“Joseph Smith married a 14-year old? Isn’t that WEIRD?”

Well, let’s look.

She was very nearly 15 and 15/16 year olds got married all the time back then.

“That’s a MYTH.”

Really?

Let’s take a look at a few Governors of the states the Saints passed through back then:

Quick 🧵 Beginning in New York: Daniel Tompkins, governor of New York from 1807-1817 and later Vice President under Monroe.

Married Hannah Minthorne.

Born: August 28, 1781
Marriage date: February 20, 1798
Age: 16

It is perfectly natural for any parent to place oneself in the shoes of the parents of the victims and to feel a deep, pure sympathy for them. This is right. This is good.

As the shock fades, it will become important to place yourself in the shoes of another person:

the killer. You need to know what makes men like these and what drives them to these acts.

You need to decipher their logic.

You need to understand their “why”.

Because they’re not senseless.

There is always a “why”.

“Why am I seeing all of these horrible reports about sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention?”

Class action lawyers eager to squeeze a target for money, basically.

And they’re already gearing up to come after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

🧵 Class action lawsuits are complicated, but stated simply the idea is:

- A very similar wrong happened to a lot of people

- For whatever reason, it isn’t practical for those people to sue individually

- Therefore they can sue as a “class”

“Why do the gays keep doing the flashlight thing on Y mountain?”

Because it’s a grift by Jerilyn Pool (@auntmarvel).

The same Jerilyn Pool who was publicly booted from the defunct blog Feminist Mormon Housewives amid accusations of embezzlement in 2016.

And more.

#DezNat 🧵 To the Twitter mods reviewing this post when it is attacked:

All screenshots and data are from:

- A publicly available blog and comments on the same.

- Public tweets

- Public court records without contact information.

Planning a trip this summer. Called up a cousin who lives in the area, wanted to reconnect, let his kid meet my kids.

Apparently, that’s 100% dependent on whether or not the vax is available for his (very healthy) 4-year old. This perfectly healthy 4-year old hasn’t played with another child in *two years*.

They told me they taught him to run from people.

He’s an only child.

And always will be.

My cousin and his wife decided that having any more kids in “times like these” was simply impossible.

One of the most illuminating things about these episodes is the display of the absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the self-proclaimed “Mormon Studies” intelligentsia.

Benjamin Park gets plenty of well-deserved flak, but Taylor Petrey is probably a better example. One of the (unintentionally) funnier tweets I’ve read in a while was Petrey’s feigned lament that the Maxwell Institute would not be able to “attract credible scholars” because it had belatedly deleted Park’s dribble from the site.

What does Petrey know of credible scholarship?

Hey, @PodiumHQ - looks like you’re getting some tweets about one of your awesome employees.

I thought I would, first of all, introduce you to the woman who was supposedly the subject of a racist attack.

She loves the guy.

https://twitter.com/FIDEL_FRFR/status/1437441155910754306

And now it’s time to introduce you to some of the folks behind the attack on your employee:

Meet ‘Kelli’ Potter - a violent extremist associated with the Utah branch of the Party of Socialism and Liberation (the organizers behind many violent protests in 2020 and beyond).