Criticism of Mormonism/Articles/LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904

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Response to "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904"

A FAIR Analysis of: LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904, a work by author: D. Michael Quinn

Response to "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904", a work by author D. Michael Quinn

...writers are certainly "dishonest or bad historians" if they fail to acknowledge the existence of even one piece of evidence they know challenges or contradicts the rest of their evidence. If this omission of relevant evidence is inadvertent, the author is careless. If the omission is an intentional effort to conceal or avoid presenting the reader with evidence that contradicts the preferred view of the writer, that is fraud, whether by a scholar or non-scholar, historian or other specialist. If authors write in scholarly style, they are equally dishonest if they fail to acknowledge any significant work whose interpretations differ from their own.
— D. Michael Quinn, "Editor's Introduction," in The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), xiii, n. 5

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Response to claims made in D. Michael Quinn, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Spring 1985):9-105

The author(s) make(s) the following claim:

The author quotes Wilford Woodruff as follows,

Let not my servants who are called to the Presidency of my church, deny my word or my law, which concerns the salvation of the children of men.... Place not your selves in jeopardy to your enemies by promise.... Let my servants, who officiate as your counselors before the Courts, make their pleadings as they are moved by the Holy Spirit, without any further pledges from the Priesthood, and they shall be justified.
D. Michael Quinn, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 no. 1 (Spring 1985), 36.

Author's sources:

1. • Revelation to Wilford Woodruff, 24 November 1889, recorded in Wilford Woodruff's Journal: 1889–1898, edited by Scott G. Kenney, Vol. 9 (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1985), 68–69.

• Also in in James R. Clark, Messages of the First Presidency Vol. 3, (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966), 175–176. Text in {bracket} is from L. John Nuttall Journal, 27 November 1889.