This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
“This is Warren Jeffs territory. This is not the Joseph Smith I grew up learning about in the Church and having a testimony of.” (CES Letter)
No Adultery – This comparison is a lie. Warren Jeffs reportedly ordered his people to commit adultery. But Joseph Smith and early Mormons believed women should have only one husband and partner, according to D&C 132:63:
“But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery.”
| Some women were apparently sealed for eternity to men other than their husbands, because civil marriage and sealings were totally different things. One could be sealed “for eternity” to one person and married “for time” to another, because a sealing for eternal cohabitation in the afterlife did not involve sexual or earthly relations. The “new and everlasting covenant” of eternal marriage would nullify civil marriage in the afterlife. |
Not Sexual Relationships – Helen Mar Kimball and the other young women sealed to Joseph Smith were sealed for “eternity only,” which meant that it did not involve sexual or earthly relations. The women did not live with Joseph Smith as a married relationship and did not have sexual relations with him. It was literally a matter of Joseph Smith and the woman speaking some words in a ceremony and then hardly ever seeing each other again. Helen Mar Kimball described her sealing to Joseph Smith as “celestial marriage” and “for eternity alone.” (Helen Mar Whitney, Autobiography, p. 2)
Warren Jeffs reportedly was a pedophile who “married” and had physical relations with many underage women and abused them, fathering children with them. This is entirely different from Joseph Smith. Joseph was sealed to the afterlife to older women and had no physical relations with any married women or anyone underage–and likely had no physical relations with any of the plural wives at all!
Deceitful Graph – CES Letter published a common anti-Mormon graph. Here are some of its deceptions:
The names Joseph Smith and Warren Jeffs appear next to each other, in the same unique font, twice. This repetition conditions an association between them in the audience’s brains. Their portrait images are run through the same unique image filter and overlapped to suggest a relationship. It is the kind of illustration a middle-schooler would make about a kid that he hates… put his photo through the same Photoshop filter as a creep like Warren Jeffs so they look similar, adjust the size to be the same, and overlap them. Now they look like the same person!
The color of both figures in the overlapping portraits are black and light red, which matches the color scheme of Joseph Smith’s numbers in the graph (dark red and black numbers) and does not match Warren Jeffs’. Thus, we subtly associate the images of both Warren Jeffs and Joseph Smith with Joseph Smith’s numbers on the graph.
The rest of the graph is incredibly deceitful. Ages and amounts of people are placed on the same field, introducing confusion and inconsistency of measurement. For example, above “Under age 18 Wives,” Joseph Smith has 7 and Warren Jeffs has 24. Does this mean the age of under-age 18 wives or the number of under-age 18 wives? Other measurements are labeled “age” and others “number.” Which is it? This vagueness incorrectly suggests that Joseph Smith married a 7-year old. In any case, it is an inaccurate comparison–Joseph Smith was only sealed to a few teenage women for the afterlife for “eternity only” and had no physical relationship, unlike Warren Jeffs.
It cherry-picks a few issues that could be skewed as similarities but really are comparing apples and oranges. Joseph Smith’s sealings for the afterlife were nothing like Warren Jeff’s disgusting sex-romps. The graph ignores the different contexts and definitions.
On top of all of this, the graph adds scripture verses that could be falsely skewed to apply and make Joseph Smith appear hypocritical, but really don’t apply. Joseph Smith did not commit adultery with other men’s wives, and the law of Moses in Leviticus is defunct.
Belief & Moral Justification Is Not The Same – CES Letter curiously asserts that it is not an issue of being “okay” with polygamy but believing that God would command it. Pay attention to the logic they twist in defining what a testimony is:
“I’ve been asked once by an LDS apologist if I would be okay with Joseph Smith’s polygamy and polyandry if I received a witness that God really did command Joseph Smith to participate in these practices. The question is not if I would “be okay with” God commanding Joseph Smith to secretly steal other men’s wives and to marry underage and teenage girls. The question is “Do I believe that God did such a thing?” The answer, based on comparing D&C 132 to what actually happened, along with my personal belief that there is no such thing as an insane polygamist god who demanded such sadistic, immoral, adulterous, despicable, and pedophilic behavior while threatening Joseph’s life with one of his angels with a sword…is an emphatic and absolute “no.”” (CES Letter)
This is a classic case of defining an issue by how it is framed. An honest portrayal of Joseph Smith’s polygamy is that he was sealed “for eternity only” to most of his “wives,” and likely did not have sexual relations with any of them. But anti-Mormons frame eternal sealings as the same thing as physical civil marriage, and they go on to compare it to modern pedophiles and sickos. Suddenly, it is insane, sadistic, immoral, adulterous, despicable, and pedophilic. Now, it is much more than the sacrifice of Abraham that Mormons had to suffer through. Now, it is God commanding the worst kind of sinful behavior.
With this fake frame in place, CES Letter can successfully convince us that no matter what kind of “witness” we receive that Joseph Smith was following God’s commandments, we must not believe it. Even if an angel appeared and wrote glowing letters in the air that said “Joseph Smith was right,” we will always be outraged and refuse to admit the truth. What CES Letter is arguing is that religious truth is dependent on moral fitness rather than any kind of witness. And we have seen that CES Letter skews history to attack Mormons’ moral fitness.
This frame fits Marxist philosophy. It is all about setting the conditions for a person’s human nature to best flourish and produce moral behaviors. Did God set proper conditions by introducing polygamy the way Joseph Smith did? Marxism is all about social justice:
“For Marx, however, unlike for Aristotle, the key question was not about how best to foster human flourishing in this society within a given structure. It was, rather, about the kind of society necessary to allow humans to flourish in this fashion.”
CES Letter Logical Fallacies
| Falsehood | Joseph Smith did not commit adultery, polygamy, or pedophilia. The “new and everlasting covenant,” or eternal sealing was different than civil marriage and did not involve physical relations. |
| Shifting Goalposts | CES Letter acted shocked by the “bizarre rules outlined in Doctrine & Covenants 132.” But in the graph in this argument, they act like Joseph Smith was evil because he contradicted D&C 132 and was committing adultery. CES Letter places age on the same scale with a graph of amounts, creating an inconstancy of measurement. |
| Strawman Fallacy | In the graph, CES Letter quotes from the law of Moses in Leviticus. But that doesn’t apply. CES Letter claims “Warren Jeffs is more closely aligned to Joseph Smith Mormonism than the LDS Church is” because of the fake similarities. |
| Repetition | CES Letter repeats five previous issues that don’t apply: “It’s when you take this snapshot of Joseph’s character and start looking into the Book of Abraham, the Kinderhook Plates, the Book of Mormon, the multiple First Vision accounts, Priesthood restoration, and so on that you start to see a very disturbing pattern and picture.” CES Letter repeats six polygamy issues that they already repeated. |
| Cherry-picking | CES Letter picks 6 issues with completely different contexts and definitions to imply causation. This is the same game they played with the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham. They picked random similarities with contemporary books to imply they were inspiration for Joseph Smith writing the Book of Mormon. With polygamy, they skew different contexts and lump them all together as “wives.” |
| Argument From Ignorance | Most of what we know about Joseph Smith’s polygamy is speculation. CES Letter‘s claim that Joseph Smith had 34 wives is baseless. |
The narrative that Joseph Smith victimized women is important for anti-Mormonism because it gives us a reason to hate Mormons. If the Book of Mormon was made up and Joseph Smith was a conman–so what? Even if he were a fraud, aren’t Mormons still nice people who do nice things and make the world a better place? Why not just let them be? The powerful thing with these polygamy arguments is that CES Letter tells you why Mormonism is evil: it victimizes girls. It matters because Joseph Smith was a creep who preyed on women. This is easy rhetoric for them to push, as the internet is filled with all kinds of false rumors about Mormon polygamy and because the fake news media labels modern-day polygamist cultists as “Mormon”.
In this phony argument, CES Letter uses visual manipulation to associate Joseph Smith with an infamous modern pedophile.
Opponents in the media have trumpeted this kind of narrative since the beginning. In the 1800’s, American newspapers were putting out story after story about how women in Utah were treated as “slaves.” It led to the federal government for the first time registering all marriages, controlling the definition of marriage, and jailing Mormons who did not fit that definition. This is the kind of society and moral rules anti-Mormons envision. Still today, Mormons are persecuted as some kind of oppressive patriarchy that victimized women.
It poisons the well against honest and open discussion. It smears Joseph Smith as a creep, and nobody wants to be associated with criminals or sexual creeps.
Big Lie Tactic – In the polygamy arguments, CES Letter approaches marriage from our modern society’s definition, ignore all historical context, and perpetuate the big lie that eternal sealings in the temple were the same as a civil marriage with a physical relationship. If Joseph Smith was a prophet, why did he keep his behavior secret? Well, he didn’t. But people are much more likely to believe CES Letter‘s string of illogic because they connected the dots out on their own, subconsciously. They are also more likely to believe the evidences for that deduction, which in this case are falsehoods. One lie leads to another.
Why do so many “pro-equality” activists, good progressives who say people should be free to marry whoever they love, condemn Mormons for their history with polygamy? The same anti-Mormons who attack us for the old history of polygamy also endorse “progressive” ideas about marriage and love. Shouldn’t polygamy be on their list of marriages that deserve “equality?” Well yes, it should, and this is why anti-Mormons spin polygamy as something that coerces and manipulates women into subjugation. Lately, this narrative has become evens easier as there really are crazy cults that actually do victimize young girls and force people to marry, criminals like Warren Jeffs.
| The claim that men were victimizing women establishes a frame of ‘predator versus victim,’ and that leads us to a Marxist ideology. Marxism is all about protecting victims from the predators. Marxists think the biggest miracle about mankind is that we evolved to the top of the food chain without ever becoming predators of other animals. Economically, Marxists protect working classes from a predator class. Marxism is all about protecting the vulnerable from those seeking unequal advantage–and all about keeping people weak in order to keep them reliant on a benevolent dictator for safety. A major part of Marxism is the deconstruction of masculinity. |
They seek to pick positive masculine traits that propagate the ideology, such as the gusto to fight for the cause, and eliminate “toxic masculine” traits such as the desire to marry and have children in a traditional family. They think traditional families are evil because men contribute labor to the economy while women are “subjugated” as mothers and do not perform labor. The ideal for Marxists is a state where men and women are completely equal working bees and children are grown and raised by the benevolent dictator state. Nobody is preying on anybody.
CES Letter wants us to believe Mormons were manipulating and victimizing women in the same way as this Marxist narrative. The narrative that women are coerced into marriage because of Christianity comes straight from Karl Marx, and it is nothing but an attack on the traditional family. CES Letter‘s appeal to emotion is not only about attacking the church. It is about replacing the testimony of a gospel with… something else. Marxists believe females are oppressed by men in a giant class struggle that hinders their economic output. Polygamy in the Mormon church was problem for Marxists because the higher law of eternal marriage is the perfect example of “inequality” that Marxists hate.
CES Letter can get away with this Big Lie because it is the consensus among so many fake scholars that Joseph Smith had carnal relations with girls, and because it takes so long to actually investigate the evidence. People are too lazy to actually look through all the historical documents. Even mainstream church apologists are beaten down by all of the accusations and have give way to the big lie. They are too tired defending against it. They let CESLetter get away with the lie that Joseph Smith “married” underage girls, as we understand the definition of marriage today which involves sexual relations. Even if you don’t believe the allegations, just this association frames Joseph Smith as a creep.
