Prophet, Joseph, he (my father) offered me to him; this I afterwards learned from the Prophet’s own mouth. My father had but one Ewe Lamb, but willingly laid her upon the altar: how cruel this seemed to my mother whose heartstrings were already stretched until they were ready to snap asunder, for she had already taken Sarah Noon to wife and she thought she had made sufficient sacrifice but the Lord required more’.
Smith pressured Helen to marry him, giving her only 24 hours to give him answer ...
Fanny Alger, 16 ... Sarah Ann Whitney, 17 ... Lucy Walker, 17 ... Flora Ann Woodworth, 16 ... Emily Dow Partridge, 19 ... Sarah Lawrence, 17 ... Maria Lawrence, 19 ... Helen Mar Kimball, 14 ... Melissa Lott, 19 ... Nancy M Winchester, 14? ... Steve Benson, board post 24th October 2014, ‘The Cad’s Out of the Bag: Church Admits Joe Smith Chased Girl Brides’, cited Richard Wagoner’s Mormon Polygamy: A History
There once was a prophet of god
who was born with a passionate rod,
he asked the almighty
if it was alrighty
to have sex with more than one broad. Kenny Thompson aka Shaunteez (The Salamander Society Best Original Mormonia Lyric 2000)
Why did Joseph Smith cross the road? To get to the other bride. Runtu, board post ‘Mormon Jokes’, 7th September 2012
The age of consent in Nauvoo
Was eighteen years, it is true
But if you were bad
They’d just get your dad
To trade exaltation for you. Substrate, board post 16th March 2006
What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one. Joseph Smith, Journal of Discourses; viz also Salt Lake Tribune 13th December 1997 & History of the Church VI:408
The same God that has thus far dictated me and directed me and strengthened me in this work, gave me this revelation and commandment on celestial and plural marriage, and the same God commanded me to obey it. He said to me that unless I accepted it, and introduced it, and practiced it, I, together with my people would be damned and cut off from this time henceforth. We have got to observe it. It is an eternal principle and was given by way of commandment and not by way of instruction. Joseph Smith, Contributor vol 5 p259
For it is my will, that in time, ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites, that their posterity may become white, delightsome and just, for even now their females are more virtuous than the gentiles. Joseph Smith, revelation Missouri 1831
In no area were Joseph Smith’s manic qualities more evident than in his efforts to introduce and practice polygamy during the last three years of his life. The point at which Joseph Smith began systematically to introduce polygamy to his closest associates has strong suggestions of mania ... His subsequent surge of activity with the sixteen or more women with whom he appears to have sustained sexual relations as plural wives ... is even more suggestive of the hypersexuality that often accompanies manic periods. Dr Lawrence Foster, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 1993
Again I told her [Emma] I heard that one night she missed Joseph and Fanny Alger. She went to the barn and saw him and Fanny in the barn together alone. She looked through the crack and saw the transaction! She told me this story too was verily true. William McLellin
It was with a shocked surprise that the people heard that sister Emma had turned Fanny out of the house in the night ... [Emma] certainly must have had some very good reason for her action. By degrees it became whispered about that Joseph’s love for his adopted daughter was by no means a paternal affection, and his wife, discovering the fact, at once took measures to place the girl beyond his reach. Eliza Webb, future wife of Brigham Young
Emma was furious, and drove the girl, who was unable to conceal the consequences of her celestial relation with the prophet, out of her house. Chauncey Webb
I was afterwards told by Warren Parrish that he himself & Oliver Cowdery did know that Joseph had Fanny Alger as a wife for they were spied upon and found together. Benjamin Johnson
His brother, Hyrum, said to me, ‘Now, Brother Benjamin, you know that Brother Joseph would not sanction this if it was not from the Lord. The Lord revealed this to Brother Joseph long ago, and he put it off until the Angel of the Lord came to him with a drawn sword and told him that he would be slain if he did not go forth and fulfill the law.’ He told my sister to have no fears, and he there and then sealed my sister, Almira, to the Prophet. Benjamin F Johnson, My Life’s Review, Joseph Smith’s personal secretary and church patriarch
One day they came both, Joseph and Bennett, on horseback to my house ... Bennett smiled and said: ‘Oh, a little job for Joseph; one of his women is in trouble.’ Saying this, he took the thing out of his left sleeve. It was a pretty long instrument of a kind I had never seen before. It seemed to be of steel and was crooked at one end. I heard afterwards that the operation had been performed; that the woman was very sick, and that Joseph was very much afraid that she might die, but she recovered. Bennett was the most intimate friend of Joseph for a time. He boarded with the prophet. He told me once that Joseph had been talking with him about his troubles with Emma, his wife. ‘He asked me,’ said Bennett smilingly, ‘what he should do to get out of the trouble.’ I said, ‘This is very simple. Get a revelation that polygamy is right, and all your troubles will be at an end.’ Sarah Pratt
Joseph Smith begins seriously to take plural wives ... Ten of them married to other men. Richard Bushman
Polygamy and Mormonism are inseparably entwined. One of the most offensive aspects of Mormon-based polygamy is the rampant practice of taking underage girls as polygamous wives ...
Smith married several underage girls himself. The most notorious example of this is in the case of Helen Mar Kimball. Young Helen married Smith in May, 1843. She was 14 years old; the same age as Elizabeth Smart was at the time of her abduction. Helen’s father, Heber Chase Kimball gave his daughter to Smith as a token of his unquestioning devotion. In return, Smith promised that this union would seal up the salvation of the Kimball family. Smith didn’t use a knife to coerce this young girl, he used the weapon he was most adept at using, psychological manipulation ...
The LDS Church finds itself in a serious dilemma by refusing to repudiate this doctrine, an act that would seriously undermine the alleged divine calling of their founder and expose him for the sexual predator he really was. But by allowing this doctrine to remain in canonized form within their holy scriptures, they are allowing a hideous practice to continue unchallenged. Extremely devout members find themselves very troubled when they study the practice of polygamy according to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who was also the man who established the precedent for not only practising polygamy, but taking underage girls as polygamous wives. These devout members find themselves in serious trouble with the LDS Church hierarchy when they start looking into this doctrine. Expressing a belief in this doctrine is a sure-fire way to get oneself excommunicated ...