Artikkelit

Diana wrote:

>I went too far in accusing Clovis of approving things like Hauns Mill.

You don't say.

>On the other hand, I honestly haven't seen any indication from him that he disapproves of stuff like that,

Clovis wrote nothing that could be construed of approval "of stuff like that." You simply invented your accusation out of whole cloth, like Rabid Russell McGregor called Rich Measures and me "two apologists for genocide" a couple of years ago, and like a poster named "Sol" wrote to me a few days ago that "Randy probably approves of the Taliban." Such comments are the product of ignorance and fanaticism.

> in fact, he has gone to rather great lengths to excuse it by alluding to mythical actions by Danites.

Diana, there's another one of your problems. A couple of months ago, you wrote "OF COURSE there were Danites. I know all about the Danites." But above, you show us that you know N-O-T-H-I-N-G about the Danites, because if you DID, you'd know that their actions were not "mythical," but horribly REAL.

If you knew anything about the Danites, you'd know that they were Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon's secret "enforcement squadron," made up of men who would swear an oath of unquestioning obedience to church leaders, drive off dissenters, and "assist in the utter destruction of apostates."

If you knew anything about the Danites, you'd know that Apostles Parley P. Pratt, Lyman Wight, and David Patten were among the Danite leaders, and that Patten was killed while leading the Danites on a dawn raid at Crooked River to free two other Danites who had been captured by Missouri militiamen; and you'd know that Joseph Smith and Sampson Avard were at Patten's side when he died.

If you knew anything about the Danites, you'd know that it was they whom Joseph Smith sent out to loot and pillage the non-Mormon towns of Gallatin, Millport, and Grinding Fork, and that it was those Danite raids which prompted Governor Boggs to issue his "extermination order"; and you'd know that it was those Danite raids which enflamed non-Mormons to the point of organizing the vigilante group which attacked and killed those 17 innocent, unsuspecting Mormons at Haun's Mill.

If you knew anything about the Danites, you'd know that portions of their oath of initation were incorporated into Joseph Smith's 1842 "temple endowment ceremony"; and that the Danite oaths of loyalty, obedience, and vengeance against 'apostates' remained in the temple endowment ceremony into the early 1900's.

And if you knew anything about the Danites, you'd know that many of the men who planned and committed the MMM in 1857 had been Danites in MIssouri in 1838, or swore to the above oaths in the Endowment House in SLC under Brigham Young's reign.

So you see, Diana, neither Clovis or anyone else needs to "allude to mythical actions by the Danites" as being the cause of the Haun's Mill tragedy; the actions of the Danites were very real, they were endorsed by Joseph Smith, they were the reason the Mormons were kicked out of Missouri, and they were horribly real at Mountain Meadows in 1857.

>"Approve" "Excuse" "Dismiss"...three terms that mean essentially the same thing, especially when such pains are taken to point to the MMM in excruciating detail. >I haven't approved, excused OR dismissed the MMM.

When you adopt a stance of denial about Mormon teachings and policies that led to the MMM, and support the institution of Mormonism and its leaders who created those policies, you in effect approve of the MMM.

When you post specious information that the Fancher party had done something worthy of their mass murder, you in effect seek to excuse the MMM.

When you dismiss the evidence that the MMM was an act of the institutional Mormon church, rather than merely the act of locals acting on their own, you in effect dismiss the MMM. That is the moral equivalent of condemning Nazi guards who dropped gas canisters, while holding Hitler blameless.

>All I ask in return is a fair examination of ALL that happened, including the actions taken against us, with something other than a dismissive "Hauns' Mill is a part of history" as if saying so made it irrelevent to the Mormon people.

Your problem is that YOU have not made an even-handed study of the events, to know WHY the Haun's Mill tragedy occurred. All you do is whine and moan about those "poor persecuted Mormon pioneers", while being totally clueless about what they did to rile the Missourians against them.

>Hauns' Mill was NOT irrelevent.

Who said it was?

>Neither is the fact that some of the men involved in the MMM had lost entire families to the persecution of their religion, lost their families, their lands and homes, sometimes twice or three times over.

Above, you wrote that you're not trying to "excuse" the MMM, but here you do it anyway. You're digging your hole pretty deep, Diana.

> If you push people that hard, something is going to blow;

Who pushed Mormons hard enough for them to "blow" against the Fancher party in 1857? The Mormons, along with their Indian mercenaries, attacked a wagon train of 120+ unsuspecting men, women, and children. They convinced them to give up their weapons, and murdered them under a flag of truce, while they were unarmed and helpless. How could those poor, unarmed people "push" those Mormons hard enough to make them "blow" to the point of murdering them under a flag of truce? Reports say that when the Fancher party came out, they expressed their gratitude to the Mormons for saving them from the Indians---whereupon the Mormons and Indians massacred them. Does that sound like the Fancher party, which had been under siege for days, and were tired, hungry, thirsty, and wounded, "pushed" the Mormons enough to make them "blow?"

If that's your attitude, do you also excuse the Missourians who committed the Haun's Mill massacre because the Mormons "pushed" them that hard, and they "blew?"

>as I said, the MMM did NOT occur in a vacuum, nor did it occur because Mormonism is evil.

I agree with the first half of that sentence; the MMM did not occur in a vacuum, nor was it an isolated, anomalous incident. As for the second half of your sentence---well, some people might hold that an organization that claims to be a Christian religion, while simultaneously employing secret policies that called for crime and violence against its opponents, is very evil indeed.

Randy J.