Episode 146 - My Emotional Support Virgin

Send us Fan MailTo celebrate Joseph Smith’s sacred calling to spiritually wife other men’s wives, aaaAAAaaa serves up the Orson Hide and Seek, named for Apostle Orson Hyde, who was conveniently away dedicating Palestine while Joseph secretly married his wife, Marinda. The drink combines Utah-made Stinger hard apple cider with a hidden shot dropped into the glass, because nothing says “restored gospel” like a surprise second relationship concealed inside the first one.The intro immediately wanders into beautifully unnecessary territory: fake temple wedding photos taken at prom, the anatomical inappropriateness of the word “erected” appearing anywhere near a temple, post-half-marathon stair descent, Alan Parsons Project arena music, Apple TV betrayals, HBO’s Neighbors, and the revelation that Mel Gibson is making a two-part, multiple-timeline, Satan-origin-story sequel to The Passion of the Christ. The overall vibe is cider, sore quads, neighbor feuds, and everyone slowly realizing that reality has fired parody and taken its job.History: [00:26:40]Abigail begins with the “Law of Sarah,” the biblical consent loophole Mormon polygamy borrowed from the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, an enslaved woman whose reproductive exploitation somehow became inspirational source material for religious men looking to make their erections doctrinal. From there, the segment traces the recurring historical pattern of powerful men finding ancient scripture and announcing that their penis has a biblical precedent: early Christian clergy keeping supposedly chaste “spiritual” women in their homes, church councils having to explicitly outlaw decorative live-in virgins, Protestant rulers rummaging through Abraham for permission to take second wives, and Puritanism turning sex into something intensely policed rather than remotely healthy.The segment then connects that same architecture of control to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, emphasizing that Gilead’s use of Hagar, coerced reproduction, religious hierarchy, and ownership of women was assembled from things societies have actually done. Abigail brings the argument home through Mormon purity culture, where women are trained to treat sexual desire as contamination until marriage, then expected to become sexually available overnight. In that system, Joseph Smith’s marriages to teenage girls are not rendered harmless by claims that they may have been “eternity only”; placing a child in a marriage-shaped relationship with a prophet who controls her family’s salvation is already coercive. The segment closes with the only reasonable theological conclusion: purity culture is bullshit, subjugating women is bullshit, and any man attempting the latter should prepare for an extremely hostile review of his genitals.FHE: 01:22:47For this week’s Family Home Evening from hell, Moroni takes the group through the CES Letter’s section on Joseph Smith’s polygamy and polyandry, beginning with the fact that many members were raised on the polished Emma-and-Joseph love story while being told absolutely nothing about the other thirty-something women in the celestial waiting room. The discussion focuses on Joseph’s marriages to women already married to living husbands, including Marinda Hyde while Orson Hyde was away on a mission, and the Church’s attempt to soften the whole thing by suggesting some of the relationships were merely dynastic or eternal. The hosts immediately identify the gaping problem: if sealing families together was the point, why was Joseph sealed to other men’s wives and teenage girls before being sealed to his own children?The group then works through the ways Joseph violated the rules supposedly revealed in Doctrine and Covenants 132: marrying already-married women, keeping unions secret from husbands and Emma, taking teenage girls and women who were obviously not virgins, marrying mother-daughter and sister sets, and using promises of exaltation or angel-with-a-sword threats as divine coercion. The rage reaches operatic levels with the Fanny Alger barn account, sworn statements denying polygamy from people participating in it, and the realization that “Praise to the Man” was apparently written about a man whose actual modus operandi involved secrecy, dishonesty, and spiritually branded sexual predation.The episode ends by placing Joseph Smith beside Warren Jeffs in an absolutely damning side-by-side comparison: many wives, underage wives, married women, mother-daughter pairings, sister wives, and the same prophetic authorization structure used to turn abuse into obedience. Warren Jeffs may have pressed the accelerator through the floor, but the road map was already there. After surviving the ecclesiastical sewage fire, the group regains just enough emotional stability to praise Oscar, a tiny Jack Russell puppy, instead of any dead prophet. 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