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Brazenly lying about a nineteenth-century Church leader

Brazenly lying about a nineteenth-century Church leader

Last updated on: April 14, 2025 at 4:37 pm by Dan Peterson

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Brazenly lying about a nineteenth-century Church leader 2025-04-14T16:37:47-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Heber C. Kimball (1801-1868) was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles from 1835 until 1847, and served thereafter in the First Presidency from 1847 until his death in 1868.
(Image from LDS Media Library)

An avid anonymous participant over at the Peterson Obsession Board who calls himself something like Everybody’s WC has, for years, specialized in manufacturing fictional stories designed to illustrate my depraved buffoonery — stories that he passes off as real. These tales often rest upon information supposedly shared with him by (probably fictional) confidential informants or even, in a few cases, upon his own supposed personal knowledge of me.

For reasons known only to him, I’m his favorite single theme there. His deep personal hostility has been commented upon (and wondered at) even by some of the more normal people among his fellow-residents at the Obsession Board. While he’s not as cunning or clever as my Malevolent Stalker, his focus resembles the Stalker’s and I’ve sometimes thought of him as my “Mini-Stalker.” Very recently, though, he attempted a whopper that had nothing directly to do with me. It didn’t go well, but it’s fascinating in its sheer and demonstrable mendacity.

In a thread deriding Latter-day Saint views about human conception and, if you will, Latter-day Saint notions of the precise time of “ensoulment,” EWC volunteered this not-entirely-relevant pearl:

Heber C. Kimball had one of his wives get an abortion. Nothing to see here folks.

‘Heber C. Kimball, recalling his courtship with and marriage to a woman, claimed he “taught in our young days, when she got into the family way, to send for a doctor and get rid of the child”; a course that she followed. (Footnote 9).’

Heber C. Kimball in the Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool, 1857), V:91-92.

Then, just a bit further down the thread, he offered this supposed statement from Heber C. Kimball that he placed in quotation marks. Brother Kimball, he says, was referring to the Latter-day Saint settlements in nineteenth-century Utah:

“Abortion here is as common as wheat.”

But EWC didn’t get away with it. (His accusations are implausible on their face.) One believing Latter-day Saint still quixotically shows up on the Obsession Board from time to time in a forlorn attempt to bring at least a faint semblance of balance to the discussions there. That gentleman actually looked up the reference that, in a remarkably brazen bluff, EWC had offered in support of his claims. I share the entire passage from the Journal of Discourses with you. The passage may be a bit off-putting to some because of its polygamist assumptions, but those aren’t the issue at hand:

The priests of the day in the whole world keep women, just the same as the gentlemen of the Legislatures do. The great men of the earth keep from two to three, and perhaps half-a- dozen private women. They are not acknowledged openly, but are kept merely to gratify their lusts: and if they get in the family way, they call for the doctors, and also upon females who practise under the garb of midwives, to kill the children, and thus they are depopulating their own species, [Voice: And their names shall come to an end.] Yes, because they shed innocent blood.

I knew that before I received ” Mormonism.” I have known of lots of women calling for a doctor to destroy their children ; and there are many of the women in this enlightened age and in the most popular towns and cities in the Union that take a course to get rid of their children. The whole nation is guilty of it. I am telling the truth. I won t call it infanticide. You know I am famous for calling things by their names.

I have been taught it, and my wife was taught it in our young days, when she got into the family way, to send for a doctor and get rid of the child, so as to live with me to gratify lust. It is God s truth, and I know the person that did it. This is depopulating the human species ; and the curse of God will come upon that man, and upon that woman, and upon those cursed doctors. There is scarcely one of them that is free from the sin. It is just as common as it is for wheat to grow.

Do we take that course here ? No. I have buried several children ; I have buried them in York State, too, in Monroe county, where I lived all my young days, and where I became acquainted with brother Brigham, which is rising of thirty years that we have been together, about twelve miles from where Joseph Smith lived and found the Book of Mormon. I buried two children there, lawful children, born to me by my first wife; and then I have buried some ten children here, born to me by my lawful wives ; and I have had altogether about fifty children; and one hundred years won’t pass away before my posterity will out-number the present inhabitants of the State of New York, because I do not destroy my offspring. I am doing the works of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and if I live and be a good man, and my wives are as good as they should be, I will raise up men yet, that will come through my loins, that will be as great men as ever came to this earth ; and so will you.

As Everybody’s WC commonly remarks immediately after flatly making something up, “Folks, you just can’t make this up!”

In fact, even after being called out for his flagrant misrepresentation of what Heber C. Kimball had actually said, and even after a link to the original source had been provided, EWC doubled down on his false claims, repeating his assertions that Brother Kimball had ordered his wife to undergo an abortion, that she had obeyed his command and had an abortion, and that, at the time he was speaking, abortions were as common in Latter-day Saint Utah as the growing of wheat. (Since then, EWC has issued a spray of irrelevancies in an evident attempt at distracting attention from his misadventure. And his colleagues seem, as they typically do, to have passed over the indisputable falsehood of his assertions in charitable [or, perhaps more accurately, in ideologically partisan] silence.)

It seems pretty obvious that somebody lied about what Heber C. Kimball said. Either EWC did so personally, or (more likely) his source lied and he accepted it with uncritical enthusiasm. Of course, mendaciousness isn’t uncommon among a certain breed of critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and shameless falsehoods are, arguably, the favored tool of Everybody’s WC in particular. But the dishonesty is rarely as blatant, as obvious, and as easily demonstrated as it is in this case.

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