If your daughter was Helen Mar Kimball...

As Mormons encounter greater media attention and scrutiny, Reuters spoke with Elder D. Todd Christofferson, a member of the Presidency of the Seventy, a church leadership body, in his office at the headquarters of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. The following [is an] excerpt from the interview [found on the last page]:


Q: There is historical evidence that suggests Joseph Smith took a 14-year-old bride, Helen Mar Kimball, when he was 38 years old. In today's terms, that would make him a pedophile. Does this bother you or other LDS church members?

CHRISTOFFERSON: It would depend on what all the facts were and the context. In those days, of course, was that it was not so uncommon in the society of the time. Today that would be statutory rape. A different standard applies. What I look to, I'm telling you about my personal approach, is: what do I know through study and through prayer concerning Joseph Smith and at root my witness is that he was divinely called. That's the foundation. Now whatever questions might arise -- as to whether he erred or stumbled in a certain matter -- throughout his life he wasn't perfect. We don't claim perfection in the human being. I don't know what he was responsible to before -- God I don't know frankly. But as to his prophetic calling, his prophetic mission and what he achieved in that goal, I'm convinced of that. So the fruits of what he accomplished I think are evident.

Comment
from Jeff Ricks, Administrator and Founder of Postmormon.org

Mr. Christofferson, there's a reason that having sex with a 14 year old girl is considered statutory rape -- because it's morally wrong! It's morally wrong because anyone that young is too young and too impressionable and too easily manipulated but an adult. It is morally wrong today and it was morally wrong then. Mr. Christofferson is trying to rationalize in his statement that because he knows through prayer and personal conviction that Joseph Smith was a prophet, when Joe took advantage of the 14 year old girl it was somehow okay. Apparently Mr. Christofferson has a lower standard of morality than I do.

Comment
fh451

And I think Christofferson illustrates one of the fundamental inconsistencies of Mormonism: if the powers of heaven are intrinsically tied to personal righteousness, and, as he states, Joseph may be "responsible to before God" for his failings, how can any of his allegedly prophetic statements, revelations, and sealing powers be considered valid if he was in a state of serious sin? Maybe he considers committing statutory rape a minor "stumbling," but I certainly do not. Any God that sets one set of rules for the leaders and another for the followers simply is not worth my time. It is amazing how the LDS leadership continues to downplay behaviors that would get someone excommunicated today (or thrown in jail) as "imperfections."

Comment
freethinker

Personally I am disgusted by Joseph Smith. He used his position to coerce young women into quick marriages and he consummated them. Did he have sexual relations with Helen Mar Kimball? Considering that he did with his other wives, what evidence is there to assert that he did not? There is none, and my guess is that as a 38 year old man, Prophet of God, Mayor of Nauvoo, General of the Nauvoo Legion, King of the Council of Fifty, Joseph Smith also enjoyed a sexual relationship with this underage girl for no other reason than personal gratification.

Comment
Grape Nephi

Apologists are quick to come to Smith's defense saying that these marriages were platonic and just there to seal them together. However, if you read D&C 132 carefully you will note that it is for expanding the Kingdom by having more kids! And when you add in the journal entries for a number of these brides, you can see through the innocent mask and see Smith for what he truly was: a sexual predator.


Comment
Crime Dog

A more important point here is that this is another of those instances where the interviewer is either providing a pass, or simply does not know enough about church history and doctrine to ask the appropriate follow up question.

REUTERS: Joseph Smith ran for president. Brigham Young was head of the Utah territory and once said he intended to make Utah a sovereign state. The early church history is very political. Given that this was just 170 years ago, what relationship does the church have with politics today?

CHRISTOFFERSON: In our view, the first loyalty of a member of the church in his role as a government official is to the nation and his constituency.

At this point, Reuters should have known to follow up with,"But what of the sacred oath of consecration, taken in the Temple? Does whatever oath of office an elected official takes trump this commitment? Can an earthly office possibly outrank an oath and commitment so sacred, so important that it was taken in the Church's holiest place, in a ritual so secret that participants at one time were required to take death oaths to protect those secrets? Wouldn't Governor Romney have taken such an oath?"

Continuing his response:

I think it's important to distinguish the church's role as an
institution and the roles of its members as individuals.

Reuters should have known enough to challenge this statement by asking "But hold on here, didn't Joseph Smith teach that the US constitution would hang by a thread, and the Latter Day Saints would save it? Didn't he believe in an LDS theocracy, so strongly in fact that he not only ran for President, but raised his own army? And wasn't that type of activity among the chief causes of the Mormon persecution, wherein they were driven from place to place in the Church's early years?

I am confident to say there is no secret document that would blow the church out of the water that's been held at a secret vault.

A good follow-up would have been, "Fair enough, but what of the so-called 'salamander letter' that Church officials purchased, that later turned out to be a hoax? Why would they believe it even remotely possible that such a wacky story could be anything but a scam? And did they buy it with the intention of displaying it to the world, or did they intend to bury it? And, had the Book of Abraham facsimiles been in the Church's possession, rather than in the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art when they were rediscovered in 1966, knowing what they know now, would those facsimiles ever have seen the light of day?


Comment
noggin

Of course Joseph Smith consummated his plural marriages. There is a bit of ostriching among the Latter Day Saints in that they don't want to picture their prophet sexing up a 14, 15, and 16 year old girl. It's repulsive as the day is long.

But we know it happened because EVERY single polygamist in the church who was taught by Joseph Smith himself how to behave sexually in their marriages was having sex with and bearing children with their plural wives. They learned to do it from the founder of the religion. Besides, read section 132-- it's all there... "do the works of Abraham" (i.e. have sex, have children).

There is no escaping that.

Smith had sex with teens. End of story. Makes you just want to run off and go do an endowment session now doesn't it??


Comment
duryen

My main problem with Christofferson's response is the assertion that marriage this young was common at the time. It was not. JS was 19 when he first married to Emma Hale who was 17 (that is NOT 14, in case you missed that) and her dad was STILL pissed that they ran off together. He did not have a "Well she's old enough to make those decisions for herself," attitude you might expect if it was common place to marry extremely young. At the time it wasn't considered statutory rape, but women were still considered chattel, could not own land, and it was thought impossible to rape a spouse. My polygamous ancestor didn't marry anyone under the age of 20 - why not if it was common? His hottie wife that Ole Joe wanted, but she turned him down, married Orson at 21 and was his first wife. It wasn't "just the way of the time." It was actually much more despicable when you realize women didn't usually hit menses until around 17 back then - today girls hit menses around 12-14 - so we are talking about someone that was not even fully sexually developed.

****MY THOUGHTS****

Occasionally, I run into a block, unable to bring up points that I haven't brought up before. After 140 posts about Mormonism, I thought I had pretty much come up with the main hitting points. But then things like this interview come up, and I just have to share it with the Outer Darkness.

As I was reading the reactions posted by members of the PostMormon.org, I just got that sick twisted feeling all over, trying to picture what it would be like to allow my 14 year old daughter, no, make that SACRIFICE my only daughter in order to ensure my place in the Celestial Kingdom. Read Helen Mar Kimball's own story, and then substitute your own daughter or niece or granddaughter in her place. Would there be ANYTHING that could convince you that selling her virginity to a man 24 years her senior would be justified by God?

Another thing that was brought up recently {and I can't pinpoint where} was that polygamy as a device to raise up seed is completely absurd when you consider that a woman can only be pregnant once at a time, and there is no reason she couldn't fulfill the law with her OWN lawfully wedded husband, without also having to be married in secret to Joseph Smith, via 'celestial marriage". Some of these men came home from two years abroad [missions to England] to find their wives had been taken by Joseph as plural wives, and pregnant by him upon their arrival! But, lest Emma would find out, these husbands kept their wives home with them and raised up Joseph's kids as their own. How was this populating the Earth any faster? Making these women pregnant without any breaks in between, THAT'S GOD'S PLAN???? Pardon me while I sneeze: BULLSHIT!

Polygamy was NOT used to 'care for' the widowed, orphaned, or homeless women!!! It was used to purchase a 'glorious reward', namely being included in Joseph Smith's celestial harem of wives. This was going on LONG before the trek out west, and it was the underlying reason for the invention of the temple endowments and the oaths taken by those secret members of Joseph's circle of polygamists.

They weren't merely promising to never reveal handshakes, they promised never to rat out each other, or Joseph. If they attempted to do so, they were promptly disavowed, excommunicated, blacklisted and run out of town, their wives and daughters cast out with them and their reputations completely raked through from the pulpit.

One read through of the Nauvoo Expositor, the one and only issue that threatened to expose Joseph Smith of his lascivious acts should be convincing enough, and that is precisely why Joseph ordered the press destroyed and the issues burned. He was taken to jail to face charges of TREASON and RIOTING for using the Nauvoo Legion to do his bidding. He was killed by a mob for being a child molester, and for breaking oaths of Freemasonry. There was no 'religious persecution' to escape from. There was only the legacy of a twisted, sick pedophile.