re: #297 dholmes32

It only took 170 or so years for that official admission to come out. It certainly was never taught in official Mormon church manuals, although some people may have known about it because they read certain biographies.

What ticks me off about this is how the essay obfuscates how one of the wives was a 14 year old girl (Helen Mar Kimball) “who was sealed to Joseph several months before her 15th birthday.” Most people would call that “fourteen.” Here’s the other women he married before their 20th birthdays:

1. Fanny Alger (16)
2. Sarah Ann Whitney (17)
3. Flora Ann Woodworth (16)
4. Emily Dow Partridge (19, Smith also married her sister)
5. Lucy Walker (17)
6. Sarah Lawrence (17, Smith also married her sister)
7. Maria Lawrence (19)
8. Nancy Winchester (14)
9. Melissa Lott (19)

Keep in mind that when most of this marrying was going on, Smith was between 35 and 38.

Oh, and the list doesn’t include the wives of other men that Smith married as well.

I suspect these days Smith would be sharing prison space with another guy who really liked the young ones—that would be Warren Jeffs.

(FTR, former Mormon here. I resigned over Prop 8.)

The word that was used generally to describe a preference for mid- to late teenagers is Ephebophilia. It’s not used anymore since society generally accepts a wide difference in ages, as long as the age of consent is met.