133: Women React to Mormon Land – Part Two

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Mormon Land podcast episode 345: Did Joseph Smith Practice Polygamy?
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[00:00] Michelle: Welcome to 132 Problems revisiting Mormon polygamy. I am so excited to finally be releasing the long awaited part two of the panel discussion that Karen, Whitney, and Gwendolyn and I had on Matt Bowman and Brook LeFever’s Mormonland episode on polygamy deniers or polygamy skeptics or whatever they want to call us. So anyway, this was a great conversation. I’m so glad you’re here. I hope you enjoy it. We are here for the 2nd part of our panel discussion on the Mormonland episode. The first part, we had such a fantastic discussion that I think we’ve all been really excited to get back together. So, again, I am here with Gwendolyn Wine, and you can find her YouTube channel. It’s just Gwendolyn Wine on YouTube. She does excellent work. Whitney Horning. who is the author of Joseph Smith Revealed A Faithful Telling, as well as soon to be 3 other books. So, and we wanted to announce again that Joseph Smith revealed will be coming out on, or probably already is out on Audible, is on audio. So, um, we’ll link to that below. That’s great news. And Whitney has another book that’s being published. Remind me of the title of it, Whitney.

[01:22] Whitney Horning: Essays on gospel topics.

[01:25] Michelle: That’s right. Excellent. And also, I am here with Karen Hyatt to remind everybody, she is what I like to call my fairy thought producer who showed up on my doorstep and is editing my videos and is an immense help. And she is working on her own documentary of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. So many people have asked for like a 2 hour or less video making the strongest arguments. And that’s really hard cause it’s such a huge topic and we can’t keep Fighting more and more. But that is what, what, um, what Karen is working on. Apparently, I’m gonna mix up everyone’s names today. I’ve been talking to my kids too much today. So, OK, I, we, we talked about so many things, but we only made it through half of the clips. So we’re just gonna dive right back into our, um, clips. Let me see which screen I need. Here it is. And I’m going to replay the last clip that we left off on, Brooke talking about how to be a good historian, which I love what she has to say.

[02:22] Brooke LeFevre: History is inherently, it’s a discipline in which we argue with each other and we, we try to reinterpret things and we analyze evidence and um we’re constantly kind of making new arguments and reinterpreting the past um as we try to figure out what happened. Um, so I, there’s nothing that’s you know sure in history and every time we get new evidence, we will reanalyze and uh re-evaluate the narratives that we’ve been telling.

[02:52] Michelle: OK, so for those who remember in the first half, we talked a lot about the great things that both Matt and Brooke had to say about history and basically their admissions that the evidence for Joseph Smith’s polygamy is deeply problematic. It’s what was the word that, um, Matt used for like it’s very scant and in missing.

[03:16] Karen Hyatt: The paucity,

[03:17] Michelle: the paucity of any contemporary, thank you, Karen, of any contemporary evidence, and then the highly problematic nature of the main body of evidence, which is the, the 30 to 40 years later, Utah evidence. And I included this next clip just because it, I think it demonstrates well how people usually think about this. I really do appreciate that Matt and Brooke were more measured and more honest in their statements, but I think it was shocking to the interviewers, so I wanted to play. Um, this next question from Peggy Fletcher sack, where she seems completely flummoxed, like doesn’t even know where to go because she’s so shocked by what she’s hearing. At least that’s what I hear here in this next um attempt to come up with a question, so I’ll just say that. So Um,

[04:09] Brooke LeFevre: Brooke and Matt. Well, Brooke, what, what do the women who purportedly married Joseph have to say about all

[04:16] Michelle: this? Did you guys notice that?

[04:20] Gwendolyn Wyne: Yes. When you’re listening to the, to this podcast, there’s something that kind of happens where I started to think, are they arguing in favor or against Joseph’s polygamy? Because it sounds like they’re saying maybe he wasn’t. And they keep using these, um, using these theoretical concepts that as soon as you apply them to this, really do show maybe he wasn’t a polygamist. So I thought it was so funny, and I think that’s exactly why Peggy kind of stumbles a bit because she’s saying, I thought you guys were coming on to tell me how obvious it is that Joseph is a polygamist, but you keep saying these things that sound like you’re saying the opposite. What’s going on here? And it’s really, it’s really funny.

[04:57] Michelle: That was my thought exactly was, it was almost shocking. And, and again, I think I said this in the first half. I, I don’t want to take credit if it’s not, you know, it’s not, I’m not saying I’m taking credit, but I do think it’s interesting how different Matt was between the article and this Mormonland episode. And the thing I know of is that we exchanged emails in that time. I, I, I, I, I mean, maybe it would have been exactly the same anyway, but I was very surprised by how different the tone was. And I actually really appreciated it. And it just like you said, it made me think, if you guys would apply what you preach to this topic, we would be having very different conversations. It seems like they talk a good game, but they don’t, for some reason, they can’t apply the principles of good histo historical work to the topic of Joseph’s polygamy. So, OK, we’ll go on to talk about Brooke’s answer of of part of what she has to say about what the women have to say.

[05:57] Brooke LeFevre: Um, it is clear that these sources are not perfect, right? These are sources that are recorded 30, 40 years after they had been supposedly married or sealed to Joseph Smith. We can show problems with those sources. We can show problems with the affidavits, um, and that doesn’t mean as historians when that happens, that doesn’t mean you discount all of those sources, it means you analyze why there are those problems.

[06:24] Michelle: OK, I’m doing all the talking so far. Sorry, I, I love

[06:28] Karen Hyatt: that. But she said these are 30 or 40 years after they were supposedly married Ursule to Joseph. Like, I, we couldn’t say it better, could we?

[06:36] Whitney Horning: Right. Right. And she says, and she acknowledges there’s problems with them and then says, well, that’s why we need to analyze them as if we don’t.

[06:46] Michelle: Right? That’s exactly what we do. Like, in our last conversation, I think I just grabbed 5 quickly to show them. I think that we spend way more effort analyzing the affidavits and the later testimonies than the other side does by far, and I, she goes on to say this again. So did anyone have anything else to say before I Well,

[07:09] Whitney Horning: I just wanted to point out that Peggy uses the word purportedly. The the wives who are purport, the women who are purportedly married as wives, and then, um, Brooke says supposedly, so I thought, yeah, we’re making progress because if this is a done deal, then you don’t use words that leave room for doubt. So I was very happy to hear them using words that, you know, because leave room for um These women have been married, right?

[07:43] Michelle: That was such a good catch. That totally went over my head, but I do know I loved the tone of this entire section of the interview, so much better than what we usually hear. And that’s a, that’s a big part of why they’re talking about, they’re kind of having the discussion of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, right? Like, is he or isn’t he? What, what, how strong is the evidence? Oh, it’s not very strong at all. So they’re At least, maybe they’re doing it subconsciously, not intentionally, because they’re having to look at the evidence. They’re having to acknowledge how problematic and weak the evidence is.

[08:16] Whitney Horning: Right?

[08:17] Michelle: The other thing that I found so appalling is she said, we don’t just ignore them. As if, do you know what I mean? As if we just ignore them. And I, I think she mentions it later, and I’ll give my thoughts about that because I think it’s an interesting claim that she makes, that again, I, I think shows how limited their understanding of our work and our movement actually is.

[08:42] Karen Hyatt: Yeah, I, I don’t ignore them at all. I love some of their testimony. It’s like you got your marriage date wrong. Thank you. You, you know,

[08:50] Michelle: there’s both dates or all three, all three, none of them are right.

[08:54] Karen Hyatt: And it’s like, are you kidding? It’s great to analyze them, and usually they fall apart. That’s the part that we, it’s like analyze it, but then look at the results of your analysis. That’s really helpful too. It’s to say, well, I analyzed it and I found out that that it fell apart. But they tend to go, well, I guess she’s just bad with dates or he’s just bad with dates, you know, what, um, Noble, uh, Joseph Bates Noble like gave, I mean, Don Bradley totally acknowledges that he gave a multiple, you know. You know, multiple dates for when he, yeah, for when he supposedly sealed Louisa Beamman to Joseph Smith. And it’s like, and it was at my house and he hadn’t moved there yet. And then they just go, Well, so we moved that date back then. I’m like, What do you mean you move it back? No, you don’t move it back. You, you acknowledge you’ve got it wrong and weigh it that way.

[09:47] Michelle: Yeah, and, and, and, and consider what it might be saying other than in your one narrow viewpoint. I, I found it to be fascinating. But, like, anyway, I, she said, well, this, in these next series of clips, I think it’s amazing the contradictions and like the internal contradictions, how she contradicts herself in so many ways. And so, and, and just, uh, anyway. I’ll, I’ll go on and play these and we could discuss them cause it’s quite, this is, this is the part that I really most wanted to talk about are the several clips coming up.

[10:21] Brooke LeFevre: So I think one of the more interesting questions to ask is, how are those sources shaped by the changing nature of polygamy?

[10:31] Michelle: Again, I feel like that’s exactly what we’re asking, right? We just see the changing nature of polygamy differently. She acknowledged in her first clip that these are 30 to 40 years later, and then they continue to say, Well, you wouldn’t expect them to be perfect when it’s that much later, right? But the problem is they throw out all of the contemporary evidence just like they claim that we throw out all this later evidence, which we don’t, we analyze it. They throw out all of the contemporary evidence, right, and they just assume, come to it with the assumption they were lying. And come up with reasons with no evidence to support their reasons. So, OK, we’ll we’ll go on to the next clip.

[11:13] Brooke LeFevre: We know that the understandings of polygamy shift. So it’s interesting to look at these later sources and say, OK, what are they um misremembering or what are they interpreting in light of this, these changes, in light of how polygamy is now understood in the 1870s and 1880s. That’s something that as historians, we do, we analyze the, those sources in that way.

[11:36] Michelle: OK, so can I share an example of like how we analyze those sources in that way? This is exactly what we’re doing is looking at the changing nature of polygamy, as in, in Navo, they had to hide it from Joseph. Joseph always preached against it. Then we can see the process of Brigham and others. Grooming the states into it, we can see the explosion of marriages and children after Joseph and Hyrum’s death. Then we see them coming to Utah and developing the narrative, right? That’s, that’s how I see the changing nature of polygamy. Does anyone have anything to add before I show these examples? OK. So let me go ahead and share. Yes.

[12:16] Whitney Horning: I just wanted to chime in on that. I, I found that a really fascinating thing for her to say, because we, uh, I can see, I can understand it from a historical perspective, if we’re just speaking about historical facts and events, but This is a church that’s a religion that was supposed to have been restored to be the true church and to have all truth. So I find it fascinating that if you take what she’s saying and and overlay it over a church that is supposed to have been restored and have all truth. Then it shouldn’t have continued to shape and change. And on one hand, right, and then you could say, well, we, we have a church that believes in continuing revelation and the restoration continues. So is that what she’s trying to allude to that Brigham Young changed doctrine because he was the then current prophet, and we do have a kind of a belief in a teaching that a living prophet kind of trumps a dead prophet. I mean I’m, I’m just not totally sure what she meant by that because to me, I don’t think that’s a good thing that sources are adapted to the changing nature of polygamy because to me that means then why and why was it, if it was restored by Joseph. Why would the affidavits, why would the the sources 30 and 40 years later have to be different? And what are they covering up? What are they, what are they, um, different for? I don’t know. I just found that a very curious thing coming from her because I couldn’t tell if she was speaking as an academic historian or if she was trying to speak as a member of the LDS Church. Does that make sense where I was a little confused by what she was. trying to say?

[14:15] Michelle: I’m not even sure if she is a member of the church or if she is an active or believing member. I, I didn’t see that in her bio anywhere. So I’m not sure. I would assume she was speaking as a historian, but I think the point still stands that in that they are acknowledging that what they claim to have been Joseph’s polygamy looked nothing like Brigham. And early Utah polygamy, and they are acknowledging that the narrative completely changed, and they are acknowledging, again, that the affidavits are not believable or are not historically accurate. They don’t paint an accurate picture of what they claim to be talking about, Joseph’s polygamy, right? Like, and so

[14:56] Whitney Horning: then, so then are they, OK, so I’m, I’m just trying to, I think I understand what’s going on, but let me just try to figure this out for maybe listeners. So then In a, in a simplified way then, are Matthew and Brooke confused by us and our stance because they think, you know, the experts have spoken, it’s done, it’s a done deal. Joseph did polygamy. And then they’re trying to, you know, I do think they’re trying to give us kind of a little bit of a benefit of the doubt. Um, they are kind of saying, well, maybe the history isn’t settled, right? And so, where, where is it? We are saying what Bergham Young and the early Utah Mormons doing doing did with polygamy didn’t look anything like what purportedly Joseph Smith was doing. So are they then trying to, are they looking at it with the lens of, OK, it’s obviously different. So therefore, all the sources are now different and they’re based on it being different instead of just saying it’s different because Joseph didn’t do it. Like, does that make sense where I’m kind of like I’m really just, it’s a very for me. What we’re gonna continue to play here, the clips get more and more confusing where. Where they’re at, like, they’re just like they start to me speaking out of both sides of their mouth because they’ve got to uphold their PhD for historians, but yet there what what the work we’re doing is because there is truth in the fact that the sources quite honestly don’t support what they claim Joseph Smith did.

[16:45] Michelle: I completely agree with that. Yeah, and I think just going along with that, this, this is a point better made later, so I’ll just make it now and then we can, you know, I won’t make it again later, but I think it is so interesting. Uh, as we go forward in these clips, we’ll get to the parts where they talk, where they explain why our movement is growing, why more and more people, which is so offensive, we’ll talk about it. But what is amazing to me is that they always attribute it, it, attribute it solely to motivated reasoning. We just have our reasons that we have to believe this. But I really honestly believe that we have about the least motivated reasoning of any of the groups, right? The polygamists absolutely need Joseph to have been a polygamist, right? Anybody in that camp, anyone who is practicing polygamy or who Likes the idea of polygamy, right? Then the um very rigid, um black and white thinking boundary keeping type members of the church need Joseph Smith to have been a polygamist because they need to redeem Brigham Young. Right? As we’ve talked about before, the anti-Mormons who want to hate, who do hate Joseph, need Joseph to be a polygamist because that’s the base foundation, the biggest block building block they have of why Joseph was so horrible. And then the historians themselves have to protect the historical consensus, right? Like, like, even those who are softening toward us always say if they if they get into a conversation now I now I don’t agree with Michelle. I don’t agree with that standpoint, but we should take it more seriously but they even have to say I’m on your team. I’m not a heretic. Like that’s what it is they can’t become heretical from the historical consensus. There’s a ton of pressure. We, and this comes up later too, in many ways have gone against our best interest, have gone against our training or as active members of the church, we have all put ourselves at some degree of risk. We take an immense amount of heat and abuse, right? And so I can’t see how we’re the group that is always accused of motivated reasoning at like. I think that we should just wipe that out of the conversation, because I don’t think it’s true. So, um, back to this piece of evidence I wanted to show, however, let me get this. So we’re talking about the changing nature of polygamy, right? And the best explanation for that. So I just want to add you guys, I know, all know what this is. This is the times and seasons for October 1st, 1842. And it is where, if you can see, I don’t know if it’s big enough, they have to do a big editorial note to explain. This all away to tell us how to think about it before we get to it. But you can see right here they publish on marriage the full statement on marriage doctrine and covenants. This was 42, so it would have still been Section 101 in the doctrine and Covenants, which to remind people, says among other things that as this church has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife and one woman but one husband. Except in the case of death when either is at liberty to marry again. They published that entire statement, and then we can go down here below it. They write, We have given the above rule of marriage as the only one practiced in this church to show that Dr. John C. Bennett’s secret life system is a matter of his own manufacture and further to disabuse the public ear and show that the said Bennett and his misanthropic friend Origin Bachelor are are perpetuating a foul and infamous slander upon an innocent people. And need but be known to be hated and despised. And now for the polygamy lovers who will claim he only was ever declaring against Bennett’s spiritual wife system. The reason he talked about that is because Bennett had just published all of these letters in the newspaper. He’d written all of his letters accusing Joseph Smith of polygamy, and there wasn’t, and, and nobody had the term. Um, celestial plural marriage, right? It was spiritual wifery and that term was used into late Utah by people who were involved in this originally in Navvo. So it goes on to say in support of this, of this position, we present the following certificates. Then it says, We, the undersigned members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and residents of the city of Nauvoo, skipping ahead, do hereby serve. and declare that we know of no other rule or system of marriage. That would include celestial plural marriage. That’s a different system or rule of marriage than what they have published. We know of no other rule or system of marriage than the one published from the doctrine and covenants, and we give this certificate to show that John C. Bennett’s secret wife system, turn the page, is a Creature of his own, of his own make, and as we know of no such society in this place, nor never did. And then you can see the list of signatures, which includes, among several others, Wilfred Woodruff, who I don’t think was involved at this point. Whitney, do you have evidence different than that? I, I don’t, I,

[22:07] Whitney Horning: I do not think he became involved until after Joseph’s death.

[22:11] Michelle: Yes, I agree. I think these signatures were actually sincere, right? And then interestingly, it has N K Whitney, who, according to the narrative, I’m going to do my episode on the Whitney documents, had just had, um, um, his, his daughter married Sarah Anne, married to Joseph, a few months before he performed the ceremony. And, by the way, had taken her with his wife for a little special booty call. And the one room that Joseph was staying in just a few months earlier. So that’s Newell K. Whitney. And then we have the women that signed theirs right below it. We the underside members of the Ladies Relief Society and married females to certify and declare that we know of no system of marriage being practiced in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Save the one contained in the Book of doctrine and covenants, and we give this certificate to the public to show that John C. Bennett’s secret wife system. is a disclosure of his own make, and it’s signed by Emma Smith. Elizabeth Ann Whitney, that’s Sarah Ann’s mother, Noel K. Whitney’s wife. She’s signed this right now. Sarah M. Cleveland, Eliza R. Snow, right? And again, I believe that they are sincere. None of them, I don’t, well, Eliza Snow, there’s some scuttlebutt about, um, her being possibly having been seduced by John Bennett before he left.

[23:36] Gwendolyn Wyne: But here she’s still saying, This we know that this isn’t how the church wants us to be and we agree that this is the law and the rules that we all consented to to be to be governed by and they’re saying there’s no other system whether she was seduced by it or not, she’s saying I’m, I’m putting my name to this there’s no other system. This is the only system is the public system of one man and one woman. That’s all that’s it.

[24:05] Michelle: Absolutely agree. The only reason I brought that up is to show that she may be somewhat compromised by the polygamists, because they’re the ones that would know. Joseph Smith and Emma Smith wouldn’t know. And she, and, and, and we don’t know. You know, there’s just some people that find evidence to make that case. But yes, she is signing this to say this is not part of the church. And then you can go on and. Read the rest of the names of the women who signed this. And an interesting thing is that of these men, only one of them filled out an affidavit, and that’s Aaron Johnson, who claims to have heard Joseph teach polygamy later on. So we can see him change his testimony. Newell K. Whitney never said anything other than this. He died. Before Elizabeth wrote her a her, um, autobiography before any of the claims were made, right? So there is the changing nature of polygamy. There’s one piece of it. And then we can go on, let me get back to my page. So

[25:03] Karen Hyatt: can I, can I say something about Eliza Arsena in this nonsense? So, um, she signs that, and it clearly says, well, so later she writes to Joseph F. Smith. And supposedly, I mean it’s an undated and it’s typewritten, but it’s it at least it is typewritten when there were typewriters and it’s full of errors in the typing so yeah yeah so it seems like it’s probably legit but but she tells him. She’s justifying why she signed that then, saying that she knew of nothing else but monogamy, but then said that she had been married to Joseph Smith 3 months before she signed it. So what the heck? Like, they contradict each other. So she writes to him and she says, um, It’s perfectly easy to explain, and she says, at the, at the time the Sisters of the relief Society signed our article, I was married to the prophet. We made no allusion to any other system of marriage than Bennett’s. His was prostitution and it was his, and he succeeded in pandering his course on the credulity of unsuspecting by making them believe that he was authorized. And so she’s saying we were only signing that in reference to John Bennett’s system of marriage, but it’s not true. Like read that, and it says of no other system of marriage save the one in the doctrine and covenants. So she specifically the system of marriage that she does mention in there is. Monogamy. So it’s this letter’s a lie, the original, I mean, I think like you do, that the original was real and this is the lie later. Well,

[26:47] Michelle: isn’t it? It’s the same pattern everywhere. There’s all of this evidence, and then they come up with all these twisted, ridiculous explanations to try to explain it away so that they can, and, and this, guess what was I, someone can remind me, I didn’t look it up. Let me see really quickly. I believe that this was not included in the, um, And yeah, sure enough, this was not included in the Joseph Smith history in the church’s history that they compiled this um Times and Seasons article, right? We had to get this from the prices and from other sources because this was not to be had in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ histories anywhere that I that I have seen. And so

[27:26] Gwendolyn Wyne: that’s why, that’s why Eliza was able to say those things was because it wasn’t an easily accessible history for the saints. She was able to say. No, no, we were just talking about Bennett, and no one was able to say, Well, it says right here, we know of no other system, but now we do have that. So that, that is why we were, we’re kind of saying it’s not that crazy. It’s not a conspiracy to say, let’s look at all of this again, because it actually doesn’t hold up to their own words and their own justifications, which, frankly, is wonderful. I am grateful that this isn’t part of the original teachings of the church. I think that’s great. Right, do you guys,

[28:03] Karen Hyatt: right. Do you guys remember the, the, the lawyer, um, the questioner for the Temple Lot case, he actually Um, or it was Judge Phillips, sorry, it was Judge Phillips that says, wow, this must be really embarrassing for Wilfred Rudruff to have signed this very document that we’re looking at right now that says he knew of no other system than monogamy, but he now he claims that he was, oh my gosh, that he knew Joseph was a polygamist before he signed that. It’s, it’s really searing.

[28:34] Michelle: Right, and that, that’s exactly right. And what Gwendolyn said, um, is why, again, let’s help the historians out as we go. This is why this movement is growing. If you want to understand it’s because of things like that. This, the point that Gwendolyn just made that they were able to lie about this source because nobody. See it. Now we can see it, and we can see the lie to try to explain it away. That does not help the standard narrative to feel credible. But, um, so, so quickly, the point I wanted to make was that in looking at this, only people who came to Utah ever changed their story, right? Like Wilford Woodruff. Those who didn’t come to Utah didn’t, and someone can tell me if I’m wrong. I looked it all up, and that’s what I saw. Unless, unless I missed something, but that’s what I thought. And so now I want to share. This, and I’ll just show you, here we have um Elizabeth and Whitney’s and Eliza Snow’s um affidavits that they filled out in Utah that tell a completely different story. So when we are, which we don’t ignore, we analyze them, right? But as we analyze them, we compare them to that earlier document and say, OK, what’s going on here? What’s the best explanation for it? How does this make the most sense? And these are the conclusions we come up with. I think I completely agree that it is very. Important to look at the documents, these later documents, and analyze them just as she is saying. So, yeah, so let me take this off and we’ll go on to play the rest of this clip. I, I just want to demonstrate how we are actually doing what she’s saying that needs to be done, which it sounds like she’s not doing. So we’ll continue with the clip.

[30:22] Brooke LeFevre: But you still use those sources, you still analyze those sources, you still work with those sources.

[30:30] Whitney Horning: So what are the

[30:30] Brooke LeFevre: problems with how these deniers are analyzing this, this historical evidence? One of the, one of the big problems is that in general, they do just dismiss any non-contemporary sources.

[30:45] Michelle: OK. So do, do you guys know why she says that? I think I know why she says that.

[30:52] Karen Hyatt: Who, who’s, who is dismissing, like, who’s like, I don’t listen to anything, but,

[30:57] Michelle: well, so my take on it is, so they keep attributing this movement to Denver Snuffer, which, and Phil Davis, which makes me or Justin Griffin, which makes me crazy for a million reasons. But from my, um, experience with Denver Snuffer, How kind of his shorthand to talk about the evidence is just if you, if you look at everything before, um, July 27, 1844, there’s nothing, right? That’s kind of his shorthand for explaining how he finally changed his mind, which he did after, I know after Whitney did, after most of us did, you know. And this is so weird.

[31:36] Karen Hyatt: He, this, this reflects on. Their methods, I mean this really reflects on their methods. If it’s 2024, the current day, and they’re trying to figure out what the polygamy denier movement, what’s motivating them and how they’re doing it, and they come up with Denver snuffer instead of you, Jeremy, Rob Fotheringham, Whitney, Gwendoline, like if they’re looking around and they find Denver, and they’re like, this is our best guess as to what they’re doing. That really says something important. How much worse are they doing with, with 100 year old documents, you know,

[32:18] Michelle: that was my exact mystery. The words I wrote was that this is like shockingly sloppy and or ignorant sloppy and ignorant to first of all, keep claiming that Denver is leading out in this movement and then take that one little shorthand way that Denver, who has not produced content on this topic, to take that one way that he explains that is one way that he thinks about it. And then use that to define our entire movement and talk about that that’s our methodology is I, I’m like who are you like do better, right?

[32:55] Whitney Horning: I would, I would say that I think the reason Denver. Well, I don’t, I mean, he’s not here to speak for himself, but he is a lawyer. And so if we were to take this to a court of law, contemporary evidence at the time of the event. It is considered typically firsthand information, right? And it is it is exactly. And then you, if you, if we were to take this to a court of law today in which you talked about the last time we met with Judge Phillips, it, it already has been tried in a court of law, and Judge Phillips, again, was not convinced by the later affidavits and other information that came about. And so I think in some ways, um, Denver Snuffer, being a lawyer to him, you know, it’s like, well, case closed as a lawyer, contemporary evidence outweighs. What’s interesting to me is I’ve actually had a lot of people, a very common thing that is said to me. Um, when people have heard me speak or when, you know, they’ve seen your show, Michelle, and, and they get in discussion with me. It’s amazing to me how many people have in the church have no idea Joseph ever spoke out against polygamy. That is like that just like blows them away. They don’t know what to do with that. And I, and I’m like, well, you’re either going to have to Except Brian Hale’s answer, which is, you know, all these carefully worded denials and maybe his, when he said, you know, you, you’ve accused me of having 7 wives. I can only find one. Well, that’s because all of his other wives weren’t at the meeting and so then he could, you know, wink wink nod nod. I’m not really lying, you know, so you have to believe that or you do have to look at what Joseph spoke out against it and What amazes me is how many times these types of shows that they want to support the polygamy narrative. They will, they will kind of just like in passing, like, well, Joseph only spoke out, you know, maybe once or twice. It’s astounding how often, I mean, you just read a newspaper article where he again printed the law to the church on marriage, which is one man, one woman. And so Joseph just over and over and over again in a Especially in Navvo, it really was ratcheting up in Navvo, you know, with John C. Bennett, and then, um, Brigham Young and Hebrew see Kimball come back from England and they had started, definitely, if not in New England, they definitely had started the practice in England, and there’s plenty of evidence about that in their own words and in their own handwriting. Um, they come back

[35:47] Michelle: historians have not dealt with

[35:50] Whitney Horning: exactly. And so they get back just after John C. Bennett’s all blown up, Heber and Hebrew C. Kimball and Brigham Young. And so I do think that what what does give power to anything is when you tell, um, a lie with just enough truth in it. And so I do think that a lot of the statements and the things that we even continue to say today about polygamy were born out of the need for those men to keep their practice secret in Navo. And so, yes, and so, yes, and I think that um I think that, you know, we’ve also been accused our movement of people um who believe Joseph never practiced polygamy and fought against it. We’re also accused of, you know, that it’s got to be this grand conspiracy, you know, thousands of people in on it, and I’m like, all you needed was, you know, a handful. And, and if you go look at a lot of these affidavits, a lot of the people will make statements, people who talk about being taught the principal, they will make statements that they heard it from so and so, and that so and so isn’t Joseph. Well, so and so told me. Well, OK. So that’s why they, that’s why I believe the contemporary evidence is so important. When I die someday and my kids get a hold of my journals, I want them to believe the words I wrote as opposed to, especially if I wrote over and over and over again about something, as opposed to maybe what, like people are saying about me. I mean, my kids, my grandkids are, they’re gonna find stuff that Brian Hayes has said about me and and other people out there doing this work. And so, You know, are they gonna believe what other people who’ve never quite frankly ever met me or ever spoken to me are out there saying about me? Or I’m hoping they’re gonna, you know, read my journals and my words in the books I’ve written, and like, believe me for what I’ve said.

[37:56] Michelle: I love that. I love that. And I was kind of amused. Let me just really quickly, I was kind of amused when you said that the way to pass off the story is to tell the lie that has a little bit of truth in it. And I didn’t know if you were talking about Navu, if you’re talking about the historians right now because that comment when she says they, they disregard everything after. 1844. I’m like, OK, that’s not true, but the little kernel of truth is you can find quotes of Denver snuffer saying that and they’re claiming that Denver Snuffer is the leader of this movement. Therefore they can make that claim because there’s a little sliver of truth. It’s so I thought that was interesting, Gwendolyn.

[38:35] Gwendolyn Wyne: So this this comment that she said that we disregard everything after 1844. I think that when you piece through the history, as we do, and even just looking at it chronologically, you can see why we would preference things before Joseph’s killed. Here’s just one quote from Brigham Young, which is actually the first time I read it, I read it in the church, published, um, 1st 50 years, the, the history of the relief Society. They got that in the book, and I was so grateful for it because it really opened my eyes as to what was going on. This is Brigham Young on March 9, 1845. So we’re just less than a year after Joseph died, this is what Brigham says. Um, he says, talking about relief society and how he doesn’t want them to continue to meet. I say I will curse every man that lets his wife or daughters meet again until I tell them. What are relief societies for? To relieve us of our best men. They relieved us of Joseph and Hiram. That is what they will lead to. I don’t want the advisory counsel of any woman. They would lead us down to hell. So yeah, we do take. Subsequent statements in light of the leader’s comments right there. We know that that was the attitude, and so anything that you see after Joseph’s death is going to have to be filtered through this lens that The women were known, if you speak against polygamy, that’s gonna, that’s gonna kill the men. It’s gonna lead the church to hell. So we’re gonna kind of look at that a little bit differently. And I think that’s completely fair. I’m surprised that the historians don’t look at those things more closely.

[40:19] Michelle: I love that. And do you know what’s interesting about that quote? When you find it, I can’t remember which church, um, press, and which, which historian site it is. It might be the church historian press, but they clarify again, they write little, this is how I think about it, and they say in that this is harsh but. You didn’t have the benefit of it being edited, as many other of the sermons were, so they acknowledge that they do that. And the thing that I found fascinating, well, and I think in one of those because he gave that speech twice, I think once to the elders and once to the was it the 70s or the Yes.

[40:54] Gwendolyn Wyne: To the 70s, later that day to the 70s.

[40:57] Michelle: Yeah. And in that one, I believe he says, for God knew what Eve was, which I thought was fascinating. And, um, and so anyway, I think that the thing that’s interesting is, now we have the Joseph Smith papers and we can look through all of the contemporary contemporaneous records of Joseph’s words and We don’t need the benefit of being edited out to not be horrible, like Brigham’s apparently do. So they’re acknowledging in that that they have changed the history and that we should expect it to not be, that’s all of these reasons are the reasons why historians, you need to preference prioritize contemporary sources. That’s a like. Universally well understood historical practice that you are failing to do in this case, which is shocking to me. And then, uh, so if, if we have to choose, first of all, we’re not throwing out the later evidence. We are analyzing it and trying to understand it and using it to help us, to help clarify our understanding of what was actually happening. But. I feel like they’re throwing out the earlier stuff, you know, they’re accusing us of throwing out the later stuff, but they’re throwing out the contemporary stuff. And if I did have to choose, you know, you can only have one of these baskets, I would choose the contemporary stuff. But the great thing is we don’t have to choose. So, so I would like to invite. Historians and members of the church and all others to try to do a better job of even just looking at analyzing considering the earlier evidence in honesty and curiosity and openness. So OK, we’ll go on to this next clip.

[42:36] Brooke LeFevre: Typically the polygamy deniers will say anything after 1844, we just ignore it. Or they will say we can’t trust these sources from these women. um, this is a, a direct quote from one of them. They, they were women who were under the power of Brigham Young and the Utah Church. This is what Michelle Stone says um she says a lot of these women had to do what they were told.

[43:02] Michelle: OK, I’m gonna pause it right there because Michelle, you,

[43:05] Gwendolyn Wyne: they said your name. I

[43:07] Michelle: can’t believe it. I don’t know if she was supposed to or not, but I do think. I, I appreciate that she did because I think that’s more honest, you know, I was said they mentioned my name that one time. And what made me laugh is that no one was like, Who’s Michelle Stone? Like, it was so apparent that they all know exactly who I am. And probably if they’ve looked into this at all, they would know at least who Whitney is, likely who Gwendolyn is, you know, Karen’s been behind the scenes, so hopefully they’ll know who she is at some point when her, um, documentary comes out. But It’s funny, it kind of revealed and exposed the fact that they are intentionally silencing women’s voices. That is a choice that they are making for their own motivated purposes. And they’ll talk about that later on, but I mean, again, shame on you. Uh, right? Like. Are you kidding me? Let’s, if we’re gonna silence women’s voices, then, you know, who’s actually doing that? Cause we are, anyway, I, I thought that was interesting to, I, I appreciate that she said it, but it, it made it abundantly clear what’s actually happening here. Like giving the credit to Denver and Phil Davis, right? Like, come on. OK, go ahead, Gwendolyn.

[44:31] Gwendolyn Wyne: Well, the, the quote that Brigham said to the 70s later that day, I think really supports um what we’re saying. He said, when I want the sisters of the wives of the members of this church to get up or leave society, I will summon them to my aid. But until that time, let them stay at home. And if you see females huddling together, veto the concern.

[44:53] Michelle: That’s what they’re doing. We’re a group of females huddling together and they’re trying to veto it. They’re trying to silence us.

[45:01] Gwendolyn Wyne: And, and so I think, and they, and if they say Joseph started it relief society, tell them it is a damned lie, and he goes on and on and so for For, for us to be trying to say, look, there’s another perspective is like we’re, we’re literally looking at the words that were said and you’ve said this in another podcast, Michelle, it is almost impossible to find writings from the women in the church in Utah. Before they are allowed to speak in favor of polygamy, it’s just there’s a real silence in Utah,

[45:35] Michelle: including those who kept journals their entire lives, and we just don’t have their Navu journals, right, until they their later reminiscences.

[45:44] Gwendolyn Wyne: So it’s very strange. It’s very strange if you, if you don’t have a willingness to look through this lens, it’s like, oh, that’s curious. I wonder why like 25 years went by. And we don’t have anything from these women. Like, how weird. But if you just look through this lens that the women were intentionally silenced so that polygamy could be indoctrinated. And that’s really sad, then it makes a lot more sense. And you can kind of see clearly why they started speaking up because they were allowed to speak if they said this narrative.

[46:14] Michelle: If they supported the patriarchy, right, which is what we’ll talk about a little bit later as well.

[46:20] Gwendolyn Wyne: And their eternal salvation was, it wasn’t the it wasn’t like Brigham Young wielded this, uh, absolute power over people’s day to day lives, but the authority, I mean, we still have that in the church right now, which is why we get so much pushback for speaking up is because we are told that by questioning. And by speaking up, we’re putting our salvation at risk. We’re putting the salvation of our families, of our, our eternal family. Maybe you won’t get to be with your family if you continue speaking like this, and that’s today. So yes, these women were given a huge amount of spiritual pressure. You can see all over the world people do things and. Dedicate their lives in the most severe sense because they believe that the spiritual threats that are in. Yeah.

[47:16] Michelle: I’m so glad you’ve read that quote as well, from Brigham Young shutting down the relief society. The central purpose of the society was, one, to provide relief, and two, to strengthen the morals of the women so they wouldn’t be deceived. By the nonsense of of these any plural marriage teachings, right? So, considering, like I’ve said this so many times, no polygamist leader gives a platform to a woman who is fighting against polygamy. That does not happen. And Joseph not only gave Emma the platform and sustained her and told all of the women to sustain her and listen to her. And, right, like he fully sustained her in that calling, and he did everything he could to support the relief society. He gave them a plot of land, he, you know, everything he could do and gave them their own independence and platforms to speak. And, you know, he let them use his scribe to, or his ghostwriter to write the voice of innocence for them, and many more things. And then we have Brigham. Shutting it down, speaking this way about women and blaming women, right? So that should be a huge indication of who this actually, who’s this actually was Joseph’s versus Freedom. Another thing they constantly ignore or kind of lamely explain away that in ways that don’t make any sense. Kate Whitney, I went off a little long, sorry

[48:37] Whitney Horning: about

[48:37] Michelle: that.

[48:38] Whitney Horning: No, that was great. So I just wanted to add, you know, she makes when she’s making that statement about you and that. You just give Brigham all this power, and I think, well, that’s one of the things that, that the people, people today, non-Mormons, anti-Mormons, and apologetic Mormons claim that Joseph was kind of this, you know, theocratic, um, leader that had all this power. So, I guess I’m just Always confused a little when things that people are fine that Joseph Smith did, you know, they’re fine, claiming he was the one who restored polygamy, and that there was a restoration of all things and so that he was commanded by God to do it because, you know, the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Jacob had done it. But it’s so it was OK that Joseph did that, but it’s not OK if Brigham did. And then, you know it’s OK if Joseph ruled with, you know, all power and, and was a tyrant, but it’s not OK if Brigham did. You know, Brigham didn’t do that. And I think, you know, for me, as I’ve delved into these topics and really delved into our church history, I have come to fully believe that I did not know Joseph Smith. I knew a caricature of him that I had been taught in in this church growing up. But I didn’t actually know him and so just to, and I actually didn’t really know Brigham Young. So I always knew him as the American Moses. He did great things with colonizing Utah and with keeping the um church alive here in Utah. I mean, I have tremendous gratitude for being raised a member of the church, but to say that our leaders, especially our presidents of the church, don’t have all power, Brigham Young declared himself a king in 1847. There were, there were saints, converts from England. There’s journals of them, of them writing that they were so blessed to come and work for the king, and that they lived in little sheds in his, you know, in on his property, living on bales of hay for their bedding and cooking in open pit fires, but how blessed they were to serve the king, Brigham Young.

[50:49] Michelle: And they were expected to do it without pay and not complain because it was such a privilege to work.

[50:54] Whitney Horning: Yes. Well, I mean, they lived worse than farm animals, right? Like, but he would stand up at conference and he could say, you know, to a man, you’re going to go settle Santa Clara and you’re leaving tomorrow. And they would go do it. I mean, you’re telling me that’s not all power, but even today, you know, if your husband got a call from the church office building tomorrow, and it was President Nelson wants to meet with you and you’re being called as a mission president, you uproot your family and you go. So to say that there isn’t this idea that there’s all this power. And it’s not, I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad or good. I mean, if we’re trying to serve the Lord and build up the kingdom of God, but you have to be really careful. I mean, Joseph from Liberty Jail wrote to the men and said, Um, you know, I’m learning that, um, that most men get a little power as they suppose, and they, um, wield it

[51:57] Michelle: right?

[51:59] Whitney Horning: they exercise unrighteous dominion, and so I just think that it’s just fascinating to me. To be honest, she even said that because this proves the ignorance actually of what the women lived like in Utah, the ignorance of how Brigham ruled the church and he considered the church a kingdom. He did consider himself a king. It took the US government sending an army to dethrone him and to put in place a governor, right? And so, I guess I just think you can throw out all these barbs at us and what we’re trying to do all you want, but all they’re doing is they’re trying to instill fear and they’re trying to make us sound stupid. Like there’s nothing to see here. These are just a bunch of little You know, little ladies, maybe like we’re little clowns or whatever and we don’t know anything. We’re really not doing anything worthwhile or any good research. We’re just and I just you’re like, like that’s kind of cool in a way that we are um. That we’re becoming something to reckon with that they even have to take their time to make something to be and all they can do the best they can do is to try and cast doubt on our work and to instill fear so that people will stay away from it.

[53:26] Michelle: Right. And OK, I love, so you went into this now. She has several more quotes about Brigham Young’s power and about the women, and I love everything you just said. Um, I actually, so I’ll, I’ll play a few more quotes, but I wanted to respond to one of the things you said because I thought about that too, and that was part of why I wanted to show this times and seasons from October 1st, 1842 with Newell and Elizabeth Whitney. To show how much power they’re OK attributing to Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith, how many of his wives, supposed wives, signed this, right, and other men engaging in polygamy, and he had the power to make them outright lie despite his constant ongoing teachings and revelations for the Doctrine of Covenants, the liars shall be cast thrust down to hell and right the Things that Joseph Smith said about lying, and yet he got all of these people to lie with no problem at all. And none of them, like N K. Whitney kept that lie until the end of his life, right? So did, I mean, most of those people kept living that lie. Only a few, like Elizabeth Whitney, as a much older widow, ever contradicted. And Eliza Snow, who gained so much power. So anyway, so that is such, I feel like every argument they make is not consistent, is not well thought out, it’s not applied to both sides. And that was one example. And so Whitney, oh, I loved everything you said. 00, and, and there’s so much more. We’ll talk about it now. The quotes are going to keep. Well, I’ll play the quotes and then we’ll, I’ll play the clips and then we’ll continue talking about it. But yeah, I wanted to address that she said my name and then threw out. I like for me, when she, when she quoted me on, I’m like, that was good. That was one of the best things they’ve said, you know, is acknowledging the sys the patriarchal system that the women were living under, but she just throws it out without responding. Well, here we go to how she throws out what I said on this entire case that we’re talking about.

[55:26] Brooke LeFevre: Dismisses and a lot of these polygamy deniers dismiss the, the sources from the women who claimed to be Joseph Smith’s plural wives, claiming that they were just fabricating these stories that they were lying because Brigham Young forced them to do so. And the problem with that is, of course, they don’t actually have evidence that Brigham Young had that type of power. Did Brigham Young have a lot of power in the Utah church? Absolutely. Um, but there were also women who did speak against him.

[55:58] Michelle: OK, I’ve got a pause it right here, cause that shocked me. I’m, I’m assuming it did all of you as well. Like, that was shocking to claim Brigham didn’t have that kind of power. And this is the main thing. This actually, I have pages and pages, so I decided this needs to be its own episode. So I’m just going to do a Separate episode for me of Brigham’s Power and the evidence for Brigham’s power that I cannot, this is a PhD candidate in history specializing in women’s issues, and she said this. OK, we’ll go on to play more of this clip because there are some things I want to respond to, but I will be doing a full episode. So, Brooke, I hope you’ll watch it because I think it would be helpful for you to see the evidence of Brigham’s totalitarian power that I can’t believe you just denied. I, I find. I don’t even know what to do with that. So let’s continue.

[56:58] Brooke LeFevre: There were women who denounced polygamy. There were women who left the church. There were women who left Utah. Uh, there’s not enough evidence to support this idea that Brigham Young had so much authority that he could force all of these women to lie for their entire lives.

[57:16] Michelle: OK, so I want to respond. One part I do want to respond to is her claim that there were women who left. There were women who stood up against it, right? I guess I, I, I mean, I, I felt like, OK, Analiza Webb had a ton of support and help to get out of Utah and to tell her story, right? To me, when we look at what’s the number one thing that like abusers or controllers, I should say that controlling people do, they isolate. They were in Utah saying they could just get up and leave. I, I, saying that as anybody, but as a feminist historian, I found that to be shocking. It’s like saying, oh, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, so there wasn’t a problem with racism in America, cause look, she stood up against it. I is that a fair comparison? That thing struck me. What in the world is she talking about?

[58:18] Karen Hyatt: Do you guys remember the um. Talk that Brigham Young gave where he talks about how he’s going to liberate the women. I know you guys are. That’s my, yes. I’m gonna, I have to read it, right? Do you want, can I read it real quick? OK, I’m gonna it’s just a couple short paragraphs now for my proposition, and this was like the end of September in Utah, so he talks about two weeks from now, which places you at the middle of October in Utah.

[58:51] Michelle: And can I also just add, we have many cases of people starving to death in Utah, right? Like, there was not a support system. There was not any means of like child support or alimony, right? There was, there was nothing like that.

[59:08] Karen Hyatt: And you had an stor, did you not, that starved

[59:11] Michelle: to

[59:11] Karen Hyatt: death. So

[59:12] Michelle: she was not the only one. There are many cases. extreme poverty. It was usually the stories I know of are usually women who either starved to death or froze to death.

[59:24] Karen Hyatt: Right? So, yeah, so here’s Brigham Young’s words. And if you want to, I mean, it’s funny because it’s like, oh, they claim that the people who are under Brigham’s thumb. I’m like, listen to the words he uses himself in this speech. Now, for my proposition, it is more particularly for my sisters, as it is frequently happening that women say they are unhappy. Like this is how you know they’re unhappy because Brigham’s telling you, men will say, men will say, my wife, though a most excellent woman, has not seen a happy day since I took my second wife. No, not a happy day for a year, says one, and another has not seen a happy day for 5 years. It is said that women are tied down and abused, that they are misused and have not the liberty they ought to have, that many of them are wading through a perfect flood of tears because of the conduct of some men, together with their own folly. I wish my own women to understand that what I’m going to say is for them as well as others, I am going to give you from this time to the 6th day of October next for reflection. That you may determine whether you wish to stay with your husbands or not, and then I am going to set every woman at liberty, my women with the rest, go your way. And my wives have got to do one of two things either round up their shoulders to endure the afflictions of this world and live their religion, or they may leave, for I will not have them about me. I will go into heaven alone rather than have scratching and fighting around me. I will set all at liberty. What the first wife to? Yes, I will liberate you all. That’s his words. I’m going to liberate you. That’s so creepy. And if you’re gonna pretend like, oh, he didn’t have power, and when he’s using this kind of language, that’s just disingenuous.

[1:01:12] Michelle: It’s, it’s insane. Yeah, and I also all of the rhetoric of blood atonement, which we have evidence of was occurring, like, huh, yes, Gwendoline, go ahead.

[1:01:24] Gwendolyn Wyne: And then in our own family stories, Michelle as yours was just mentioned, in my family history, one of my female ancestors was married to Brigham’s brother John Young. And she was a widow, but she was a young widow. When we talk about the widows, we’re not talking about 70 year old widows. We’re talking about twenty-something girls, and John was older. And so he married her, and after, um, they had one, they had one child, and I think his name was Heber actually, but they, after this one child, she could not stand the abuse anymore. She said she would not live. This is, this is one of the histories that That I’ve been able to find. Everything else is a much different story, but this one history talked about her, um, not being willing to live with the abuse anymore. She didn’t feel like he treated her children. In any kind of a loving way. And so she left. But when she left, she wasn’t able to get all the way back across America back to society. She just left and got to the side of a mountain. And Brigham and John tracked her down and came to where she was living on the side of the mountain as a single mom with her children. I think her oldest son at the time was 13, and they tried to persuade her to come back, and she would not be persuaded. She would, she said she would no longer live like that. So, I mean, if you’re a polygamous man and you’ve got a woman living on the side of the mountain, are you gonna try to drag her back? No, fine. Fine. Live. Stay there. And so she did, and they, they allowed that, right? They quote unquote allowed her to live on the side of a mountain and that was how she was able to live out her life. Um, and whether it was because she had a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which they intertwined with polygamy. To

[1:03:13] Michelle: that was just as we think about the gospel now as the temple and follow the prophet, they thought about the gospel as polygamy. That was what was the central doctrine that was, that was how you live the gospel.

[1:03:26] Gwendolyn Wyne: So whether she was not, whether she did not leave because she could not leave, which I think it makes the most sense, how can you leave? What do you, what do you eat? How do you walk across thousands and thousands of miles by yourself as a single mom with your little children? Um, or, or because she stayed because she had a testimony of the gospel and knew that this would work out somehow, um, which is frankly what we’re trying to do today. We’re trying to help this work out. We gotta work this out because it’s not part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This was the thread of their eternal salvation, and people did what they could, but there’s only so much that they could do.

[1:04:05] Michelle: Mhm. Yeah, and just like Whitney was talking about how Brigham would just assign people where to go live, he would also just assign. Teenage girls who they had to go marry, right? And like

[1:04:17] Gwendolyn Wyne: 22 year old widows and they were just they were just given.

[1:04:23] Karen Hyatt: Right. And and he projected that onto Joseph. If you guys know the story that Brigham tells about his own sister Fannie, he, he, he says that there’s this story where Fannie and Joseph and Brigham, I guess we’re all, you know, having a chat. And Fannie says, Well, when I get to the other side, I just want to be a ministering angel. I don’t want to do anything but that. And Joseph said, Oh, sister, you do not know what you want. Here, Brigham, seal me to her right now. And so he sealed his sister Fannie to Joseph, and that’s Brigham’s story. And it’s like, you’re projecting. That’s so gross.

[1:05:01] Michelle: Mhm.

[1:05:03] Whitney Horning: Well, I also, I also want to just make the correlation between what Gwendolyn was just speaking of with her ancestor who left, that that is what Brooke um is doing in this Mormon land. She’s saying, well, there were women who left, so therefore, somehow because there were women. Who did leave somehow then that means that all the women who stayed loved it, enjoyed it and were not coerced into um creating these affidavits in support of it, right? And that’s just like. It’s just a ridiculous comparison.

[1:05:41] Michelle: Oh yeah. I, I completely agree with you. It’s like everything, not everything, I can’t say everything, but again, Brooke talks a good talk, but all of her statements on, on this topic seem to be downright anti-woman. Like, let’s, anyway, we’ll get to it. We’ll get to it more as we go on, but I really did just find this entire section to be. Quite unbelievable, right? And so, OK, we’ll go on to her next to her next claim on this same topic.

[1:06:17] Brooke LeFevre: And the, the problem with it for me, um, I am trained as a, as a feminist historian, right? I’m trained in feminist theory, so I spent a lot of my time analyzing women’s historical agency and it’s completely valid to interrogate the levels of agency that women had within certain patriarchal structures. Women’s historical agency is almost always constrained by certain patriarchal structures.

[1:06:42] Michelle: Did you notice right there, she said, almost always, like, as in there are very few exceptions of where it’s not constrained by patriarchal structure. And so they’re looking like at the history of America and saying how constrained women are. I would like to see a comparison done of, like, rating the amount of patriarchal. control over women and see where Brigham Young’s Utah ranks, right? I’m guessing that Brooke would claim that women in general in America in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s were quite constrained. Yet in Utah, there, there were women who left. So the women like had complete freedom in Utah. I mean, what is she even saying? I’ll keep going, OK.

[1:07:31] Brooke LeFevre: And women can face severe repercussions for resisting or violating those constraints of patriarchy.

[1:07:39] Michelle: All right, isn’t that exactly what we’re saying? I just, this whole thing, this whole talk, I’m shocked.

[1:07:44] Brooke LeFevre: Things that I studied that I’m very interested in and looking at like how do women work within patriarchal structures and how do they, you know, what benefits do they get from supporting patriarchy. So those are questions that I really care about as a historian. However, there’s just not enough evidence to support this idea that women like Eliza. Snow and Zya DeYoung, Mary Elizabeth Rawns Leitner, Sarah Anne Whitney, Helen Mark Kimball, that they were all being forced to say these things, to say that they had been married to Joe Smith, that they were Joe Smith’s plural wives. So, uh, you know, I’m sure Brigham Young wished he had that kind of power in Utah, um, but he just, there’s no evidence to support the fact that he did.

[1:08:28] Michelle: I don’t even know what to say. At

[1:08:30] Karen Hyatt: least she acknowledges that he’s power hungry, like he wished he had that kind of power.

[1:08:36] Michelle: Right. And again, she freely attributes that power to Joseph in Navu. But, you know, like, even though Joseph complete frequently stated in opposition that I don’t like creeds. I don’t feel so good to not be trammeled, and I teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves. And we look at everything he did. He shared power. He Sustained Emma in a role as a woman, right? Then we look at Brigham Young separated out into Utah with a completely different perspective on all of it, and all of a sudden there’s no evidence. I have so many things to say on this. So I, again, I’m gonna do a full episode, so I let you guys talk and then I’ll share a couple of things.

[1:09:15] Gwendolyn Wyne: I do want to give a little historical contrast then now that we’re speaking about, about this. Um, I want to read something from Hiram Smith, and then I’m gonna read something later that Phoebe Woodruff said. So just to kind of context, OK, how the women were encouraged to be. OK, so Hiram talked about polygamy and he was saying this spiritual wifery, polygamy, all the terms, this is not, this is not coming from us. It’s not coming from God. And then he says to the sisters. I give the sisters leave to wring a man’s nose that teaches such stuff. I’ll bear you out in it. Give him justice. And um and I just love that he’s like, wring a man’s nose if he tells you that these things are of God. This is not of God. And then we like

[1:10:02] Michelle: 4 times,

[1:10:02] Gwendolyn Wyne: yeah, over and over

[1:10:03] Michelle: like

[1:10:04] Gwendolyn Wyne: over and over again, yeah, it’s a I think this is the 1844 talk that I just

[1:10:11] Michelle: April 8th, 1844.

[1:10:13] Gwendolyn Wyne: Yes, so he says it again and again and again and then later we hear Phoebe Woodruff say um things in favor of polygamy publicly, and she is then reported to have been asked how is it that you have changed your views so suddenly about polygamy, I thought you loathed and hated it. Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe Woodruff said, I have not changed. I loathe the unclean thing with all the strength of my nature, but sister, I have suffered all that a woman can endure. I am old and helpless and would rather stand up anywhere and say anything commanded of me than to be turned out of my home in my old age, which I should most assuredly be if I refuse to obey counsel. So we have

[1:10:59] Michelle: the men they ignore that they ignore those kinds of statements,

[1:11:01] Gwendolyn Wyne: yeah, and they’re saying, well, that one, that one was maybe secondhand and so maybe that’s not from her and it’s like, yeah, that’s like kind of the problem with most of the prop statements too. But we do have during Joseph’s lifetime contemporaneous evidence that they were telling the women do not believe this, we authorize you to give women, as you were saying earlier, to give the women authority. To speak against it and that was the purpose of relief society was to make it so that the men weren’t the only ones preaching this. They authorized the women to come up to preach this with them. And then continued to preach that, preach that same tune and say, wring their noses, do all these things. But then later on, the women knew, if we say one word against it, I will be turned out of my house as an old woman, and I don’t want that. And you can see how individuals would be personally incentivized to not become homeless in their, in their old age. Like, that’s not

[1:12:00] Michelle: hard. Absolutely. Absolutely. The voice of innocence does the same thing. It empowers the Women to, to kick people out of their homes, kick them out of their community. Like Joseph and Hyrum, I love that you brought up that comparison. We’re empowering the women. Brigham was silencing them, and then later on, when he did start, we, we have all of those, um, let’s see, when was religious Society started? Wasn’t it 20 years? We have two decades of almost nothing from Eliza Snow. We don’t have any sermons from her. We don’t have, I don’t think even very many writings of her. She wasn’t even published like in the newspaper, if I recall correctly. You know, and then all of a sudden release society starts up and Eliza comes to great prominence. Because she was towing the, she was supporting the patriarchy, the polygamy narrative. And, um, I wanted to respond. Thank you so much for that, Gwendolyn. And I wanted to respond also. She says there’s just not a, there’s no evidence to support that Brigham had this kind of power, and this is what I’ve decided to do a full episode on because the evidence is too much to include. But just a couple of things I wanted to talk about. Like, I think the book that won the historical award a couple of years ago was called Sally in Three Worlds, and, um, it talks, uh, it’s by Virginia Kern, and I’m Kearns, and I wanted to bring it up because I would assume that a historian in this field would know about this award winning book, and it talks a ton about. About the culture in early Utah. Like one of the examples I remember, they would have these planks, you know, they had the irrigation canals that went down the sides of the road, and they had planks over them, that you would have to cross over. And people that would come to Utah would be shocked to watch, because in the rest of the country, and probably the rest of the civilized world, the culture was ladies first, right? A man would step aside and maybe assist a woman in Utah, the men aggressively went first. There could be a woman trying to manage all of her children. And the men went first, um, because the man goes first, and I, oh, I should have included the conference talk. I’ve spoken about it before, where it says, he explains why we say brothers and sisters instead of ladies and gentlemen, because we don’t want to flatter the women by putting them in the head when it’s the man that’s the head, right? And all of this contributes to my mom going through the temple as a Engaged, you know, she was getting married the next day, and her first time through the temple, she was told that she needed to walk behind, not beside her husband in the temple. Right? And that’s something that like was enforced, at least for her in the, in the Salt Lake Temple at that time. That was not only one time she was told that that was the culture of the temple. In fact, I can’t, I can’t even remember when I went through first, I have a fleeting memory of wondering why my mom was walking behind my dad. You know, and so at least she didn’t tell me that. But that really was the culture. And then I’ll let you guys respond if you have anything to say. And then I do want to talk about the list of women that she included there at the end. Uh, did anyone else want to talk about that first or anything else?

[1:15:16] Whitney Horning: Well, I, I do want to kind of touch on expand a little bit what you’re saying here about the temple and about the way women were treated. I do think that we have lingering still feelings about that. I, I almost feel like as I’ve studied more and more Joseph Smith and the church in Joseph’s day and how we treated women and the respect he had for women. I mean, there’s stories of, there’s a famous story of a A young guy coming by and seeing Joseph out, you know, beating the rugs and and doing house chores, and the man being like, what a prophet of God is doing chores? And Joseph was just like, yeah, you know, I mean, he just, his respect and admiration, and I mean, he was, he was chastised by the Lord in the very early days of his marriage, not being able to translate anymore. We have that story in our scriptures and in Joseph’s history. That he could not, he lost the gift of translation when he went out and prayed the Lord, let him know is because he wasn’t kind to Emma. So we have in the very beginning, the Lord in our scriptures, you know, that in the very beginning we create Adam and Eve, and Eve was created out of Adam’s rib, which signifies that she’s not beneath him, she’s not behind him, she’s side by side one with him. And so I do feel like as I’ve, as I’ve studied church history, but specifically Joseph Smith and Emma, I have come to more fully believe that a lot of the, the issues that women have today in the church with patriarchy, and sometimes even some of the women I know who struggle with some of the things about the temple. It really comes stems out of this polygamy. Like I do feel like in a lot of ways we’re more Brigham Young’s Church than we are Joseph Smith. And so I really feel like if, if women, in particular, could understand how Joseph actually honored and valued women and then go beyond that to see how God values and honors women. Um, maybe they would, um, honor and value themselves, and then maybe if the husband could also do that, like we could maybe have stronger marriages and I don’t know, I just, for me, I’ve just come to think that most of what we have that’s bad fruit as far as how women are perceived stems from polygamy.

[1:17:53] Michelle: I, I completely agree. It’s we’ve adopted Brigham’s attitude toward women, the, you know, and, and another point with what you were saying of how Joseph was at the Johnson farm the night that he was tarred and feathered, the, those twin babies, the Murdoch twins, um, Joseph and Julia had were recovering from the measles, right? And Joseph was taking care of baby Joseph. Well, was taking care of baby Julia, right? They had, like, they were kind of in adjoining rooms with the steam on so they could be put down by the stove. And he was walking. You guys know how utterly exhausting it is to have a sick baby. And Joseph was there every step of the way, half and half equal partners, even in the ultimate woman’s work of caring for babies, right? And Uh, anyway, that’s part of why baby Joseph suffered so much from exposure, right? They, Joseph was holding baby Joseph when they came in and grabbed him. And so anyway, like, I think I would love to see these historians look at that, just even a, I don’t know if a personality study is, but is a part of historical work, but at least a study of their rhetoric and their actions tells us a lot about who was more patriarchal. And I think that’s worthwhile. And so thank you so much for sharing that with me. I love the insights you guys are all bringing to this, but I did want to talk a little bit about the list of women that she includes saying these kinds of women, how could we think that Brigham Young could control what they said and, and have the power to make them tell lies? Well, OK, so the first two he named were Eliza Snow and Zaina. Yeah, Zy Young, right? Is it Zya Diantha, Huntington Young? Am I getting it right? And, um, first of all, literally the two most privileged women in Utah, both Brigham Young’s wives, which meant they lived in his wealth, in his abundance, right? They had their private rooms. Eliza, they even, the other wives, some of them talked about how she was just completely left alone and didn’t even interact or mingle with the other wives, just had her, like she was. Seen with awe, you know, and Zaina and Eliza went around, so they had the biggest platform. Eliza was the relief society president when Relief Society was reestablished. Zaina was the one after Eliza, and when Eliza was president, they went all around Utah talking to the primary children and I think groups of women as well about being just. wives, and Eliza would show the gold watch that Joseph lent to her at a relief society meeting so she could keep time, and then she never returned. But then claimed that it was this relic of her marriage. She would wear it prominently and let the children hold it. And so you could not choose two better examples of women benefiting from promoting the polygamy. Narrative. In fact, when they did the retrenchment Society, they talked to all of the girls and women, especially about wearing homespun clothes and homemade hats and not wearing fancy clothes. Eliza kept wearing her silks and laces, right? And I’m guessing Zaa probably did too. So that was shocking to me that here we have a feminist historian, and I wanted to talk about this a little more as well. The, the people that were preaching out against polygamy, I guess I’ll get to that later, but Zya and Eliza are not representative of, of Utah women and polygamist wives. Prioritizing their voices is doing exactly what the patriarchy does, right? So she’s doing exactly what the patriarchy does. That was shocking. Then the next one, she says. Is Mary Elizabeth Rollins Leitner, and I haven’t done my episodes on the wives yet, but I can’t even believe she chose to include her, that she’s one that comes to mind. If anyone, Whitney, I know you’ve done work on all of these wives, and you probably like you probably, Karen have a lot of information as well. So I’ll talk, but you feel free to chime in if you want to add anything. But this was crazy. The only evidence there was of her being married to Joseph was the claim, and I still need to look into these claims of ceilings in the Navu Temple, but there’s a claim that she was sealed to Brigham Young in 1845 in the Navu Temple. The goofy thing is she was already married. To Adam Leitner. She was married to him from 1835 until his death in 1885. She had 10 children with him consistently throughout their entire marriage. She did not come west with the saints, which makes me wonder what the ceiling to Brigham Young was about. She would have been another of these polyandrous wives. Her husband. And never joined the church, so that’s part of why they explained that she was sealed to Brigham, but she did not come west. They had extremely hard financial problems throughout their lives. And so in the late 60s, I believe, the late 1860s, they moved to Utah. Yeah, they were in Minersville, Utah in 1869 and continued impoverished, but this She, she never, she never signed an affidavit. She wasn’t in Utah at the time, so she signed one later, I believe I could show that, but let me. Let me show this because we’re we’re talking about is whether Brigham had influence over these women, right? Or whether this patriarchal system, I don’t want to, I hate saying Brigham because it wasn’t only in one personality. It was this system, this patriarchal system, which we still are dealing with the relics of, as you pointed out, Whitney. So this is a letter. I found actually a series of letters. I knew about one of them, but I found the rest of them more recently. So this was 1881 in Minersville, September 13, 1881, to President John Taylor from Mary Elizabeth Rollins Leitner. And it it just says, I regret to inform you that I will, it will be impossible at present for me to pay the money I borrowed last fall. That’s basically what it says because her husband is sick and so they have a Been able to get any money, please inform me of your will in the matter. So for some reason, she had borrowed money from John Taylor, right, at this point already. She mentioned nothing about being Joseph’s wife in this 1881 letter. Then we go forward. And there’s another letter I just included the page that has this quote taken out. This is a longer letter. This is May 18th, 1886. All of these will be linked below again to President John Taylor, and this is part of what she says. I and this is after the year. After her husband had died, and he’d been sick before. She says, I am hardly able to go out to work, as I was 68 years old last month. However, if you do not feel willing to assist me anymore, as Joseph’s wife, I must do the best I can without money. Without friends. So here we get that manipulation of, I’m Joseph’s wife, but if you, you know, if you don’t wanna help Joseph’s wife, Joseph’s widow, then I guess I’ll just have to do the best I can. So she’s on extremely hard times and claiming her status as one of Joseph’s wives to deserve financial help from the church when there were all of these other women starving, right? I mean. This is how she’s saying I need help. Then we have another letter in 1887, October of 1887 to President Wilfred Woodruff. And here’s part of what this is. I was sealed to Brother Joseph’s family in the spring of 1831, and when Zion’s camp went to Missouri, he received a commandment to take me for a wife, but was afraid, and I was not sealed to him as a wife until 1841. Again, This is embedded in her request for money. So, Whitney, do you want to respond? You’re pulling a face at that.

[1:26:03] Whitney Horning: Well, so first of all, she’d have been 13 if it was the spring of 1831.

[1:26:08] Michelle: So we need to join in the re-dating game. She’s now the youngest wife, right? Not exactly.

[1:26:15] Whitney Horning: I’m wondering if one of the reasons that Brooke included her, and I’ve actually been hearing her being mentioned more often lately by those who don’t appreciate our work. Um, and, and I’m wondering if one of the reasons is because she kind of has this, you know, place as a heroine in Mormon history, but as a young girl, she helped save the papers of the, you know, the Book of Commandments as being printed in the mob was throwing it out into the street and she was, you know, the story is purportedly that she and her sister grabbed some and ran into the cornfield, right? So she kind of is already like a heroine in Mormon history. And then she’s also one of the sources that we get the story of, um, the angel with the flaming sword coming and commanding Joseph to enter into polygamy. So she’s kind of a little bit pivotal, I think, in those ways, and so they need her to be um a truthful and relevant, um, Historical figure. And unfortunately, when you kind of do dive into her overall history as an entire person and persona, um, she actually comes out as somebody who is not credible in most of her feelings in life and as a less than honest person. So I’m wondering if some of those things have been coming out and they’re trying to shore up this young girl heroine. And then making, you know, making sure, and then like this, like we’ve got these letters like this, and so they have, um, some people to point to, and Brooke works on the Wilfred Woodruff papers. That’s one of the things she does and so perhaps is aware of these letters. So

[1:28:06] Michelle: then that’s interesting. I also think that one of the reasons maybe they need to shore her up is because she is one of the polyandrous wives, and she the example of a husband who never joined the church. So that’s the most useful case of a polyandrous wife that they have. That might be part of it too. Although there’s no evidence, she never, I mean, it’s all, it’s all silly. She never lived as she was never taken care of as one of Brigham Young’s wives. I don’t know if she ever claimed to have been Brigham Young’s wife. Maybe in her Later testimonies, but anyway, we’ll go on with these because what the reason I included these is to show, is to help Brooke see some of the evidence of why women in this patriarchal, how this patriarchal structure might shape the claims they make, right? Because she claims that you don’t have no evidence to show that there was Brigham had power to make Mary Mary, um. Lightner make these claims. Well, here’s some. Then we go forward to this next one, and this is a letter from actually Helen Helen Mar Whitney at this point, Helen M. Whitney, on behalf of Mary Elizabeth Rollins Leitner, and again it’s to Wilfred Woodruff explaining her hard situation and the highlighted portion, but I consider her worthy of your attention and that she, as the prophet’s wife, should be relieved and provided for for the remaining. of her days, your sister in the covenant. Is that amazing? And then I, as I said, the first evidence we have of her being, um, a wife, I think, did you say that her letter was in 1874, Karen? Is that the year she wrote? No, that was 2.

[1:29:51] Karen Hyatt: 1892.

[1:29:55] Michelle: And these are the earliest for financial help, I believe, are her earliest.

[1:30:00] Karen Hyatt: She has an affidavit in 1877.

[1:30:03] Michelle: Is that what it was? OK. Oh yeah, I have 17,

[1:30:06] Karen Hyatt: but there’s a funny letter that she writes and from the letter, you get the gist that um Joseph F. Smith and someone named John Henry Smith were both like, how were you married to Joseph when you were married to Adam Leitner all that time? And so a snippet of her life. to them says, if I could have an opportunity of conversing with you, John Smith, and brother Joseph F. Smith, I could explain some things in regard to my living with Mr. Leitner after becoming the wife of another, which would throw light on what now seems mysterious. And you would be perfectly satisfied with me. I cannot explain things in this letter. Some You will know all. That is, if I ever have an opportunity of conversing with either of you. I was like, I don’t know, you have your pen in your hand, you could just explain it. And Brian Hays actually notes, Mary Elizabeth doesn’t explain what information would make John Henry Smith perfectly satisfied regarding the apparent marital arrangements.

[1:31:08] Michelle: Right. And as their So comfortable claiming all of these Pollyandrous wives. This is one woman talking about the embarrassment of just like Judge Phillip said that Wilfred Woodruff might be embarrassed. All of these women were embarrassed when their dates didn’t match up, and they were these Pollyandrous wives. But I wanted to add this slide back where she talked about the dates of when she married Joseph Smith. Oh yes, this. The spring of 1831, again, that’s when he was working on um Genesis and shoring up the anti-polygamy, like his, his criticisms of David. And then she goes on to say, I was not sealed to him as a wife until 1841, which would make her the earliest wife, right? Like these dates don’t work at all. And she was having, um, Adam Leitner’s children throughout this time. So, like, like her claim is another one of these, that doesn’t work. It just simply doesn’t work. And it was what, 30 years later, she was 68 when she was making these claims from when she was 13, which. Well,

[1:32:16] Whitney Horning: I also think that this this perfectly illustrates something that a lot of people don’t want to admit that these women were financially motivated. Not we didn’t have, we didn’t have just Brigham Young telling them you will do this, or Joseph S. Smith, you will write these affidavits, but they also got honor, prestige, glory, and as this a test, she was trying to get financial help by claiming something. So Just like, like anybody who knows, you know, somebody who’s famous, you know, there’s this um secondary um benefit you get like, oh, I know so and so I’m related to so and so who’s famous, right? So we really um minimize how How beneficial into the community it was. And then also like you were mentioning, I thought you were gonna continue going, but with a lot of these women, this one’s an exception. She was married to a non-member, but you mentioned Elizar Snow and Zaina both being wives of Brigham Young, a lot of these other women, they became wives to Hebrewy Kimble or some of the other leading men. So it wasn’t that they were just, you know, the The woman whose husband was a poor farmer down in Santa Quin, you know, and they were eking out a living and she’s dragging her up to Salt Lake to sign an affidavit. That’s not who was doing that, you know. So they were women who were, they were, they either already had prestige in the community and And it was a small community. It wasn’t like the churches today where you can really not know people who are in the church, right? Like this is a small tight knit social. It was very much a social organization and you, you did and said what you needed to to get ahead to save face, to have popularity. I mean, It just, I don’t know, I just found this argument from Brooke just really inane and, and it just doesn’t work.

[1:34:23] Michelle: Yeah. Oh, I completely agree. And so, so to finish up about Mary, um, Mary Elizabeth, she, we have those letters, we have her that letter that she wrote, we have, you know, I mean, all of this. And then the two times she spoke about it publicly were 1902 and 1905. I can cover that in another episode. But so by just like you were saying, Whitney, if you could claim to be Joseph’s wife, you got prestige, a platform lauded for Like, you compare the standing in the community as well as the wealth, the comfort of Eliza Snow and Zaa compared to these other women in Utah. And there’s just no comparison, right? And so that’s why it’s also goofy. I, I want to look into these claimed ceilings to Brigham Young, because if she had been sealed to Brigham Young, why didn’t she move into his compound when she came to Utah, right? I guess Adam was still alive and didn’t die until after Brigham had died, and, and John. And Wford Woodruff report. So maybe that’s why it’s just, it, the whole thing is strange, right? So that’s that, and then the next one she claims is Sarah Anne Kimball, and she claims that Sarah Anne Kimball was speaking out. Like, like, how could Brigham Young control, have the control to make Sarah and Kimball claim this? And what I find shocking there is the only thing we have from Sarah and Kimball, the only thing is this form letter affidavit. That was included in in, um, Joseph F. Smith’s collection. And it’s some of these signatures, it doesn’t show as well on the slide as it does when you actually look at it. This sort of scratchy, um, like jaggedy writing shows up in several of these signatures and makes me very suspicious. I believe even Eliza is like this. I can’t remember for sure. But it makes me suspicious that there’s something going on. So I’m not even 100% sure that, I mean, this, this affidavit is not her words. And that’s all that we have from her. The rest of the story comes from Elizabeth, her mother, because she outlived both of them. And as we’ve seen that you could be benefited by Joining in the patriarchal line, right? And then the last one, Helen Kimball. I’ve already, I covered her in a recent episode, so I won’t go into it, but to claim that there was no benefit to these women to make the claims that they did, like, and then including Mary Elizabeth Rollins Leitner and including Sarah and Whitney. Like, I, I just, I don’t know. I’m not, they’re not, I’m not gaining more, um, respect for historians. They’re not gaining credibility in my eyes with these kinds of statements and these kinds of mistakes and claims. What about you guys?

[1:37:18] Gwendolyn Wyne: I’m, I’m having a hard time seeing what benefit they didn’t get. They were spiritually benefited because they understood that line for the Lord to make sure that this doctrine perpetuated would assure them their salvation and exaltation. They were temporarily benefited, as you just displayed. Um, they literally got money if they were willing to shore up the narrative. That’s how they were supported as the widows and, and whatnot. Um, they were socially benefited. Um, I’m just like, where, how were they not benefited from a, from a worldly standpoint? Every, every benefit they received. I’m, I’m just seeing like, what did they sacrifice? I mean, from my perspective, they sacrificed everything, but from your perspective as a historian, what did they, what did they lose? I’m just, I can’t find it.

[1:38:10] Michelle: Right. Is such exactly. And that’s why it’s shocking to hear Brooke say, I care deeply about looking at how patriarchy shapes women, and I, I, you know, I like, ah, and the other point that I wanted to make again, is she is literally. Only listening to the most privileged women and ignoring the state of all of the other women living in this system, which is exactly what these women did. We’ll go on to talk a little bit more about her claiming how they spoke out about it. In fact, let me see if that’s, if that’s where we are. We’ll go on to this and then I’ll talk about that.

[1:38:50] Matthew Bowman: And Brooke, if you put it in today, today’s vernacular, that would sort of be silencing women, wouldn’t it? I mean, in a sense, and that you’re throwing out what they said, uh, you might have your reasons for it, but, uh.

[1:39:02] Brooke LeFevre: Right. And again, like I think it’s it’s very valid as a historian to look at in what ways were they manipulating the truth? Were they manipulating the truth? I think they probably were.

[1:39:14] Michelle: I’m gonna pause it there. There’s just a little bit more to this, but I want to respond to that first point about silencing women. I’ve already gone off on that. Do you guys have any more thoughts on that part?

[1:39:24] Karen Hyatt: We talked a lot about that last time. It’s just like, are you kidding me? We, we’re listening to Emma. We’re listening to the, and, and there’s so many women not to listen to because they never said it. Of, of Brian Hales’s 35 wives for Joseph, 18. Never claimed it, not in one affidavit, Nothing. We have 0 from them. So we’re listening, but we’re not hearing anything. We,

[1:39:51] Michelle: and we’re also, we’re even listening to Eliza Snow and Elizabeth and Whitney in what they said contemporaneously in Navvo. We’re listening to that as well, right? We’re We’re, we’re rejecting what looks to be manipulated by this patriarchal system and and we, we’re listening to the women’s claims and seeing how problematic they are, right? So trying to shame us in a feminist sense, as both of them are doing here as they’re silencing us, I just, the hypocrisy is galling, right? And then. Then going on when she says they were misremembering, they were manipulating the truth when she accuses us of just saying they’re lying. I want someone to explain to me the difference between manipulating the truth, not misremembering, not saying, oh well, here, I’ll I’ll play the rest of the clip.

[1:40:46] Brooke LeFevre: There were probably instances in which they were misremembering, and I think that that’s totally valid to do. I’m not trying to valorize these women and say that they were just like perfect and they never lied about anything in regards to polygamy. Um, I think they had reasons to tell the story of polygamy in a certain way.

[1:41:07] Michelle: This is that different from what we’re

[1:41:08] Gwendolyn Wyne: saying. This is back to what Whitney said at the beginning where you’re listening to this and it becomes so confusing because which story are you telling? Are, are they, are they saying, yes, this makes sense what these uh polygamy deniers and again the label is so grading to just to, to label people, yeah, to label people who. Want to understand and also who who say you know polygamy is obviously not of God so let’s see how it worked its way into the church um but that’s the question that they don’t wanna deal with they do not want to deal with spiritual questions they don’t wanna deal with questions of right and wrong. They don’t want to have to think about or talk about the nature of God because that’s totally um outside of academia and outside of what they. Don’t worry, that’s just a child knocking on my door. Um, go find your daddy. Sorry, please. I,

[1:42:05] Karen Hyatt: I, do you know why? Because that’s who we are, and yet we can dig up these things. Michelle’s got a house full of children. This is crazy. This is crazy. I’m leaving that in, Gwendolyn, because that’s who you are and you’re able to do this research in your spare time. You guys have jobs doing this. I I’m leaving it and if that’s OK, it’s just a testament to, hello, you, it does not help to be a trained historian, obviously.

[1:42:37] Gwendolyn Wyne: Obviously, well, and to my husband’s bless my husband, he was the one who said, lock the door, do not leave that door. So he’s downstairs. I’m just gonna text him that guess what? Children are awake. Anyway, but they don’t want to deal with the questions of spirituality, and that’s actually where we started and that’s what brought us to this. None of us came to this arena looking to prove that that Joseph was not a polygamist. Like, honestly, he could be, he couldn’t be. We will find out someday. I’m not gonna stand in accusation of him. Because I look at his fruits and these are the fruits of a true prophet. Uh, but again, this is something that academics are not gonna be interested in, and so this is the one thing that they can really attack. Um, they can attack this. They can’t attack the actual thing that we’re saying, which is that polygamy is not of God. They can only attack this historical perspective that we are. Choosing to try on, we’re saying try on the lens, try on this historical model, see if it makes sense. It makes so much sense. When you add in the evidence, it makes more sense. The more you add in, the more history that’s discovered, the more documents that are brought forward, it all aligns with this. This historical model. So I, I just think it’s so crazy to, to act like we’ve got this polygamy denier slash holocaust denier mentality. It’s like, no, we know it happened. We just think that the people who told the story are not the most credible, the more information we have on them.

[1:44:17] Michelle: Right? And I, I, I wanna say I’m so discouraged because I don’t want to be harsh on people. I, you know, I get in trouble for being harsh with the historians, and I don’t mean to be, but this is upsetting. It is upsetting to have people who claim. people who claim to be advocates for women. Brooke is a woman who claims to be a woman of a feminist historian who claims that she looks at how patriarchal systems shape women and the agency of women and and the actions of women. And here we have Perhaps the most extreme, at least one of the most extreme patriarchal systems in the history of the United States, and this is how she approaches it. I, it is galling. It’s maddening to me because she’s a respected historian, so her words carry weight and all of the, all of the people who continue to tell us that we as women don’t deserve a platform and we need to be silenced, so we need to be ignored and we need to be excommunicated. She is shoring up the the perpetuation of this false narrative and the continuation of silencing and demeaning women. And I, like, Brooke, I emailed Brooke and asked her to come, and it was a nice email and asked her to come on my program, and she didn’t respond. Uh, Brooke, I, I would much rather talk to you than about you. And to me, like, like I, I am going to continue to, uh, like, repeat that invitation. I hope you will come on cause we could have a wonderful discussion. With your history, I talked specifically about, she did her undergraduate, I want to say, in psychology. I think one of her specialties is the development of of contraception in in America. Like there are amazing things that we have both worked on and that we could talk about. And if anyone wants to say, oh, she’s not gonna come on your program because it’s not, you’re not worth addressing. No, you can’t say that because she went on Mormon land to address what we are doing, right? She knows this is a big deal. So it looks like if she won’t come on and engage, she knows these arguments are bad, and I, that’s good. I hope she knows how bad these arguments are because they are terrible and really offensive to people who actually do care about women and have read about the suffering of the women under this system. She’s doing the same thing that these privileged women did and denying the reality of the women who don’t. Who the reality of the women who suffered and didn’t benefit the story they wanted to tell when these women had their indignation meetings to stop the legislature for passing these laws, they denied that there were women suffering in Utah, which from the quote that Karen read and so many others, we, we have more of. that we could possibly want of the suffering of women under the system. And these privileged women on their platform denied it. They denied the suffering of their sisters for the sake of the narrative. That’s what was happening, and that’s what Brooke is still doing, both to those women and to us. And it has to stop. I find it to be intolerable.

[1:47:26] Karen Hyatt: Because it’s so well said. I mean, that’s so true, and um they, you know, not just physical suffering, they were harmed in other ways like. Yeah, yeah. Let, let me, um, OK, so she named Helen Mar Kimball, who was the very polygamist daughter of very polygamist Hebrew C Kimball. And she obviously just marinated in that. He’s the one that was like, oh, to his wife, I do what I do in stolen moments, like he’s going back. Behind her back, and he’s like cheering her up about it. I do these things in stolen moments. And just remember, when I have children with these other women, it’s for our glory too, yours as well. It’s so manipulative and so gross, but so his daughter, Helen, was just so steeped in it, and she wrote the book called Why We Practice Plural Marriage. And, um, Monogamy has, this is a quote from the book that um I think it’s Gwendolyn, right? Did you read this? Um, monogamy has led to the greatest vices and social evils that are daily increasing and degrading the human family. Monogamy. Is degrading the human family. That’s where she was. So, I mean, does that sound healthy? Like, does that sound like a good and then Zya,

[1:48:45] Michelle: let me get let me just add one of Helen’s reasons are, well, Gwendolyn, you could speak to this more. They’re atrocious. Nobody would agree. Like, Helen, even just from a doctrinal point of view, I know that the polygamy promoters love to quote Helen Mar Kimball. They should be embarrassed to do so because they would not agree with any of her reasons.

[1:49:10] Karen Hyatt: Right?

[1:49:10] Gwendolyn Wyne: Something that was so hard for me to hear in the Doctrine and Covenant Central podcast where they interviewed Brian Hill. That Michelle you guys responded to, um, and I was just getting to watch one of them last night, um, so I don’t even know if you did this one little bit, but it was so sad to me that they actually did use this justification that, that, well, if you don’t have polygamy then men tend to go to prostitutes. They actually repeated it like it was a real reason. And that that is very hard as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to hear a fellow member say that this is what is good.

[1:49:50] Michelle: A BYU religious teacher. These are well, and and the the main historian that we defer to the the anesthesiologist is a historian who we defer to.

[1:50:04] Gwendolyn Wyne: I’m trying to like breathe through it because it brings back BYU memories where, um, I never even thought that it was possible that polygamy was not part of the eternities and part of God’s plan. It never even crossed my mind because I had been taught so thoroughly. Um, not even necessarily by my parents, but just by the weight of evidence that the church puts out there, uh, Mormon doctrine, you know, anywhere you look, you’re gonna find this all the Journal of discourses and, and definitely at BYU I was told that in no uncertain terms by peers by these. I mean, I just, I still remember. I’m like 20 years old and just having casual conversation at parties, somehow it would come up, right? Because we’re all members of the church. And so I remember this one young man looked at me and he was just so certain, he said, Oh no, you absolutely will have to live plural marriage if you’re going to be in the celestial kingdom. And I was stunned because I was kind of like, oh, it really, I don’t, I don’t, it’s really hard for me to comprehend. And he was so certain and I wouldn’t be surprised if he and others of that mindset are no longer members because there’s only so long that you can believe it. Something that bad is of God before you reject everything you throw God out and you say never mind, there’s there is no God name. Um, but just to, just to say that like. That we we came to this because we need to defend Joseph. It’s like, that’s, that’s so wrong. I don’t think they talked with anyone who has this perspective because I don’t need to defend Joseph. Uh, the next string of church leaders after him or polygamists, it means that I have to wrestle with, with something that no longer makes sense and I’m willing to wrestle. I’m willing to wrestle. I’m willing to take it to God. And then I’m willing to look at all of the evidence and say, well, then how does this even make sense? Because it doesn’t fit the story that they’ve told me, um, and I’m just amazed that like we’re telling these stories that, oh yeah, you need polygamy so that men aren’t visiting prostitutes and you need polygamy because Helen Mar Kimball talked about it just as a purifying, uh, purifier of jealousies and it’s like, yeah, because women had to shut down and they couldn’t feel love anymore because the only way that you can Stop your jealousy is to stop your love and just all these, all these reasons that we’re just none of them hold up. The reason we don’t quote from that book very, you know, if we quote from the book, it’s Helen R. Kimball’s books. It’s not to talk about the reasons so much because they don’t hold up. They don’t make.

[1:52:52] Michelle: It’s her testimony.

[1:52:54] Gwendolyn Wyne: It’s just her testimony which really and and remember Helen Mar Kimball’s mother Violet’s testimony that we say that. That she, um, prayed and this, this vision opened up. That was Helen saying that. That wasn’t violet. And that was often what happened. The women themselves kind of had a distance from this, but they would testify other people’s testimonies, right? And so I think that that was also a bit of a coat so that they wouldn’t be lying so blatantly. They could say, well, my mother had this testimony, and they could embellish it because You can, you can get away with some embellishment when you’re telling someone else’s story and

[1:53:33] Michelle: not have to, especially when they’re dead, which was almost always the case. Erin, were you, I think we interrupted,

[1:53:42] Karen Hyatt: no, not at all, but I just wanted to add to what Gwendolyn was saying about how they had to shut down like you’re saying, and we have that Zain. Huntington Young again to a newspaper reporter like she was given an interview, and she says it is the duty of a first wife to learn to regard her husband with indifference and with no other feeling than that of reverence. For love we regard as a false sentiment, a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy.

[1:54:15] Michelle: That claim about love is a false sentiment. When I think of the entire New Testament, all of the teachings of Jesus Christ, God is love, right? Like Everything you have that charity, you have nothing. Everything is about love, but in polygamy, it’s a false sentiment. Yeah.

[1:54:35] Karen Hyatt: Of all the situations where you would expect to find love, you would think it would be husband and wife. This is so horrible. Like, if you read between those lines and see what a horrible existence that would be to have a loveless marriage or, you know, Emily Partridge called. Herself an unloved spiritual wife. Like this is the saddest thing ever.

[1:54:57] Michelle: And, and we say it’s for women to overcome their jealousies, right? Well, we also say men have to have polygamy or they’d be going to prostitutes. And we don’t, like, even now, we don’t call that out, right? Like, it, uh, it’s appalling. OK, I’m gonna go on to the next clip because it keeps, it stays bad for a little while.

[1:55:20] Brooke LeFevre: But when you completely just throw out their voices, when you completely just disregard them, what you’re doing is you’re doing the same thing that 19th century anti-polygamists did. In the 19th century, anti-Plygamists, um, the way they depicted Mormon women is that they were these deluded downtrodden slaves of domineering patriarchs, and Mormon women in the 19th century worked very hard to counter that narrative. They published the women’s exponent, which was. Owned by women, operated by women, they were very involved in politics. They were very public speakers and so to dismiss their voices and say that they were simply just the pawns of, of Mormon patriarchy and that’s why they were saying what they were saying is to do the exact same thing that 19th century anti-polygamists did.

[1:56:09] Michelle: Oh, I have so much to say about this one. First of all, we’re not throwing out their voices, right? And she’s denying that the patriarchy influences them. That I find just to be appalling and maddening. And again, it’s this. I I had some other things I want to talk about, but I’ll just go here first. She brings up the women’s exponent, and she brings up that these women are trying to stand up and say, no, we’re powerful women, the privileged ones, right, who are receiving all the benefits. And yet, and then she paints the anti-polygamist in a negative light as being these awful people that were pointing out that, I mean they were saying that, you know, polygamous women were not free to act independently. The thing she ignores is that the most profound and impactful anti-polygamists were non-Mormon women living in Utah and the few women who escaped Utah. So while she brings up the women’s exponent, she completely ignores the anti-polygamy standard. Which was begun by Jenny Anderson Froy, who was a non-Mormon woman living in Utah, seeing the suffering of these women, and she started the Blue Tea Society, which is where these women got together. These, these anti went through Utah territory gathering stories, gathering testimonies. It’s, it’s from them that we get Phoebe Woodruff’s testimony of, of what she said about polygamy, right? And This resource, she went on to write this book, The Women of Mormonism or the story of polygamy as told by the victims themselves, and this is one of this source is critical. The the anti-polygamy standard, the newspaper ran, she also went on a speaking tour, I think, anyway, she worked really hard to try to collect funds to be able to print this newspaper, and her only motivation, these Women’s only motivation was to help the suffering women in Utah. They already were so troubled by it. And finally one night, a girl named Carry Owens, who was a girl from England who her fiance joined the navy and sailed around the world with the Navy, and then in Australia was converted to the church. So when he got to California, he left early, left his conscription and Went to Utah, was sent to St. George to help build the temple, where he became engaged to two daughters, the two teenage daughters, I think they were teenagers, of the woman that he was living with. And then he got called on a mission back to where he came from, and there was, was, um, Carrie, who he had already been engaged to when he left. So he brought her back to Utah as his fiancee, and on their wedding day, she found out about these other women. Right? And so she, I, I just, how I imagine it is with her just in tears while it’s raining out, you know, who knows, but she went and knocked on doors of like, I’m stranded in Utah. My fiance, who I’m coming here to marry, it’s my wedding day. He brought his other wife and what am I supposed to do? So she went and knocked on the doors of these, uh, in Salt Lake, and that is what finally kicked. Jenny Anderson Frey that in gear to start the the anti-polygamy standard. This is why I want to do an entire episode on these specific claims that Brooke makes. I like, I’m perfectly willing to just engage and talk about it, but when you go on and say this kind of thing and speak authoritatively as a almost PhD historian and demean us this way and then demean all of these powerful women. These the women of the Bluetooth Society had nothing to gain. It was purely humanitarian because they were the advocates for the non-privileged women in Utah, for the suffering masses in Utah, who you, Brooke, are continuing to ignore just as these privileged polygamist women climbing the structure of the patriarchy just as they ignored them. Sorry to get so impassioned. I just find it. Shocking. Someone else

[2:00:33] Gwendolyn Wyne: as you’re speaking, Michelle, it really brings to mind that that that’s what they’re, they’re doing right now. They are, they love what the polygamist system, what the women were able to do within the system. They seem to be holding up. Academia as the highest value. And so, because the women in the polygamy system figured out a way to navigate, navigate it so that they were publishing articles and they were speaking and they were Advocating for the right to vote, they were engaged in politics and intellectualism therefore we cannot um just condemn this wholly because Brooke and Matt, they like some of what was attached to it and if they condemn it, then they also have to say that that there’s a higher value than academia and they don’t seem to want to say that um. Their highest credentials are their academic credentials, right? And so the fact that these women engaged and made the exponent, I mean that’s so important to them that they’re willing to overlook and and just not worry about the morality of it because it’s more comfortable for them to say, well, what’s good, what’s evil there you can’t really attribute a moral framework to this because look at some of the good that came out of it and um. I, you know, Brooke’s gonna definitely move forward and she’s gonna be getting her PhD, um, and I think if right now the way that people are doing it, they’re gonna have to just keep supporting the consensus. If you want to push back against it, you have to be willing to sacrifice, and I don’t know. That the time and the money that people have put in, they’re gonna be willing to sacrifice it, but the, but they can stop tearing down legitimate inquiry, which is what we’re engaged in. They, they can stop name calling and things like that.

[2:02:33] Michelle: She could make a real name for herself by engaging in these topics. I hope that she would re-engage and do better, so she could actually live up to the practices that she herself. is claiming good historians follow. Like, for example, this book, Jenny Anderson Froy said, I, Brian Hailes, the only thing he quotes of me is that I quoted Phoebe, um, Woodruff from this, from, um, the anti-polygamy standard, which was compiled into this book. And, and he throws it out because it’s from a non-Mormon source, and the Mormon sources are better. I understand the motivated reasoning that Brian uses to ignore. Everything that these other Utah women women said, even when they went to the effort of going around gathering stories, they’re the ones that we get the stories of people living in these deplorable conditions. And the man who married the widow, then marrying the widow’s 13-year-old daughter, for example, right? Like so many stories like this. And they’re they’re, they’re some, I mean, they gathered them into this book, and they have a lot of credibility behind them. So I cannot understand how an actual valid historian who’s not operating under motivated reasoning justifies throwing this out, completely ignoring it. This information is at least, and I would say, far more credible than these affidavits, right? And it is contemporary. The affidavits, they were talking about things that happened 30, 40 years earlier, the women that were doing this work were writing about what was happening on the ground right then. Right? And, and we can verify quite a bit of it. And so I like, again, let’s, let’s prioritize women’s voices. This is women selflessly writing about other about voiceless women, and we’re ignoring it for the purpose of protecting the the narrative, right? To protect the historical consensus, this is what a PhD candidate is doing. Who claims to be a feminist. I, like, what I hope, what I hope is that Brooke would go ahead and look at some of these other sources that she is willfully ignoring and reexamine her, what she has claimed in this interview. I hope she can see how we, you know, see it through our lens for a minute to see what she is doing to women.

[2:05:00] Karen Hyatt: Would that so cool? Wouldn’t that be so cool in a couple of years if she was, if you and her were sitting on your podcast laughing about, remember that day you were so mad at me?

[2:05:11] Michelle: Yeah. Or even if she never wants to talk to me, but she were to write a book about kind of repairing this, I, I think I’d be a bestseller. I think it would be amazing. Far more relevant than what what many of the things historians write 100%

[2:05:26] Whitney Horning: you made the statement that they don’t have motivated reasoning, but they do. Um, both Matthew Bowman and Brooke are historians. They are motivated to continue to have a good name in the historical community. But they’re also, um, they are members of the LDS Church and, and like we said earlier, we don’t know if they’re active, what their status is that way, but it’s difficult to separate that and so I think especially for a woman who um is studying feminist history, I think a lot of women in the LDS church have to um grapple with this idea of eternal polygamy, the grapple like, like Gwendolyn mentioned, you know, that she and all of the people she hung out with at BYU knew that that was in our future after we die, you know, that’s if you’re, if you’re going to live a life, um. To get into the special kingdom, then that’s what awaits you, you know, the men get rewarded with lots of wives and the women get rewarded with sharing their husbands, right? And so, um, I think a lot of feminists in the LDS church are have a difficult time being actual true feminists in in the sense of maybe the the worldview of feminism, and I think they come to this place where they work through what polygamy means, and they come to this place of where they accept it and um accept the way that because They have this, they, they are unable to truly separate their LDS beliefs and ideology, and because it really is, it’s who we are. It’s, it becomes ingrained within our very core, and it’s difficult to separate that out and be a true, um, academic historian who isn’t colored. With what they, what their religion has taught them. Does that make sense? And so you’ve got both Matthew and Brooke, really overall to me in this interview, coming across more as Mormon apologists than as um secular academic historians. Like I just think it’s really difficult to separate it and I’ve met other women who have studied um feminist, um. Viewpoints or whatever and are also active LDS and they had to grapple with polygamy and they came to settle it and in different ways, each of them is in different ways, but all of the ones that I That I’m speaking of currently came to accept it and to um in an apologetic way. So they still believe it is in their future. They still believe it is of God, and they’ve somehow, um, been able to deal with what that means for them as a woman. And so I really do think that if Brooke can ever, if she can ever really deal with feminism in God’s eyes and deal with With that, as I said earlier, with that really come to accept that we are equal, that we’re equally responsible before God. We, um, are of equal worth to God, then I think that maybe she could maybe make some breakthroughs and maybe would maybe be embarrassed listening now to how she’s speaking because she’s really degrading. Women actually, like the only women she’s she’s um. Being a champion for are the, um, royalty, LDS royalty. I mean, those women she listed, except for maybe Mary Leitner, and like I said, she’s kind of a heroine in Mormon history. So they’re kind of like the Mormon royalty, and she’s not really dealing with like Gwendolyn’s ancestor and your ancestor and mine who and and Vern’s who left their, um, Polygamist husbands and went off on their own and sometimes in severe poverty to try and make a way for themselves because they were unwilling to live that lifestyle.

[2:09:43] Michelle: Mhm. And you know, along with the motivated reasoning, I just realized also maybe this is obvious that, you know, it just occurred to me again maybe that for historians doing Mormon history, the biggest audience is Mormons. The biggest employer is the church, right? So aside from just needing to maintain their credibility in the historical as a historian. By going along with the historical consensus which they need to defend in order to preserve the status of all historians, they also personally might be motivated by career opportunities. If I’m gonna write a book, who’s gonna buy it? Mormons. If I’m gonna be hired, it’s probably gonna be by the church, right? So they are apologists, but at least that’s how they are certainly coming across, um, Quino, you want to say something?

[2:10:32] Gwendolyn Wyne: I, I agree with what you’re saying. I think that there are apologists, however, there’s something I’ve noticed in speaking with um many of my feminist friends who have maintained activity in the church. And I think this is what’s going on with uh Rachel and Matt, is that they um come to a place where they, they start to believe that um there are no good men, right? They see the patriarchy is bad. And they see what happened in our history, and they believe what was said about Joseph because everybody believes it, and those, you know, with the stories that were told and it just simply is a further testimony to them that nobody is truly good deep down. Um, and that is really insidious because one of the challenges that we have is that we don’t really know what a profit looks like or what a prophet does. We kind of have this. Perpetually changing, um, narrative about like, well, you know, prophets can, whatever the current prophet says trumps past prophets and it’s like, please don’t read what the savior says about Isaiah. He doesn’t say anything like that at all. Um, but it’s, I think it’s, it’s something that happens to people when they become more, they intellectualize more than spiritual, spiritualize. They just start to believe, you know what, everybody’s Everybody’s um flawed, and Joseph was flawed and they’re all flawed, and it, it actually, there’s something um I don’t wanna say that, that these people themselves are prideful, but there’s something prideful in that mentality because it means that you can look down on everyone. That there’s no one worth looking up to as an example. Now, obviously, Christ is supposed to be, um, he’s our rod of iron, right? He’s the word, he’s what we measure ourselves against. However, Scripturally, we are supposed to have leaders that are supposed to, to be the example as well, right? That’s, um, that’s part of their, their role. And so when we look back on Joseph, and if they’re able to just say, you know, He was wrong and as Brian Hills has said, um, you know, if I could whisper in Joseph’s ear, don’t, don’t do that, don’t do that, and it’s just, it’s, um, again, I don’t know that they’re personally prideful, but this is such a prideful way to look at someone who brought forth the Book of Mormon and was absolutely consistent his whole life in his testimony. It’s like maybe we just believe him.

[2:13:16] Michelle: Yeah, so, so just to sum up, so we can, people can elevate themselves by demeaning the best of us, right? and saying, oh, and then the other thing they can do, it cuts another way too. They can justify themselves by saying, oh, well, these people did this and they’re lauded. So if, if, if even if That’s OK with a profit doing that. Why does it matter if I do some of this?

[2:13:41] Gwendolyn Wyne: And listening, yeah, and listening to their, their podcast, by the end of that, I was just like, how do they believe in anything? I just, there was, it was, it left me feeling very hopeless, like, wow, if that’s God, that’s so sad. It’s just very depressing and I don’t understand how they could hold to anything good and true if this is how they view um the, the workings of God.

[2:14:06] Michelle: Which is part of why this narrative is so damaging because it does destroy faith, and then there’s this gaping looming black pit of nihilism awaiting anyone who actually follows critical thought, and that’s what you’re talking about, this nihilistic approach of there’s no point to anything, right? OK, let’s go on to this next clip, and this is where they start explaining why, why we exist.

[2:14:29] Brooke LeFevre: So Matt and Brooke, why is this

[2:14:32] Michelle: simmering

[2:14:33] Brooke LeFevre: debate now

[2:14:34] Michelle: starting to boil? So Matt at this point dives into, um, kind of a, well, it’s a 4 minute speech. I’m not gonna play very much of it. He really waxes eloquent on why we exist. It starts out, I thought, pretty good. He gives a fairly accurate history, admitting, he admits this. He admits that this debate has been going on since the very beginning of Mormonism, right? I want to make these into t-shirts. I think it’s great. So he admits this isn’t a new debate that’s happening, and I appreciate that. And, um, and then he, he again inverts and misrepresents some of the history, especially the timeline of the RLBS church and the prices work. Again, we talked about this last time. Let’s let’s help them answer the question, why is this simmering debate starting to boil? Why are more and more people becoming these polygamy deniers, right? I, I have my shortlist, but does anyone want to go first? I, we talked about it last time.

[2:15:37] Karen Hyatt: Crowdsourcing like stuff’s available now. So when someone gets a hold of information, they can put it on the internet and everyone can look at it. You can put the source, you can go look it up, and you can go and look at the Joseph Smith Papers Project with the actual documents. When I tell my friends, I’m like, guess what? Joseph, every time he talked about polygamy, it was to condemn it. They’re like, What? And I, they go, Can I see it? Yep. Here you go. And they’re done. They’re. Like, cool. I mean, it’s, this is good news. And so it’s just, it’s amazing. Like, it’s all there now. It never has been before. For crying out loud, you know? It’s only been 10 years since the Joseph Smith Papers, and everybody’s got the Journal of Discourses sitting on their shelf, but you don’t know where to look in that humongous thing, but now it’s all online. Yeah, that’s why. When you’re looking at it and you find something, you can put it online and everyone can see it and it’s valid. It’s absolutely in front of your eyes. It’s not, I don’t know. Someone said, someone said this. Nope, there’s the actual document. That’s why it’s as simple as that to me.

[2:16:43] Michelle: That’s amazing. I have as my number one reason, the number one reason, the Joseph Smith papers, and I love that you brought up crowdsourcing because that is exactly what’s happening. Like, who knows how many thousands of people are looking at things and then sharing them. And so we all benefit from one another and then a few of us are are. Sharing it on a platform and in a more official way, right? But then we have Facebook and Instagram and the YouTube channels and so this, the information is strong enough to be shared and be convincing. And so more when more people see it, they become convinced. I think that’s the number one reason. I love that. Then. Like, um, well, I’m sure we’ve all brought it up, the DNA studies, right? The fact that we have ruled out the strongest cases for Joseph having children and people realize that and then yeah, that that’s the other, the other thing I have is the voices sharing this evidence, and that’s everybody engaged in the crowdsourcing so they don’t have anything else they want to add.

[2:17:44] Gwendolyn Wyne: I think there’s a couple of spiritual reasons, um, and we can look back to to the time when the Lord revealed the 10 Commandments. He said, the Lord said, I, the Lord thy God, I’m a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the 3rd and 4th generation of them that hate me. And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. But if you look at the law of the Lord that was given to the saints at the beginning of the church, the Lord told them about marriage, and this is in section 42 of the doctrine and covenants, thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart and cleave unto her and none else. It is a crystal clear law. For us to do the opposite, to indoctrinate the opposite as exaltation and the, the way is to hate the Lord’s commandments. So we’ve now come to the end of that 3rd and 4th generation, um, of blindness that the church has been laboring under. Coincidentally, maybe not coincidentally, President Nelson just a few years ago asked the women to speak up with our impressions, our insights, and our inspiration. And that is why I spoke up because, I mean, I realized maybe that’s not what he meant, but this is what I’ve been asked to do. These are my impressions, my insights, my inspiration. It is in line with what I feel from the spirit. It’s in line with what the leaders are asking. Um, so I think that is a really clear spiritual reason for why there is this groundswell. Women have been asked to speak up. We’re speaking up, and it’s the time for us to set aside this false tradition of our fathers.

[2:19:25] Michelle: Oh, I love it. I, Julie Beck and others, more recent leaders also have told the women to study our history, right? Which is exactly what we’re doing, and have told the women to study the priesthood, which is exactly what we’re doing. And then having the admonition to speak up, yes, like this is all coming together. Like it’s impossible to not see God’s hand in it for me. You know, so, um, he, so I’ll just kind of sum up his arguments, his explanation, because people can go listen to it on their own. This will all be linked below. But again, it centers in a large part on Denver, Snuffer, and Phil Davis, which is again, so highly offensive. Whitney, I wondered, I wanted to ask you if you would just share what you shared with me about trying to convince. Since Denver that this topic was important because I’ve put together a timeline that I’ll share in a just another short video talking about Denver Snuffer’s timeline with me. I like Denver, you know, like, like this is not a criticism of him at all. This is a criticism of Matt Bowman and others claiming that this is Denver Snuffer’s movement. That is a it is false and therefore it’s offensive.

[2:20:39] Whitney Horning: Yeah, I actually find it incomprehensively ironic that on a topic that mainly affects women so deeply, Matthew names two men.

[2:20:52] Michelle: I would have done nothing on this topic,

[2:20:54] Whitney Horning: right? Right? I don’t remember how many years ago, but it was before I started the work on my book that I happened to hear Denver snuffer speaking and he was talking about this rating system, like, you know, 1 through 5, things that are really important to him. And the home teaching was always a 5. It was really important to him. And, and then he was saying when and such and such a thing was only a 1, and one of those was polygamy. And I believe that like that’s how Verne has been also. And I think just men who are morally sound and morally good men, it, it doesn’t affect them. They don’t actually think about the idea that the church has it in the Social kingdom because they’re like, no, I just want the one wife. I don’t care about that stuff. And so I think it, it, it hasn’t been important to them, but, um, the best thing I did for my marriage in this regard, dealing with polygamy. And how it affects women is I got Carolyn Pearson’s book, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, and I asked Verne if we could read it out loud together. And so reading it out loud together, he was able, I those women’s voices in there gave my voice to how I had always felt about it, because whenever I tried to bring it up to him before that, he would always be like, well, it’s no big deal. And that’s kind of how Denver was. Well, I don’t, polygamy is no big deal. I don’t even think about it. And I remember when I heard Denver say that, I was kind of a little bit raging inside thinking, well, yeah, of course it doesn’t affect you because it’s the wives that get affected. Like this deeply affects women. It affects how we believe God because we have scriptures that tell us, you know, that. You know, all are equal before me, male and female, and no respecter of persons, and I’m like, well, yes, polygamy is not fair in any way whatsoever, and how can you have a unity of heart when a man’s heart’s divided between more than, you know, one woman. So I was a little bit ragey about Denver saying that, and I, I do still think that he I, I don’t know if he still feels that way. I have no idea. But I do know he has written some things on the topic since that then, and he has come out and said, you know, that he doesn’t believe at all that Joseph ever did polygamy. But I definitely don’t consider him as far as the polygamy deniers. I don’t consider him. At all, somebody who’s like out in the forefront or that he’s rallying people behind him or that he’s using a platform to try and, you know, speak about this. Like I feel like, you know, he’s got other things he’s doing and, and I do think still that it probably would be safe to say that this still is down on his list of things to worry about. And then I don’t actually really, I don’t know Phil Davis at all. I, I don’t quite understand why Matthew, I know, I know maybe other people do. Maybe he’s a bigger deal than I think like I just don’t even know him at all. But I just, for me, it was just actually offensive that they would lump all of us into these two categories and I’m, I’m I think that one of the reasons being is I do know Denver snuffer’s been excommunicated and that’s the scarlet letter the church can give to people. So you got a a good morally clean man. Who writes some books that the church doesn’t like and so, oh, we don’t want, we don’t like what they’re teaching and so we’re gonna give them that scarlet letter. I know Justin Griffin has felt the same way that he got this scarlet letter of apostate and excommunication, you know, and that’s the way to silence you, right? I think that’s exactly why Brian Hailes is going after you, Michelle, because you’re such a powerful voice and you’re a woman, a powerful woman’s voice in this arena. That um he wants to silence you. So the best way the church can do that, any church, any organization, I don’t, you know, even in Christ time they excommunicated people to silence them because then it immediately instills fear in other people who are trying to be good faithful members of whatever church or organization they’re part of. And so, Um, I’m, I’m gonna guess that Matthew, this is kind of calculated on his part because

[2:25:25] Michelle: I really know who I am. I know who I am.

[2:25:28] Whitney Horning: Well, and up until this point, they’re kind of on both sides, like, like we’ve mentioned before, they’re speaking kind of out of both sides of their mouth. They’re like making our arguments for us and then all of a sudden like counter arguing. And so I really think that they get to this point in their show, and they can’t deny that our, our movement, our group is growing, our platform, our idea, this, um, whatever you wanna call us is growing, um, and so how do we deal with it? Well, we’ve got to squash it, and so let’s just throw out two names of men who are You know, have been I don’t know about Phil Davis. I don’t know if he’s been, like I said, I don’t know him at all, but I’m going to assume that the way Matthew talks about him and Denver is in a way to make an a faithful act of Latter-day saint immediately go, oh. If Michelle, if Karen, if Gwendolyn, if Whitney are part of those two, not gonna listen to any more that they have to say. It’s all in order to silence us. That they that he brought up those names. It’s just it really. I don’t know if you, if anybody who hasn’t heard it and Michelle’s gonna link it, you can go listen to it, but it wasn’t his moment in this podcast.

[2:26:57] Michelle: It was atrocious. And the thing that it’s so upsetting as I’m listening to you speak, so yes, so Denver Snuffer, if you want to come up with the scariest apostate, right? Because I found Also, as I’ve gone to that camp out I went to and gone to, um, I just went in to another event where I was asked to speak, and, um, on Emma Smith’s birthday. And if you want to scare people, tie into Denver stuff, because I found out that in the years after that, and so I think Denver was excommunicated in, was it 2014, I want to say. And the people that I’ve met, when I said that that felt like being at a refugee camp, people’s stories of being called in and excommunicated in 2015, 2016, 2017 for nothing other than reading a book or talking to someone about one of Denver’s books they’ve read in some of the ideas, and there are a lot of Beautiful insights in those books, like really beautiful scriptural insights. But if you read something by Denverefer, like one man I just who just told me his story this last week, um, it was 2017, and he had just been released as the first counselor of the bishopc, and, um, he was told that he, he, it was found out that he had read one of Denver Snuffer’s books, and he was told that he had to say in his, he, he couldn’t believe they would call a The court, these were like this high counsel were all his friends and associates. But, and so he was, he was like shocked. He was like, OK, I’ll go, but I’ll just explain to them, you know, he had no idea. And he’s telling me this through his tears, you know, and, um, and he said that they told him that he had to say that everything that Denver Snuffer said was wrong and that he would never read him again. And he said that he said, because part of his story is he’s a recovering alcoholic, he had, I mean a recovering addict. I don’t know exactly what the addictions were, but there were substances as well as other things. And he, um, he, so he had been for years going around teaching about addiction in the church, and, you know, and, and so he said to this court, he said, I can’t say that because if I want to stay sober, I can’t tell lies. He knew that about himself, and so he said I can’t say that. And so they excommunicated him and um and his wife, they were gonna call her and they actually wanted her to resign. And she also was just shocked for, I met so many people who their sin was being married to this to this man who’d been excommunicated, right? There, that was their crime, and she, he said that she was just too compassionate to put Their friends, their leadership through having to excommunicate her, so she just went ahead and resigned just to be compliant and make it as easy as possible. And, you know, and as I’ve talked to people, one of the things that I hear often is how hard it is on your kids, because that’s one of, you know, when I get so offended when people tell me I need to leave the church or when people Advocate for me to be excommunicated, which there is no reason for them to do that other than to claim victory without ever engaging. That’s the only reason to excommunicate me. The only good it could possibly do, like I’ve said, is gratify the pride of the most self-righteous members. That’s the only good that could possibly come from it. It doesn’t solve one other thing. So the people advocating for this and contacting my leaders, it’s disgusting. And I have a family of children. I have 11 living children, one on a mission, 6 still at home, like, not to mention my grown children. What would that do to my family? And people can’t even get beyond. Themselves to think about it. So anyway, this fear connected to Denver Snuffer that led to this holocaust in the church of excommunicating. I have no idea how many members, so many people in that, what’s it called, the movement that sort of loosely follows Denver Sneffer, is it called The Remnant? Is that what it’s called? So many people in the remnant movement. Wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t been excommunicated. I heard that again and again and again that people did not want to leave the church. They didn’t want to come follow this other group, but they’ve been, they’re refugees. They’re kicked out, right? So that’s, that’s why anyway, I went on that sidetrack, but Denver Snuffer is the scariest apostate and then Phil Davis, I think that he. So I, I’m confused about the whole doctrine of Christ thing, just like I’m confused about the remnant. I don’t know exactly what they are, other than like-minded people. Like, like, you know, I don’t know. And I think that Phil Davis maybe imagined himself as the leader of that, although a lot of people I’ve talked to didn’t recognize him as a voice they wanted to follow, you know, like, Justin Griffin has said that multiple times that he didn’t have anything to do with Phil Davis. And yet people associate him with the Doctor of Christ group. I, I, so I, I don’t know exactly how it works, but I know that Phil Davis, like, went down in a blaze of glory to many people and was kind of humiliated himself. So he’s another. And what I find interesting is that some of the people who have come at me. The hardest and the most dishonestly, one woman in particular who just continually lies about me. Two of the main things that she would tell people and other people would overhear her saying this at conferences and would tell me on occasion, and she says it online all the time. She keeps blocking me on Facebook and then unblocking me just long enough to see what I’m saying. Then as soon as she can, block. Me again, like it’s so self-righteous. I’ve blocked Michelle Stone, so she can post and comment about me all the time without me seeing it. She constantly claims that I’m both a member of Denver Snuffer’s group and of Phil Davis’s group. She like, and I don’t even know how that would work. So anyway, so this is a claim that it was discouraging to see an actual historic. And when I’ve seen it made by these worst enemies of the truth, who are just these awful people willing to lie about everything, like willing to lie like crazy about me. I, anyway, I found this to be so disappointing, and that’s the only reason he did it was, again, to demean, to demean our movement.

[2:33:11] Gwendolyn Wyne: And do, is this where we want to go? Do we want to go to this place as a church of saying if you read this book, you’re gonna be excommunicated? I mean, that’s crazy. I’d like to go on public record. I will read anything. I will read every book and I have read some horrific books because I like to think and I like to figure out what’s true, and I like to wrestle with ideas. So if we’re going to Like you’re saying, Michelle, we’re going to say, well, they’re associated with them, then you’re trying to shut down the free discourse of ideas. And this is part of my

[2:33:50] Michelle: They’re using lies to shut down the pursuit of truth, because those are lies. These two men are not the leaders of this movement. The like some of the strongest voices in this movement are sitting in this panel right now, being silenced and demeaned as freethinking women, claiming that God loves women, right? And this is how they are responding both the religious side, the Brian Hill side, and the historian side, the Matthew Bowman side, it is so disappointing. And so let me add, I want to add this to the screen because one of my historian friends reached out to me after listening to this to tell me this was Matthew Bowman’s, I believe, his most recent book and what he’d recently presented on at the Mormon History Association. And, um, it’s the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, which apparently were like the first people to claim to have been abducted by aliens. So he’s writing about alien abductions and the history of that in America and my, my, uh, this historian explained to me that his presentation was about how you have to take everybody seriously. He couldn’t approach. Betty and Barney Hill seeing them as whack jobs or as crazy people. He needs to to approach them as valid people telling valid stories in, in, you know, and and you have to look at it that way. So it’s amazing that he can say that about alien abductions. But he can’t do that with us. We rank, we rank in his mind, I guess, way lower than alien abduction claims. And he again is breaking his own rules. That’s how motivated they are to silence this movement that, I, I mean, like, like talk about hypocrisy presenting on the importance of taking actors seriously and then treating us like this, that. My, the historian that called me was really struck by that. I will say this one part really quickly about about what they have to say about Joseph as a mystic and a seer and a few other things.

[2:36:00] Dave?: One of their premises is that they, Denver Snuffer Phil Davis, have greater spiritual insight into what Joseph Smith was trying to do than the current LDS church leadership does. Um, and what they are trying to do that in part is create a Joseph Smith that Appeals to them. So the Joseph Smith they are able to create is a grassroots mystic, a seer, a visionary, um, someone who is not affiliated with large scale frightening institutions, um, who seems a lot like, frankly, Denver Snuffer or Phil Davis.

[2:36:42] Gwendolyn Wyne: So this is part of when he’s like, oh, they’re able to create this Joseph Smith who’s a mystic a seer, and it’s like, I’m sorry, do we not believe in ears? I think that’s one of With one of the descriptors that we even find in the Book of Mormon about a seer is even greater than a prophet. I thought we believed that Joseph was a seer, so there’s this

[2:37:05] Michelle: a mystic is a mystic is someone who communes with the divine who,

[2:37:09] Gwendolyn Wyne: yes, there’s this, I mean, I, I wanna say indirect, but it’s kind of a direct mocking of actual sincere religious belief that we believe that Joseph Smith was a seer is like, oh. You know, that you guys are more deluded than people who believe in alien abductions. I mean, poor things. If you were more educated, if you were more educated, you would know that everybody’s a little bit bad, nobody’s truly good, and God is removed, and there’s no revelation today and we can’t know anything.

[2:37:44] Michelle: That’s so interesting. And he does, he’s making that point to say that we see, we see Phil Davis and Denver Snuffer as like, like, like the Joseph Smith, we’re creating ourselves, who are mystics and seers. He’s so false and all of that.

[2:38:00] Gwendolyn Wyne: I know almost nothing about Denver Snuffer and Davis. I saw you interview Denver Snuffer on your program. That’s like the most. That I know I’ve had some people tell me, oh, Denver Snuffer has said something similar to what you’ve said, and I’m like, well, maybe we’re both coming to the same thing because we’re both seeking out truth. I mean, I don’t see any problem with people who don’t know each other, who aren’t involved with each other, who are studying the scriptures, trying to figure out what’s true, coming to the same conclusion like, right, yeah, fine. That doesn’t mean I’m following him. That just means he’s another person on this earth who wants to know what’s true and is willing to pay the price,

[2:38:38] Michelle: right? And I also want to say from what I understand, and of course I’m sure there are always two sides to the Phil Davis story, you know, what I’ve heard is not good. But I think it’s also offensive to compare Denver Snuffer and Phil Davis, because I think that Denver Snuffer is a very different person than Phil Davis is. So, like, I, I, I was happy to have Denver Sniffer on the podcast. I don’t think it was my best interview, you know, but I, but I’m more than happy to talk to him. I’m never gonna invite Phil Davis. So, you know, I think that’s, that’s a difference too.

[2:39:10] Whitney Horning: I’m glad you said that because I, I do know Denver, um, not really, really well, but I do know him, and he is just an incredibly faithful, loyal, chaste, virtuous, righteous man. And you know what I’ve heard of Phil Davis, I’m grateful you said that.

[2:39:31] Michelle: Yeah, one of them, I believe, is telling the truth about his experiences. One of them I don’t believe is telling the truth about his experiences is how I would frame it. And I did get I did get to know Denver Steffer a little bit better recently, because I didn’t know him at all until just this last, you know, like a couple of weeks ago. And I was, um, I don’t know, I found him to be. Very sincere and. Generous, selfless, like I didn’t see any false motives. He, he was very um generous with his time and his insights and I, I don’t know, I, I had a very like, like. Uh, you know, I have, I, I’m not a follower of that movement at all, but I don’t, I don’t think that we do ourselves favors by, again, declaring people to be apostates and treating them as pariahs and as horrible people. I don’t think it’s warranted in every case. And so, and I don’t know why he even brought up Phil Davis. If I were to say to someone, Like if someone were like, how can I go find out about Joseph’s polygamy or about the polygamy deniers, who would ever recommend Denver Snapper or Phil Davis on this topic? It’s just silly. OK, I’ll go on to the next, cause then, um, Brooke adds her reasons and adds a new one that is new to me that just makes it even worse.

[2:40:59] Brooke LeFevre: It’s clear that they, these, these a lot of these polygamy deniers have a very doctrinal goal, right? They’re trying to critique the LDS Church, they’re trying to say it’s too powerful, it’s too hierarchical, um, and it’s, it’s, um, smothering real religiosity.

[2:41:19] Michelle: I’m in the pause there again. How many of you were going? Ah, the LDS Church is too powerful. How can I fight the power of the LDS Church? I know. I don’t claim Joseph wasn’t a polygamist. I, I mean, the fact that they can’t even fathom that we could just be sincere seekers of truth who have done our homework and have come to this. Conclusion, like, what is she talking about?

[2:41:51] Gwendolyn Wyne: Well, we do have a doctrinal goal, and that is to help people see polygamy is not of God, full stop.

[2:41:56] Michelle: To find the truth. It’s just to find the truth. To find the truth, the truth, yeah,

[2:42:00] Gwendolyn Wyne: whatever it is, and we believe we found that polygamy is not of God, and then what flows from that.

[2:42:06] Michelle: Right. And shouldn’t historians also have the same goal of pursuit of truth? Like, should we call that doctrinal for them as a way to demean the work they’re doing? Whitney, were you gonna say something that looked like you were? Well,

[2:42:19] Whitney Horning: just when she hierarchy, I’m not totally sure what she’s getting out there because one of the things that the church actually teaches is that Joseph was the top of the pyramid of hierarchy, right? He was the prophet president. And so, how is, how are we anti-hierarchy by saying he didn’t do polygamy? I just thought that was the strangest comment from her. I’m like, I, I don’t understand at all where she’s going that are, and, and to say that it’s our main issue. Is hierarchy, power and control of the institutional church. I, I’ve never spoken about that subject ever, so I’m just that was just very perplexing.

[2:43:07] Gwendolyn Wyne: I, I talk about it because I think it’s related. I, I think that it’s related, but that, like, again, that’s downstream in my mind.

[2:43:18] Michelle: It’s downstream. Also, for people who like a lot of people have had their sort of awakenings, their paradigm shifts or their Faith crises in the wake of things like the 2015 policy of exclusion for gay members of the church, right? Or more recently 2020 and the strong urging to be good global citizens and go along with all of that wholeheartedly, right? Those things have been troubling to a lot of people. I think rightly so. I think those are very troubling things, even for a lot of people, the, um, the name of the church thing with that that. Really troubling interview with Sister Nelson, with Wendy Nelson, and, and many of the things that happened, right? It’s like, whoa, this is weird. They’re basically saying, right, now that President Hinckley is out of the way, we can finally live our you know what I mean? We finally can tell everyone that everything President Hinckley did with the name Mormon was really just a victory from for Satan. Do like, these things are troubling to people, and I think that that’s valid, and they are troubling to me. So, so because we’re troubled by these things, we decided to go into this wild ridiculous conspiracy theory that Joseph wasn’t a polygamist because it combats those things. How? Like, uh, yeah, it’s like, why would that be the thing we would choose? Lots of people have spoken out about 2020 and talked about how troubled they were by the church’s handling of that. We can address that. We don’t have to reach back to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and polygamy. It’s just ludicrous. So OK, I’ll continue with

[2:44:58] Whitney Horning: just really quick, I wonder if Brooks kind of um. Piggy, not piggybacking, but kind of move going forward with what Matthew, because Matthew puts it all on Phil Davis in Denver. And so I, I’m wondering if when she then starts her little thing about polygamy deniers, if she’s thinking of those two and not us. Because, because I know Denver is, he has spoken out a lot against hierarchy, against power and control of institutions because he, he speaks a lot about, um, that in Joseph’s day it was all equal and flat and all one level like the doctrine and covenants teaches us that the presidency has equal authority to the high council who’s equal in authority to the state president who’s equal in authority, you know, it’s all very linear. And so I’m wondering if maybe she, because we, because we hear her this interview, this podcast, and we’re thinking about us because we know we’re the ones doing most of the work on this front. And so then we assume that she’s talking about us, right, that’s our main issue. And I wonder if he’s, I wonder if she’s thinking because he’s just got done spending all his time about Phil Davis in Denver if then she’s like, yeah, and their main issue is

[2:46:21] Karen Hyatt: that’s a really good point. That’s probably what it is like a continuation of the Denver straw man. It’s like a Denver er straw man argument and so you’re probably right.

[2:46:31] Michelle: Yeah, and I like that. So it goes in that category of sort of sloppy and ignorant, like the claim that we throw out all of the sources after 1844, right? Because all she’s looked into is Denver snuffer on this topic, right, or something. So,

[2:46:46] Whitney Horning: I mean, none of these people who love to speak out against us, none of them have ever had a conversation with me,

[2:46:54] Michelle: with any of us. Yeah,

[2:46:56] Karen Hyatt: I was gonna say they’ve got your email. 1132 problems at gmail.com, right?

[2:47:04] Gwendolyn Wyne: I have a contact me form on my on my website, so I mean, yeah, we’re all, we’re all able to be reached, um,

[2:47:12] Michelle: but

[2:47:12] Gwendolyn Wyne: I don’t think they want to to give us what is Lindsey Henson Park said to give us oxygen. Yeah,

[2:47:19] Michelle: yeah, you know, you got silence the women. Um, I did reach out to, um, a friend, Peter Brown, who’s been on the podcast, who, I’m sorry, I got that moth again. I have my window open, who, um, I, he, I asked him if he could put together some sort of a survey, at least some kind of quantifiable research about polygamy deniers and why we are who we are. I would be curious to see what percentage of the people who adhere to. Our views are here in order to the 1960s carries on with the fight, bring down the man, fight the institution if that’s why they’re here, and they think somehow polygamy denial is a good way to do that, right? That’s ridic so I think that’s quite ridiculous or how many people are here because Denver snuffer encouraged them to delve into this or do you know what I mean? Like, like, or how I, I mean, I mean maybe. Maybe there are Phil Davis followers who followed, you know, but I don’t, from what I understand, I was just told actually Phil Davis kind of was a break off from the Denver snuffer movement. He got his ideas initially from Denver Snuffer till he broke off and he was the leader. I think someone at least was. Well,

[2:48:34] Whitney Horning: and I do think, to be fair to Denver, I do think that since about Trying to think it was about 2018, 2019. It was about the same time I was writing my book that he really did start coming out. He had some talks at Sunstone and then some other, um, fire sites he did where he did really come out and really go on record and then he’s had some podcasts where he really has come out and said Joseph never did polygamy. So he’s been, so I could see, like you said, it would be fun to do a poll, but I could see that, um, because I have gone to a lot of their conferences and I consider myself um one of their group or whatever. I don’t just like-minded believers. I like that, people who think uh try to figure things out in a like-minded way.

[2:49:25] Michelle: Kind of like the other people I talked about who are refugees,

[2:49:28] Whitney Horning: and I haven’t met, I haven’t met any of them who believe Joseph did. So I do think that he has had a great influence on people who do read his work in that regard. But to say that he’s the leader of this, like I said, he’s got other work to do. I really don’t think he wants to lead the charge of being a polygamy denier.

[2:49:50] Michelle: And, and we should say that he had to be brought to these things. Like he for a long time didn’t even question it. He just was trying to figure out,

[2:50:00] Whitney Horning: like I said, it was like one on his like, he was like, there wasn’t even anything he was interested in figuring out,

[2:50:06] Michelle: right? So, so yeah, OK, so those two are all of the reasons so far. No good. So let’s keep going.

[2:50:15] Brooke LeFevre: And so they’re, they’re using this, this narrative of young forcing this, the narrative of polygamy and of Joseph Smith practicing polygamy as a way to critique the power of the institutional church and say, what else are they, you know, what else are they controlling? What other narratives are they, are they forcing upon us that aren’t real?

[2:50:38] Michelle: Or maybe we’re just reading the sources and realizing there are problems. I would say it’s more common for people to learn about the history of polygamy and then say, oh wow, there are problems with the church, than for people to say there are problems with the church. So I’m going to study polygamy. That doesn’t seem to be the order.

[2:50:58] Karen Hyatt: It makes me laugh so much that they talk about how we are like going against the church narrative. That whole thing just makes me laugh so hard because I’m like, you gave them the church narrative. You can’t then turn around and say, you’re talking against the church narrative. Like, no, we’re talking against the historical con supposed consensus. I mean, it is a consensus right now, but Like, you’re the one that gave it to them. You can’t then say they teach this. Like they only teach it because you taught it to them for crying out loud. Like, we know this. So, um, wow. When I saw Quentin Cook hold up the saint’s book, and cause he’s like, we wanted you to have, you know, somewhere where you can go and get truth about church history, and he held up the saint’s book and he said, if it says it was raining, it was raining. And I was like, oh my word. Like he thinks he’s getting unvarnished history from these people. And that was incredible. And I kind of think that probably made the historians shudder because that’s not how history is done anyway. Like, 9 people said it was raining, 5 said it was snowing. And 2 said it was a sunny day, and they do their best. So everyone knows that that’s more like reality and history. So for him to do that, I thought, like my heart went out to him because I was like, oh no, he thinks like, he thinks they found out truth and put it in this book. It was super painful.

[2:52:26] Michelle: Uh, and I didn’t include it, but even Brooke in this interview talks about the difference between the past and history, right? The past is what actually happened, and history is what we can figure out that happens. It’s kind of the difference between truth and our best attempt at narrative, right? We’ll go on to the next clip.

[2:52:43] Matthew Bowman: Why members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Why some don’t accept their face on position that Joseph practiced polygamy? Why, why are they more why are they more comfortable describing that to Brigham Young? When it seems the tie to Joseph Smith would better support their belief in their church. Why is that?

[2:53:03] Michelle: I just included that because he right there proves what we’re trying to say. This is not a result of motivated reasoning. We are going against our personal interests in many ways. It’s because we’re not seeking comfort, the comfort of a narrative or belonging or supporting our preconceived ideas, which every other group in this discussion is doing except for us.

[2:53:28] Karen Hyatt: It’s more projection. It’s more. I loved he said that because it was like, you know, they want to be comfortable. And I was like, OK, nothing about this is comfortable, but you just showed your hand. That’s why you’re sticking with the narrative that you’re sticking with. Thank you for letting us know that, because it’s more comfortable for you.

[2:53:48] Michelle: Awesome, awesome. And if we took more time, I would have us all talk a little bit. the costs that we’ve incurred doing it, but we’ll just know it’s been high for all of us, right? This is not an easy space to step into. We do it not in the, not because we’re seeking comfort. We are seeking truth at all costs, which is what it’s costing for many of us. So the next clip is where Matt and Brooke both offer. Non-answers to this question, which is kind of the question of why is it better to believe that it’s Joseph Smith and Brighayer? Why, you know, like, like, why did they have to be motivated to believe this? And they go on to give their speculative answers. They’re ridiculous and silly, and none of them answer the question. There is this critical question that people on all sides ask. But that I used to say, like, it doesn’t matter if it was Joseph or Brigham. We’re in the same situation as members of the church in either, either way. So that’s something we’re already acknowledging. And that is again speaking to our lack of motivated reasoning. We don’t really have anything to gain. In the church wise or personally by claiming it was one or the other. And so there, there are silly reasons that they talk about this, don’t answer that question, right? I will go ahead and play Brooke’s answer, because I do want to respond to it, because I think it’s very Interesting. I’ll sum up Matt’s answer is that we’re uncomfortable with the attacks on the family, and because we’re Western modern people, we’ve been trained, we’re so uncomfortable with attacks on the family that we just can’t handle another. We have to glorify the monogamist. You know, um, family as the church has done, and so we can’t handle another idea. Again, as if we had never read Section 132, as if we didn’t already know Joseph was a polygamist. All of us, I was gonna mention before, I think there is a difference maybe between like descendants of polygamists and maybe converts, maybe converts or people who weren’t growing up in Utah with recent polygamist ancestors. Maybe they just didn’t know about polygamy and didn’t know that Joseph Smith was. I can totally believe that. That’s not us. The primary voices in this are the recent descendants of polygamists who were raised knowing that that’s what Joseph Smith did. Yes, convert

[2:56:26] Karen Hyatt: convert, no, like no pioneer ancestry whatsoever. None. Yeah, no, my dad was just the first in our family. And so now it, it, it’s,

[2:56:36] Michelle: did you not know that Joseph was a polygamist though?

[2:56:39] Karen Hyatt: Was that no I mean I knew about 132. I mean like I had scriptures and I read them, so I was like, I mean it made no sense and I just, I think I’ve talked about this before. It’s like Um, I just, I, it seems crazy. It’s like, are you kidding me? That seems like the worst thing ever. That seems so anti every gospel principle, but it’s in the scriptures. And so I was like, uh, he will help me understand it. He will change my heart to understand something that it seems so blurry and crazy now. And that’s what I, I had total faith in God. So I knew that I wasn’t going to get to the other side and be ticked off or annoyed or whatever. So, whatever it was, he would make it right. But, so the minute, the minute, it was like, oh, PS, that wasn’t ever in the Doctrine and Covenant that was added in 1876. OK, that makes the click, you know, the universe just clicked and it was like, oh, that makes more sense. And now we can go back to DNC 4222, cleave under her none else. That’s what I thought. So.

[2:57:47] Michelle: Awesome. And I will just quickly say, cause Whitney earlier referred to kind of the weight that many women in particular, not some men as well, and not all women, but carry on this topic, like my interview I did on why it matters. And I do want to again point out that we are carrying the, in our DNA, the pain and trauma. That was incurred by so many of these people. And so I don’t think that being the descendants of polygamists should invalidate our voices on this. And I don’t think that the pain that we have carried as a result of being the recent descendants of polygamists should be ignored or certainly not mocked, right? I hate that people act that way about it. Like, oh, you just don’t like polygamy. Excuse me. I have a right to speak out on this. This, this was my great grandmother. She was the 16-year-old who was married by the almost 40-year-olds to be their surrogate. She was the haggar of that story. I get to talk about. this and it gets to me and and you don’t get to squash my voice, right? I think that’s true for all of us. So, OK, here is Brooke’s answer. I’m just going to include this one because again, it was a new one to me and I have a lot to say about this. We’ll try and do it quickly.

[2:59:07] Brooke LeFevre: Um, one of the things that they do is they kind of re-remember Brigham Young as a type of Warren Jeffs, and that’s they’re, they’re imagining that he had the type of authoritarian control that Warren Jeffs had.

[2:59:23] Michelle: I have so much to say about that. I think she goes on to say this to build on that in the next comment. Let me see if if she does.

[2:59:31] Brooke LeFevre: So I think in, in the, in the wake of, of Warren Jeffs and other um polygamist movements that were revealed to be really awful, um I think it it has become even more difficult to imagine Joseph Smith as a polygamist, especially when you think about the fact that he was marrying teenage girls, if you believe these accounts, right? And so I think um the, the atrocities of someone like Warren Jeffs is pushing them even further and making them want to deny that Joe Smith was a polygamist.

[3:00:06] Michelle: Again, completely ridiculous on every possible way. If anything, for me, seeing what has happened in recent polygamy, learning more about it, has confirmed for me the fact that all of the fruits of polygamy are bad, right? It would make me more, it makes me more opposed to what brings Young was doing, which we have the accounts. I don’t see that coming from Joseph Smith. It’s like it’s irrelevant to this discussion. This is based on the evidence, and I thought it was ironic that she said that, um, we see, um, Brigham Young as a type of Warren Jeffs. It’s exactly the opposite. Warren Jeffs came way later. We see Warren Jeffs as part of the fruit of Brigham Young, of what he did, right? And I want her to explain to me why it’s not a valid comparison. She again says they imagine that Brigham Young might have had something like the power Warren Jeff’s had. Let me just respond to that. Warren Jeffs was only in Colorado City and Hillville. And there are cars and cell phones and televisions and, right, like way harder for him to exert authoritarian control. They’re just like, like they’re what, 10 minutes away from the next town by car that they can escape to. Brighamy had these people in Utah in the 1840s and 1950s and 1960s, like, completely separated. You like there in fact, when the um The army came the first time the people let them in their homes and entertained them and took care of them, and then when they left and went to California, many of the women saw their first chance to leave and went with them, which I think, and Lindsay Hanson Park said the same thing is a big part of the reason that when the army came back next year, he said they shall not come. Here and went to such extremes they were going to burn the entire city to keep the army from coming. And part of it was because it was the means of escape for the women. In fact, so many polygamy defenders that I talked to now, well, that, that come after me now, don’t even have more than one wife. They claim to be polygamists, but Their wives have left them. They can’t get more than one wife, because women have too much freedom, right? To stay, like, the only thing capturing women in the system now is the mind control, is that they have to damn themselves to hell, to out of darkness, to be a sort of tradition in order to leave. Like, the only reason that people now can admit that Warren Jeffs was doing the atrocities he was doing. It’s because the the um ranch was raided and there were recordings, right? So you explain to me how you know that nothing like that could possibly have happened anywhere else. Like we know of Bishop Snow, I believe in Cedar City castrating the young man and nailing. His testicles to the wall as a warning to everyone else. We know that story. I haven’t heard anything quite that awful from Warren Jeffs, and I’ve heard a lot. We know that Brigham Young, when he was, oh gosh, I think he was 43, um, just a few weeks away from 43, he married a 15-year-old. We know that the average marriage age of girls, they say women, it has to be girls during the Reformation, with 16. That means that for every 20 year old getting married, there was like a 12 or 13 year old getting married, right? So, so stop, anyway, I had some clips of, of these FLDS women as well that you guys might remember from when the ranch was raided, and they went full, full bore onto the television stations trying to plead themselves as victims, doing. Exactly the same thing that these that the women did in these meetings they held to combat the anti-polygamists. It’s the same playbook. It’s, you know, like, and asserting that Brigham Young just automatically had less control than Warren Jeff’s when nobody, those so many of the people that escaped from Warren Jeff’s community were were telling these stories. We’re saying. What was happening there, and no one would believe them and no one would take action. Watch the Flora Jessup episode that I did as just one example. So I find it highly offensive to say, OK, we’ll believe this about Warren Jess because we’ve heard the tape recordings. But no one else would have possibly done that. What are they talking about? So, OK, let’s go on to the next. Sorry to wrap a little bit. This gets me heated.

[3:04:48] Matthew Bowman: In your view, each of you as scholars of Mormon history, did Joseph Smith practice polygamy?

[3:04:55] Michelle: So this is interesting how he sums it up. He has to ask them that question because of how they have engaged in this interview, and I wanted to, again, this is just the second to last clip. I wanted to compare it to what we have from Benjamin Park, the way that he talked about this just. Like the week before this episode, and I didn’t engage emails with Ben Park. I don’t know if he would have listened even if I had, but here’s what I think Peggy Fletcher stack and the other man doing the interview were expecting in this interview.

[3:05:26] Ben Park: Engle credentialed, published and respected historian who has examined early Mormonism, agrees that Joseph Smith both taught and practiced polygamy. I looked at every single piece of evidence. It is overwhelming. Joseph Smith was a polygamist. The documentary evidence is clear. Historians who know the documents are unanimous in. Agreeing with the scholarly consensus that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. There is no historical question that Joe Smith practiced polygamy, especially in Navu. We have contemporary records, we have accounts from those involved, we have, uh, documentation from the period itself. Not a lot. We still have to piece things together, but there’s no historical question that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, and he practiced it quite a lot.

[3:06:16] Michelle: So this is what I think they expected that interview to be, right? So

[3:06:21] Gwendolyn Wyne: when Ben seems to be Ben seems to be very converted to this belief, he has a religious fervor.

[3:06:27] Michelle: Right. And I wanna ask Ben, as a PhD historian specializing in this topic, the author of several books, how would he treat a historian who stepped out of line on this narrative? Right? You can see part of The pressure keeping them in when people, I mean, his overstatement is massive. Again, he should lose a ton of credibility for that. But I want to compare his approach to it to how first Brooke and then Matt answers this question that they were asked about the evidence. Listen to the difference in tone just after a couple of weeks.

[3:07:05] Brooke LeFevre: Uh, like I said, like we talked about before, there is really no way. Historians all recognize there’s no way to know for sure what happened in the past. We are always willing to amend our historical narratives if you’re a good historian.

[3:07:19] Michelle: Again, be a good historian, right? Isn’t that a different tone? In fairness, she does go on to say that for her, the weight of the evidence supports Joseph being a polygamist. She thinks it’s very difficult to claim he’s not a polygamist. Again, I would invite Brooke, I hope he will engage with our evidence. I hope he will come on and have a conversation with me about it, or if not, at At least look into the cases what claims we’re making, even if you want to wait until we get them published in some journals, some of the different claims, but I, I like read Whitney’s book, just start engaging with the evidence, at least, you know, to some extent, because you might come to a different conclusion just as we all did. And now I’ll play, um, Matt’s so you can also compare it to Ben Park.

[3:08:04] Dave?: I think one of the things that polygamy deniers will often look for is a single definitive piece of evidence, right, a perfect piece of evidence that will prove everything one way or the other, but that kind of evidence just almost never actually exists. So what we deal with is preponderances. What does most of the evidence seem to say? What does most of the evidence, when weighed in light of its own reliability and its own provenance, seem to say? And for me, as for Brooke, I think the preponderance of the evidence affirms that he was in fact a polygamist.

[3:08:39] Michelle: OK, so I gave Matt the final word to make his case. But again, it was fascinating for me. We talked about this last time for him to say we never can know anything for sure. There’s never a definitive piece of evidence. All of us have acknowledged multiple times that if there were a child, case closed. That would be a definitive piece of evidence. I think we have found many extremely compelling pieces of evidence, and they just choose to ignore them. Right? I, I’m not looking for a definitive piece of evidence to prove that Joseph was not a polygamist. I’m doing the work and seeing that the preponderance of evidence actually shows that he was not, right? And so I thought that that was silly that he would claim that, like, again, the historical questions we don’t have to debate are like Brigham Young’s polygamy. If someone were a Brigham Young polygamy denier, I would jump on the bandwagon and say, what are you doing, right? And they’re claiming that’s what we’re doing is, is that silly. They’re claiming the case for Joseph’s polygamy is as strong as the case for Brigham’s polygamy, like Ben Park is, and, and, you know, so I, I appreciate, like this will be my final word and I’ll let you each take one. I appreciate very much that they are um. Being more nuanced, more measured, more accurate and more truthful in their responses in this interview, at least many of their responses, their responses regarding the historical documentation of Joseph’s polygamy. I appreciate that approach and the softening. I hope it will. Continue. And I invite the, the, you know, credentialed historians to engage in the research, engage in the arguments. Start, stop silencing women’s voices and start listening to what we’re saying. And I think it would be interesting to see what happens from there when we see that. Just in, in this little amount of time, it has already softened this much. I, I think it’s fascinating. I hope it continues, and I hope that other historians and people that are speaking as authoritatively and with as much certitude as Ben Park is will reconsider because it’s not going to go well for them in the long run. Anyone else have the last thing to say?

[3:11:02] Karen Hyatt: Just that, uh, the, the, they keep talking about the preponderance of evidence and it, it, I just, I’m like, share it with us, cause we haven’t seen it. I mean, it’s all like, just 90% of it or something is these women’s late, late testimonies. The same women who, when Brigham Young introduced polygamy in 1852 to the crowd and Some people were skeptical of this. What? And he’s at pains to help them understand that. No, it came from Joseph, and he’s trying to convince people of it. Not one of the women at that time said, Yeah, totally, I was his wife. None of them, but they still believe these late 1869 and 1877 affidavits. It’s crazy. Crazy. And so the question isn’t, do we believe the women? It’s, do we believe these women over Joseph Smith and Emma and Hirum? And it’s like, then for me, it’s just, it’s the preponderance of contemporary evidence says he wasn’t. Joseph said he wasn’t. I believe him.

[3:12:12] Michelle: Awesome, thank you. I love it. Anyone else?

[3:12:17] Whitney Horning: I was just gonna say the same thing that Karen, and you mentioned the preponderance of evidence, and it continually, um, is upsetting to me when people throw out the evidence that Joseph said for himself while he was alive. When they say, oh, the contemporary evidence, and they always bring up, you know, William Clayton or someone who was a pro polygamist. And they disregard what Joseph said about himself and what Emma said her entire life and what Hiram also said, and so just to add to what Michelle had said and um Karen, just that when they talk about preponderance of evidence and they throw out these big terms like Ben Park um numerous times saying I’ve seen all the evidence, I’ve seen it all, and so therefore you can trust me when I’m telling you. Um, I don’t think anyone’s seen it all. I continually will stumble on things on the church history library that, you know, is a long buried letter from some, you know, inconsequential person that the church held on to and it talks about things that help shed light on this. So, um, dig in and get looking for truth and it will find you if you’re truly seeking it.

[3:13:33] Michelle: Oh, I love it. OK, thank you so much. And I had just wanted to really quickly respond also to the question of do you believe the women or do you believe that, you know, contemporary evidence? And I think maybe we need to find a different way to say that because it’s not the women’s voices. Affidavits were not the women’s voices, right? So do you believe how the women were used in the patriarchal structure of polygamy over the contemporary evidence is is actually what the question is, right? We don’t have to accuse these women of lying. We are accusing this system of using the women in this way as well as they in this way to claim Joseph’s Plumy just as they use them in every other way. OK, and Gwendoly, did you have something you wanted

[3:14:19] Gwendolyn Wyne: to share? I have a scripture that I want to share. When I was reading EA 5. This really jumped out at me in a, in a different way than it had before. Alma the Younger has um been preaching to these Lamanites who held to the tradition of their fathers, and they converted and their souls did expand, they did sing redeeming love and um. I want to kind of frame this a little bit different. Alma says, what is the cause of this, right? Did not my father behold, I can tell you, this is Alma 5:11. Did not my father, Alma, believe in the words which were delivered by the mouth of a Benaa? And was he not a holy prophet? And according to this faith, there was a mighty change wrought in his heart. So because Alma believed in the words of a prophet, a change was wrought in Alma Alma of King Noah’s court. It was wrought in his heart. And behold, he preached the word unto your fathers, and a mighty change was also wrought in their hearts, and they humbled themselves, right? They let go of their pride that what they were doing was right. They humbled themselves and put their trust in the true and living God. And behold, they were faithful unto the end, therefore they were saved. When you, this is the fruit of believing the words of a true prophet. You humble yourself. And you redirect your faith, your trust, you put it all in the true and living God. You let go of trusting in men or women, they are no longer your trust. Your trust is in God. And I think that that is one of the greatest witnesses that Joseph. is and was a true prophet in my life is that when I started and Whitney, your book was really what turned, we always have it handy on our podcast. Your book was what turned me to say, you know what, what if I believe him? And as I believed Joseph, I have humbled myself and realized that I was wrong and that’s OK because Christ knows that we’re wrong, and he redeems us from our, um, our all of our incorrect and and iniquitous traditions. But when I believed in Joseph’s words, I had that humility and I began to trust in God above all others, and I love that. It’s been so. Enriching to my entire life. I hope everyone gets to have that experience and I hope that everyone who is in the church is willing to speak up about their belief because as we speak up in the church, it’s going to become much easier for all of us to realize we actually, we. Actually believe the same thing. We don’t think this is good. We don’t want our married 40 year old men marrying teenagers. That’s not the, that’s not what we want. So why would we defend it? Um, and I do think that, that that will affect real change over time and it already has.

[3:17:11] Michelle: Awesome. I have loved what everybody has shared so much. I want to thank all of you for coming. Just Gwendolyn, when you were speaking, it reminded me of Joseph’s May 26, 1844 speech that is so heartbreaking when he’s like making his last attempt to say I didn’t do this, and which People laughingly throw out now and say he was dodging or, you know, but he, the, the speech was referring to 2 Corinthians 11. That’s what he started with, and I just want to read verse 31. It says, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is blessed forevermore, knoweth that I lie not. Joseph Smith was not a liar. And I don’t say that because of motivated reasoning or because of a need to make him over of my in my image, or because of my need to do anything other than seek out and find and accept the truth. And the truth happens to be supported by all of the evidence that I can find. I don’t want to overstate it, but the truth happens to be that Joseph Smith was not a polygamist. And we all understand personally the cost of coming to accept that truth, or even being willing to consider that possibility. We understand personally the cost of that and the fear that might be associated with it, but I sincerely hope that Members of the church, non-members of the church, anti-Mormons, and historians will consider just opening their heart and mind enough to come to the evidence fresh, to come to it new and consider what it might actually say on its own merits. That’s all we’re asking for. So thank you, you guys, for engaging with me. This was another beautiful conversation. And I can’t wait to speak to each of you more. Thank you. Another huge shout out to these brilliant women who spent so much time with me breaking down this, this episode. Who knew there was so much content? We could have talked about this a lot more. And as I said, a future, at least one future episode will be coming. Based on this based on this Mormonland episode, I think it is essential to provide just how much evidence there is of the patriarchy and Brigham Young’s control in it in early Utah. That was an astounding claim to me. So thank you again for joining us and I will see you next time.