“The Manifesto was a Victory!”

First, here’s another item for your voracious Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File:

“In the news? How Kobe Bryant’s Catholic faith saved his marriage and turned his life around”

But there’s other religion news, as well:

“New Smart Doorbell Will Argue With Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS Missionaries For You”

“Black Missionary Arrives At White Church To Teach Them How To Clap On Beat”

Unfortunately, my friend Tarik LaCour tells me based on his many years of personal experience with the same challenge, the prospects of success for this effort are very, very poor.

“Falwell, Jeffress Ask Trump If They Can Sit At His Right And Left Hands When He Goes Into Glory”

“Evangelical Leaders Ask Trump Which One Of Them Will Betray Him During Impeachment Proceedings”

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I’ve recently seen a discussion, in a predominantly atheistic and ex-Latter-day Saint online venue that is deeply hostile to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of the question whether the Church broke up families in the wake of the 1890 Manifesto that more or less ended the practice of plural marriage.  Of course, for some of these folks, the Church is always wrong, so the question presumably isn’t so much about whether the Church hurt people but how much it hurt people, and whether there are some especially juicy stories to illustrate the continuing depravity of Church leaders.  Anyhow, the discussion reminded me of an article from long ago:  Gordon C. Thomasson, “The Manifesto was a Victory!” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 (Spring 1971): 37-45:

“The Manifesto was a Victory!”

I didn’t know Gordon Thomasson back then, but he went on to earn a doctorate at Cornell University and eventually, during a time when I regularly participated in conferences at Cornell and then at SUNY Binghamton, became a friend of mine.  In its very earliest days, he lent us his name in support of the launch of the Interpreter Foundation.

It has always been a matter of great regret to me that we never got any articles from Gordon, whose insights were invariably fresh and interesting (even when, as sometimes happened, we disagreed).  His health took a serious turn for the worse, and it simply wasn’t possible any more.