In case you hadn’t already heard, the LDS church has acknowledged on its website, lds.org, that Joseph Smith married women other than his wife, Emma, including one as young as 14. The LDS church wants you to think that it’s okay because he was a prophet and God told him to do it. News flash: polygamy is not okay. Not then. Not now. Marrying children is not okay and never will be.
This is what it looks like when a young girl is married to a man 20+ years her senior.
This is what it looks like when a “prophet” marries a young girl in modern times.
Dieter Uchtdorf, of the first presidency of the LDS church, has given a number of speeches directed at women. Here are a few thoughts from one of them.
You can’t have it both ways. If the Lord loves women, he does not tell his prophets to marry young girls under the threat that it’s the only way for them to go to heaven and be with their families.
If the Lord loves women, he does not give them to men to collect like dolls.
If he wants us to be happy now, not at some vague point in the future in some as-yet-unreached heaven, then he does not ask women to turn their lives over to a man so they can be one of many, where true love may not exist, real intimacy is not shared, and a valued partnership never occurs.
If God loves women, he does not coerce them into unwanted marriages with threats of physical violence against their prophet and an eternity of separation from beloved parents.
If God is God, he does not manipulate, he does not lie, and he does not sell his precious daughters en masse to his favorite sons.
Polygamy has been the spider lurking in the corners of Mormon history for a long time.
Now that it’s out there, don’t swallow the lies.
[…] the faithful would like the CoJCoL-dS to make it clear that it wasn’t OK for Joseph Smith to pressure 14-year-olds to have sex with him, instead of claiming it was all […]