Two clarifications

A couple of questions have come my way in connection with my endorsement of Dr. Ugo Perego’s project.  I’ll answer them here:

1.

The genetic samples in question belonged to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, not to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  When Mr. Sorenson passed away, it was the Foundation, not the Church, that transferred or sold those materials to Ancestry.com upon the death of James Sorenson.

2.

I don’t particularly care whether it’s proven that Joseph Smith sired children by women other than Emma or not.  Nor, I think, does Dr. Perego.  We just think it worthwhile to establish the history, one way or the other.

I assume, as a matter of fact, that at least some of his plural unions were consummated.  If not, that would have been an injustice to the women involved, who presumably wanted children, etc., just as other women of their time typically did.

The important fact related to Joseph’s character in the matter of polygamy, though, has already been securely established by genetic research:  If there are descendants of Joseph by polygamous wives, they appear (at most) to be relatively few.  Yet Joseph has been portrayed by some of his critics as engaged in something of a continual orgy of sexual self-indulgence.  But this is very unlikely to be true.  We know that he could father children; if his non-polygamous posterity are few or even non-existent, he seems not to have been as sexually active (sexually obsessed?) as his detractors like to depict him as being.  Which strongly suggests that the motivation for plural marriage wasn’t simple lust on his part, not even sublimated.   And I think that other evidence points the same way.  He wasn’t a satyr.

Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah