The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is best characterized as an organism that is alive and evolving at all times. In its earliest iteration, the Church was a simple and straightforward group of people centered around what it purported to be a new gospel of Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon, translated from golden plates by Joseph Smith, Jr., was another testament of Jesus Christ. It set forth the appearance of Christ in the New World, and the migration of Israelites led to the New World some 600 years before the birth of Christ.
The Church was established on April 6, 1830; twelve days before, the Book of Mormon had been published by E.B. Grandin in a run of 5,000 copies. Martin Harris sold a portion of his farm in order to pay for the $3,000 cost. By 1837, the Book of Mormon was in a second edition. In the interregnum between editions, Smith and his followers had published the Book of Commandments, which was consisted of the revelations of God to Joseph Smith. Those revelations were published piecemeal in the Evening and Morning Star from 1831 to 1833 by W.W. Phelps, who would later compile the revelations into a single book.
The printing was not without its difficulties, as an angry mob burned Phelp’s home and his printing press. Nearly all of the existing copies of 65 revelations were destroyed. Portions of 100 copies were salvaged, but the project was effectively destroyed. There was no press upon which to print.
In the original Book of Commandments, Section 4, Paragraph 2 contains strict instructions to Joseph Smith:
2 And now, behold, this shall you say unto him:—I the Lord am God, and I have given these things unto my servant Joseph, and I have commanded him that he should stand as a witness of these things, nevertheless I have caused him that he should enter into a covenant with me, that he should not show them except I command him, and he has no power over them except I grant it unto him; and he has a gift to translate the book, and I have commanded him that he shall pretend to no other gift, for I will grant him no other gift.
Within three short years, 22 additional words changed the entire substance of that section, which would become Section 32 of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants:
1 Behold I say unto you, that as my servant Martin Harris has desired a witness at my hand, that you, my servant Joseph Smith, jr. have got the plates of which you have testified and borne record that you have received of me: and now behold, this shall you say unto him, He who spake unto you said unto you, I the Lord am God, and have given these things unto you, my servant Joseph Smith, jr. and have commanded you that you shall stand as a witness of these things, and I have caused you that you should enter into a covenant with me that you should not show them except to those persons to whom I command you; and you have no power over them except I grant it unto you. And you have a gift to translate the plates; and this is the first gift that I bestowed upon you, and I have commanded that you should pretend to no other gift until my purpose is fulfilled in this; for I will grant unto you no other gift until it is finished.
Revelation was now open-ended, and every subsequent addition to the nascent Church’s doctrine was rooted in the concept that God had granted Smith additional gifts beyond translating the Book of Mormon. Smith was the sole revelator for the Church, and this was established when Hiram Page claimed his own revelations about the future location of Zion. Smith responded with a revelation that would be chronicled in the Doctrine and Covenants, Section 28. Joseph Smith alone held the keys, and he alone received revelations for the Church. Originally, the Book of Commandments listed the revelation as Chapter 30, but the evolving Church required revision upon revision, with Chapter 30 becoming Section 51 in the 1835 Edition of the D&C, and Section 28 in the latest D&C.
Joseph Smith, Jr. was now a prophet, not merely a translator endowed with a single gift for a singular purpose. Moreover, he was the sole prophet, revelator, and seer on Earth for the Church of Jesus Christ. The modern Church leadership falls back onto this principle at all times; it distinguishes between personal revelation and prophetic revelation. “Personal revelation,” as Apostle Quentin Cook explains it, “is based on spiritual truths received from the Holy Ghost.”
Prophetic revelation is different. In his April 2020 General Conference talk, Apostle Cook made it clear that continuous revelation through the prophet is God’s “communication to his children.” This prophetic revelation is universal; that is, it applies to all Saints. Personal revelation is individual.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has gone further: the most important prophet is the living or current prophet. This is rooted to a degree in the words attributed to Joseph Smith by Oliver Cowdery, who recorded the minutes of the April 21, 1834 conference in Norton, Medina County, Ohio:
“It is very difficult for us to communicate to the churches all that God has revealed to us, in consequence of tradition; for we are differently situated from any other people that ever existed upon this earth; consequently those former revelations cannot be suited to our conditions: they were given to other people, who were before us; but in the last days, God was to call a remnant, in which was to be deliverance, as well as in Jerusalem and Zion.” -History of the Church, 2:52
The prophetic revelation given by a living prophet today is distinguished from the revelation of dead prophets in a different times: today’s revelations from the Church’s prophet supersede past revelation by past prophets. The circumstances are different.
This principle would be warped into a precedent in which whatever the current prophet uttered could supersede and even contradict the prophecies of the past. Nowhere was this more clear than in the history of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants 101:4, which expressly forbade polygamy:
4 All legal contracts of marriage made before a person is baptized into this church, should be held sacred and fulfilled. Inasmuch as this church of Christ 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 case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.
The section continued with even more restrictions: it was not right to persuade a woman to be baptized if her husband opposed the baptism, and it was not lawful to influence her to leave her husband in order to join the Church. The same applied to children, as the section forbade influencing children to leave their parents without their consent in order to be baptized into the Church. From 1835 to 1876, this section remained in the Doctrine and Covenants, until it was stricken for conflicting with D&C 132. As late as 1842, the official Church position in the Times and Seasons was that the rule laid out in D&C 101 was the only valid regulation for marriage, and that plural marriage was unlawful for those practicing within the Church:
All legal contracts of marriage made before a person is baptized into this church, should be held sacred and fulfilled. Inasmuch as this church of Christ 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 case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again. It is not right to persuade a woman to be baptized contrary to the will of her husband, neither is it lawful to influence her to leave her husband. All children are bound by law to obey their parents; and to influence them to embrace any religious faith, or be baptized, or leave their parents without their consent, is unlawful and unjust. We believe that husbands, parents and masters who exercise control over their wives, children, and servants and prevent them from embracing the truth, will have to answer for that sin.
We have given the above rule of marriage as the only one practiced in this church, to show that Dr. J. C. Bennett's "secret wife system" is a matter of his own manufacture; and further to disabuse the public ear, and shew [show] that the said Bennett and his misanthropic friend Origen Bachelor, are perpetrating a foul and infamous slander upon an innocent people, and need but be known to be hated and despise. In support of this position, we present the following certificates:-
We the undersigned members of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and residents of the city of Nauvoo, persons of families do hereby certify and declare that we know of no other rule or system of marriage than the one published from the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, and we give this certificate to show that Dr. J. C. Bennett's "secret wife system" is a creature of his own make as we know of no such society in this place nor never did. - Saturday, October 1, 1842, Times and Seasons, pg. 939-940.
Joseph Smith signed the issue as an editor and a publisher, and his wife and others signed off on the declaration as well.
In 1852, the living prophet of the Church, Brigham Young, would designate Orson Pratt as his messenger to proclaim plural marriage. Pratt delivered an extraordinary address in which he covered the gamut of doctrinal innovations of an evolving Church: God was one of many gods, and He procreated spirit children who assumed physical bodies on earth, and through exaltation those men and women could assume godhead. Pratt referenced the then non-canonical Book of Abraham, which detailed a cosmology of sons and daughters of God, who were chosen to come to Earth and take bodies, and through the law of marriage husbands and wives could propagate eternal families that would populate endless new worlds.
Those pre-mortal spirits who were more noble and more intelligent would be reserved for the final dispensation-the Latter Days-to come to Earth, through noble parentage so that they might learn and practice the mysteries of the Latter Days, receive the keys of the priesthood, and be sealed for eternity to each other in plural marriage in order to be made prophets and priests and kings to God. Those reserved spirits had been waiting for thousands of years, just so that they could be born to those faithful and chosen servants God had designated in His wisdom to raise His elect in the fullness of times.
These were the elite of the pre-mortal spirits, those who would usher in the Latter Days and fulfill the final dispensation. Their parents would be those faithful Saints who entered into plural marriage to bring forth the reserved spirits, raising them in the new faith and new revelation, for the keys had been restored to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints through the prophet Joseph Smith and his successors. Those who rejected plural marriage would be damned. Damnation was by degree now; certain punishments would fall aways and men could enter into a degree of happiness in the lower two kingdoms-the Terrestrial and the Telestial-but those who accepted exaltation would experience no damnation whatsoever.
They would be redeemed into exaltation to become the sons of God, literal gods to rule over and populate new worlds. Those who did not enter into plural marriage, who did not seal their marriages on earth, would be unable to resurrect themselves and their families.
The temple ordinances, Pratt claimed, were sealed in eternal records. Those who did not have temple marriages would be eternally single, mere angels, servants to those who had achieved exaltation through plural marriage. According to Pratt, angels were inferior because they did not keep the law pertaining to plural marriage, and they were mere eunuchs incapable of multiplying their progeny in the Celestial Kingdom.
It was a declaration staggering in its scope. It was an irrevocable change in doctrine for the Church, one which said that only those who entered into plural marriage would parent those elite pre-mortal beings destined for eternal marriages and eternal families in order to fulfill a final dispensation on this earth. Hell was no longer eternal for anyone except those who denied the Holy Spirit; instead, it was a probationary destination, after which the souls of those who had not entered into plural marriage would become servants of those who had, angels serving gods.1
The doctrines that flowed from this new doctrine were also staggering: the Law of Adoption was said to the method by which the priesthood would be perfected, as men would be sealed back to Adam. Brigham Young’s sermon on the Law of Adoption contains a stunning declaration.2
This is a clear indication that something was afoot within the early Church which required Brigham Young to abstain from teaching the sealing ordinance as it pertained to adoption. There were Saints within the Church who would use the sealing power to seal themselves to the Devil for gain, and Brigham Young knew it and explicitly referenced it when he spoke in Salt Lake City on April 6, 1862.
For the orthodox Latter Day Saint, sealings were intended to tie back to Heavenly Father, who Brigham Young explicitly identified as Adam.
“Now hear it, O inhabitants of the earth, Jew and Gentile, Saint and sinner! When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is michael, the archangel, the ancient of days! About whom holy men have written and spoken - he is our father and our god, and the only god with whom we have to do. Every man upon the earth, professing christians or non-professing, must hear it, and will know it sooner or later.”3
Brigham Young was not referencing Adam when he talked about sealing the present generation back to Adam. For Young, Adam was Heavenly Father. He was God, and Michael the archangel. Eve was Heavenly Mother. The two had come down to Earth in celestial bodies, and they had eaten of the fruit until their bodies had become corporeal and mortal.4 This represented a complete break from orthodox Christianity, a fact that Brigham Young acknowledged.
I could tell you much more about this; but were I to tell you the whole truth, blasphemy would be nothing to it, in the estimation of the superstitious and overrighteous of mankind.
Young was acutely aware that his teachings were blasphemous from the perspective of orthodox Christian understanding. By his own admission, he did not go further in his teaching on the matter because the whole truth would make blasphemy appear as nothing.
The practical effect of Young’s doctrine was simple enough: in order for the final dispensation to occur, plural marriage was a requirement, and men had to be sealed back to Adam, their father and god, the only god with whom they could have any communion. For Orson Hyde, the the sealings were necessary to the order and unity of the kingdom of God, as he wrote in the Millenial Star. Hyde provided a diagram to represent the unbroken sealings back to Adam, who in the Brighamite doctrine, was none other than Adam.
“The above diagram shows the order and unity of the kingdom of God. The eternal Father sits at the head, crowned King of kings and Lord of lords. Wherever the other lines meet, there sits a king and a priest unto God, bearing rule, authority, and dominion under the Father. he is one with he Father, because his kingdom is joined to his Father's and becomes part of it. … The most eminent and distinguished prophets who have laid down their lives for their testimony (Jesus among the rest), will be crowned at the head of the largest kingdoms under the Father, and will be one with Christ as Christ is one with his Father; for their kingdoms are all joined together, and such as do the will of the Father, the same are his mothers, sisters, and brothers. ... It will be seen by the above diagram that there are kingdoms of all sizes, an infinite variety to suit all grades of merit and ability. The chosen vessels unto God are the kings and priests that are placed at the head of these kingdoms. These have received their washings and anointings in the temple of God on this earth; they have been chosen, ordained, and anointed kings and priests, to reign as such in the resurrection of the just. Such as have not received the fullness of the priesthood, (for the fullness of the priesthood includes the authority of both king and priest) and have not been anointed and ordained in the temple of the Most High, may obtain salvation in the celestial kingdom, but not a celestial crown. Many are called to enjoy a celestial glory, yet few are chosen to wear a celestial crown, or rather, to be rulers in the celestial kingdom.” -Millenial Star 9, 23-24, January 15, 1847.
The order of Heaven was set through sealings, either marital or adoptive. Eternal rank and hierarchy were dependent upon one’s sealings, which is why higher ranking priesthood holders could violate the original commandment of Section 101 with impunity when they married the wives of other men, and took their children with them to Nauvoo. In order to accomplish the fulfillment of the final dispensation, Saints would need to enter into plural marriage so that the spirit children of Heavenly Father who had been designated for earthly tabernacles or bodies in the Latter Days could have godly parentage and fulfill the mission of Elijah described in Malachi 4:5-6.5
In the Hamblin Victims Statements, the sealings of LDS Church of Satan members were analogous to the diagram drawn up by Orson Hyde, only with Lucifer at the head of the diagram instead of Adam/Heavenly Father. Brigham Young was likely aware of the danger of preaching on sealing to a Church were men were willing to seal themselves back to the Devil if they could, which is why he explicitly referenced those men in his April 6, 1862 sermon in the Salt Lake Tabernacle.
The sealing ordinance could be used for sealings to both Heavenly Father and Lucifer. This dualistic view of sealing ordinances provides a critical insight into the modern Church, where men like Joseph Wood Bennion and David Lee Hamblin purportedly taught that CS members could seal themselves and their families to Lucifer, in order to serve in Lucifer’s armies when the final battle between Heavenly Father, Christ, and Lucifer occurred. According to Hamblin and the CS, those who aligned themselves with Heavenly Father and Jehovah would suffer the fate Brigham Young and Orson Pratt prescribed for those who rejected plural marriage: they would be eternal servants to the followers of Lucifer.
The Legacy of a Lie
Plural marriage represented a complete break from the clear prohibition of the Book of Mormon on polygamy in Jacob 2, and a repudiation of original revelation in D&C 101.
For those who accepted Brigham Young, and the principle that the living prophet’s revelation superseded and even abolished older revelation, the evolution of Church doctrine on plural marriage was a simple matter. Brigham Young not only spoke as the revelator, he traced polygamy back to a secret revelation given to Joseph Smith before his death. This revelation was not shared until 1852, almost eight years after Smith was murdered in Carthage, Illinois.
The order of the Celestial Kingdom was determined by sealings for plural marriage, and only those who accepted and practiced plural marriage would reign on thrones in the Celestial Kingdom as priests and priestesses, gods and goddesses. Anyone who did not would only achieve the status of an angel serving those gods. Additionally, the Law of Adoption enabled Saints to be sealed to higher ranking priesthood holders, which meant that they and their families would be in the houses of men like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in the Celestial Kingdom. They would be higher in an exalted order.
The net result was simple: Saints desperately tried to trace their genealogies as far back as possible, in order to complete the sealings that would tie them back to Adam-God and fulfill the mission of Elijah, bringing the final dispensation to a close. When the Church publicly forbade plural marriage in 1890, its leaders sent polygamists north to Canada and south to Mexico to continue the practice. No one entered into plural marriage in the Church without a recommends from Church leaders in the First Presidency or the Quorum of the Twelve.
In this way, the Church leadership designated the nobility of the Church going forward. Those who were selected to enter into plural marriage would be the goodly parents who would raise the elite pre mortal spirits who were to fulfill the final dispensation. When the Church issued a Second Manifesto prohibiting plural marriage in 1904, the 52 year practice of plural marriage and its accompanying ideas were officially forbidden to the general membership.
To those who remained in the Church, who hailed from polygamist bloodlines, the practice of polygamist sealings continued in home ordinances. Men like David Lee Hamblin, Joe Bennion, David Leavitt, and others continued the work of their ancestors in sealing themselves back to either Adam or Lucifer.
In this context, Nicholas Groesbeck Smith Sr.’s visit to a fabric store in Amsterdam on his mission takes on a greater significance. Groesbecks and de Jongs had intermarried in the 17th century, when Class Jacobse Groesbeck’s daughter Maijke Jacobs married Cornelis Arieszn de Jong on May 14, 1646 in Holland. As a Latter Day Saint, Smith would have performed genealogical work to trace his ancestry. He would likely have known that his family line and that of the de Jongs were intertwined, and he would have sought to gather the de Jongs to Zion, where they could be sealed through the temple into his lineage, all the way back to Adam.
Within a few short years, Gerrit de Jong, Sr. and his family would immigrate to Salt Lake City, where his 15 year old son Gerrit would join the Church. Gerrit de Jong, Jr.’s granddaughters would write of the belief system that informed their parents and grandparents, one which inverted the teachings of the Latter Day Saints with regards to plural marriage and sealings in order to promote Lucifer as the rightful heir to the throne of Heavenly Father rather than Jehovah or Christ.
Nicholas Groesbeck Smith, Sr.’s grandchildren would also be caught up in sexual abuse that allegedly involved the son in law of daughter of current Church President Russell M. Nelson. Dick and Brenda Miles would evade criminal and civil culpability for their alleged abuse, but Marion Burrows Smith and Nicholas Groesbeck Smith, Jr. would continue writing and talking about the abuse for decades. Marion’s friend April Daniels, otherwise known as Loretta Gale and Loretta Gale Child, would co-author a book describing the abuse in a non-ritual context.
That book would advocate for the approach preferred by Church authorities: forgiveness, privately handled through Church channels. Loretta Child reported her abuse to a therapist, to General Authorities in the Church, to various friends and family members, to virtually everyone except law enforcement. For thirty plus years, Child controlled a narrative that conformed to the Church’s documented standard: abuse allegations were to be contained, in order to protect the Church’s image and standing.
When that approach led to the death of Kacie Woody and the kidnapping and rape of Elizabeth Smart, and the continued victimization of countless other children, Loretta Child wrote an updated version of Paperdolls. She partnered with the very attorney, David Hardy, who had hand delivered instructions to Russell M. Nelson on how to cover up the allegations in Bountiful. She also partnered with a nonprofit that multiple survivors have accused of facilitating their abuse and re-victimization.
Marion Burrows Smith and her husband were accused of defrauding their eldest daughter in a civil suit that alleged they had mortgaged her residence through a trust, pocketing half a million dollars while leaving their daughter to fend off a creditor seeking to take her property. Bill Carstensen evaded criminal and civil culpability despite a multimillion dollar judgment against him for abusing his daughters, for which he was required to pay a monthly pittance.
The Church managed to lump the Bountiful case and other sexual abuse cases in with the so-called Satanic Panic of the Eighties. Its officers faced no culpability for their role in concealing a sex abuse ring on Jupiter Drive, in Bountiful, and in countless other neighborhoods. The net result of the Church’s desire to suppress sexual abuse reporting and investigation is simple enough to comprehend: of the 13,212 Utahns who reported being victims of rape between 2012 and 2022, just 393 saw their rapist convicted of rape, a conviction rate of just .029%. A rapist in Utah had a better than 970 chance in 1,000 of getting away with sexual assault.
Image was and is everything in a state dominated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Reality has to be edited down and sanitized into a controlled disclosure, such as Paperdolls and Cowboy Boots or an official Church narrative on missions by LDS royalty that are coincidentally intersect with the ancestors of the missionaries in question, who are then imported back to Zion where they allegedly abuse and murder with impunity, protected by their connections to a Church establishment that seeks to maintain its image at all costs.
Loretta Child writes of her happy ending in forgiving her parents, and watching her father transform into a penitent man. What she does not examine is the likelihood that her father and extended family abused countless other children over decades of criminal activity. That would conflict with her neat and tidy summation of her abuse narrative. She does not examine the consequences of her failure to report in any great detail, preferring instead to stress the power of forgiveness as a healing mechanism.
Her abusers did not ask for forgiveness of their own volition. In fact, they sought to punish her by terminating her from two jobs. They blamed her for the consequences that emerged when she reported them to the Church, instead of being thankful that they were not facing prison time. The devastation of the decisions made by the Church, by Loretta Gale’s brothers and parents, as well as countless others in her neighborhood, cannot be quantified or qualified.
The damage from the Church’s continuing refusal to face what Brigham Young himself acknowledged from the pulpit in the Salt Lake Tabernacle is also unquantifiable: David Lee Hamblin should have been convicted in 2014, when the Provo Police had him on tape apologizing to his daughter for raping her. In order to prevent Hamblin’s case from reaching other prominent Church members, that case was derailed and the charges were dropped. In the present case, Special Prosecutor Ryan Peters delayed discovery disclosures for a year before he received a judgeship from Governor Spencer Cox, whose family is prominent in Sanpete County, one of the locations where the Hamblin ring operated for decades.
The present case against David Lee Hamblin was almost dismissed a second time for failure to prosecute, but public pressure on the State Attorney General’s Office forced the appointment of a special prosecutor, Nathan Evershed.
The education of Gerrit de Jong, Jr. and his progeny was simple: they were those elite pre mortals of a royal lineage who could act as gods on earth, raping and killing with impunity, immunized from exposure and culpability by their proximity to a Church power structure and hierarchy that would do anything to conceal the rot within its ranks. It was, as Marion Burrows Smith wrote, a blip here, a blip there, at least in the eyes of Church leaders.
Conclusion
The evolving organism that is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is unrecognizable in its present form when juxtaposed against the original Church as described by the Book of Mormon and the Book of Commandments. Present revelators are under no obligation to conform their revelation to past revelation, as God does not require consistency in revelation. These are different times, and Latter Day Saints are a different people. The consequences of tradition are not binding on the Church and its leadership, for they will simply fashion new traditions to meet the new day.
Those new traditions are the same as older traditions that denied any obligation to conform to Scripture or past revelation, with a root connection to an unchanging God who did not evolve to meet the demands of the present time and its fashions. Today, Latter Days Saints openly advertise their embrace of sin as righteousness, with flags hanging from their residences and storefronts that support an inclusive attitude towards behaviors classified in the Bible as abominations. The club doesn't play by its own rulebook.
Those who protest are shouted down as conspiracy theorists or apostates, possessed of a contentious and bitter spirit. Isaiah 59 speaks of truth failing, of those who departed from evil making themselves a prey for choosing the right, and the Lord’s displeasure. The Lord saw that there was no man, no intercessor, and He sent an Intercessor to repay the wicked according to their deeds.
The reality is that the Lord had to do so because men would not use the tools He had provided to address wickedness. They abstained from reporting iniquity, from confronting it, and from exposing and punishing it. It is not complicated or impossible to confront sexual abusers, and to expose and punish them, unless we make it complicated.
The reason only 393 out of 13,212 Utahns who were raped saw their accuser convicted is simple enough: we created and maintained an environment that makes it easy for rapists to rape. That is not an indictment of rapists. It is an indictment of everyone who stands by and pleads helplessness and hopelessness in the face of evil, while pointing to the return of Christ as the solution for problems that could easily be handled today, if only Christians would live up to the name.
The Adversary’s ending is already written. It is a damning indictment of Christians that they cower before him and his followers instead of boldly proceeding with the guarantee of ultimate victory. The battle will not be easy, but the reward will be worth the struggle and the hardship. Stand with victims by insisting that their abusers face criminal and civil culpability, instead of buying the false narrative that healing begins with a forgiveness that was never requested in good faith by the perpetrator, but was instead required by a monolithic Church hierarchy that seeks to keep the rot within its membership concealed from exposure in order to limit its own liability.
Loretta Gale is free to forgive her perpetrators on her terms, if she is the sole victim of those perpetrators. She is not. Her decision to afford those perpetrators continued anonymity has real consequences for the other victims of those perpetrators, consequences that reverberate into generations to come.
The ties between David Lee Hamblin, his former in-laws, and Nicholas Groesbeck Smith, Sr. and his family are provable. According to the Hamblin sisters, those bloodline ties and the associations that grow out of those ties are critical to the LDS Church of Satan, and other ritual abuse victims have confirmed this view. Nothing is, but believing makes it so. For the LDS Church of Satan and its members, their belief was the sole force necessary to bring about the horrifying reality described by Rachel, Eliza, and Katie Hamblin in their victims’ statements.
It is no longer possible or justifiable to afford ourselves the luxury of failing to report and confront sexual abuse. The consequences for others are too great. An abuser with anonymity will continue abusing with impunity, creating more victims, some of whom will in turn become perpetrators. Investigations in Ritual Abuse will print the uncensored, documented truth as substantiated by evidence without regard for artificial, unrealistic rules about protecting victims that in turn lead to the creation of more victims. Enough is enough.
Author’s note: I thank all of you for the support, and for reading, subscribing, and donating. Your support has made it possible to do this work for almost two years. As long as God provides, IRA will continue exposing the ties between David Lee Hamblin and other abusers and their groups.
Brigham Young made it clear that there were additional revelations in store: . . . when brother Pratt went back last fall, and published the Revelation concerning the plurality of wives; it was thought there was no other cat tolet out. But allow me to tell you . . . you may expect an eternity of cats, that have not yet escaped from the bag . . . .
“When Adam and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit, their bodies became mortal from its effects, and therefore their offspring were mortal.” Journal of Discourses 1:46.
According to the teachings that the Prophet gave in private (but which he only hinted at in this discourse [13 August 1843]), to be heir to Abraham's promise that he would head an innumerable posterity, each individual and his children must be sealed for time and eternity. If this sealing was performed, he taught, the covenant relationship would then continue throughout eternity. The Prophet taught, moreover, that such a patriarchal priesthood of kings and priests would have to be established by sealing children and parents back through Abraham to Adam in order to fulfill the mission of Elijah (Malachi 4:5-6). When this was accomplished, the order within the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom would then be eternally set. Andrew F. That and Lyndon W. Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith, The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of Joseph Smith, 2nd Edition, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996), 297.
An absolute masterpiece Go El! You've tied together motive, relationship and the spiritual shipwreck that happened after Joseph and Hyrum Smith's murders. The Brighamite Church crumbled and is failing for lack of direct revelatory guidance from The Christ Himself.
According to the stats in this article, Utah is nothing special. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than-percent-rapes-lead-felony-convictions-least-percent-victims-face-emotional-physical-consequences/