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Might also be interested to read how in 1857 Mormon militia murdered a bunch of settlers traveling west through Mormon territory - the Mountain Meadows Massacre. And only one person was ever convicted for the death of between 120 and 140 people.
Edit: Fixed link.
Your link is malformed and leads to https://lemmy.world/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre. Here's one to Wikipedia if that's what you were going for.
Thanks.
I had left the church by the time I learned about it, but this completely solidified for me that my entire upbringing was a horrific sham of lies and manipulation.
I'm still struggling to unfuck my brain from the absolute twisted mess they left me in.
Have you watched any of Alyssa Grenfell's videos on Youtube? She's a former Mormon who makes videos about it from her perspective. I knew the church was fucked up, but the rabbit hole is so much deeper than I expected.
It's awful. The shit that a lifetime of lies will do to you, and the things you end up digging out years later. You have my sympathy, friend.
Add on top of that their genocide and slavery of the Timpanogos people.
There's a mountaintop in central Utah was named a slur until 2022. (Don't tell the orange ass-clown, he'll change it back,) It was where the wife of the chief fled with the rest of their village to make their last stand against the settlers. There's a plaque to commemorate her memory.
There was a show that came out a few years back called American Primeval that was about this time period and these people. I'm not sure if the show is meant to be this specific massacre, or a fictionalized version of events, but I thought it was super compelling.
That didn't work at all, did it
So, if somebody went gun happy on a mormon community before 1976, he could have referred to that executive order and walked away?
Murder is illegal federally. So no.
That's not likely why they wouldn't walk away. Murder is illegal federally, but that'll only come into play if e.g. they crossed state lines in perpetrating the murder.
In all likelihood, the person would be tried in Missouri's courts – charged with first-degree murder. No judge or jury is going to buy that they actually, in good faith, believed it was their duty to enforce an obscure, long-neglected, controversial executive order from 1838 which directed the military (and not the general public) to exterminate Mormons in the state. If they seriously did (and their lawyer would have to show some very robust evidence), they might get the exceedingly rare insanity plea and go to a psychiatric institution instead. Or, if they were somehow that plain stupid, there's always ignorance of the law not being an excuse; their intent was still to kill somebody in cold blood. But otherwise, raising this issue as if it's a loophole is going to piss off the judge and/or make them way less sympathetic to the jury – and possibly even solidify premeditation which first-degree murder requires.
Not familiar with Mormons I guess.
So the law would kind of be fighting itself? One old, obscure law says do it, the more commonsense law says don't. But both are legal.
But both are legal.
Well no, not at all. Please read the order itself (bottom of the linked Wikipedia article). It's specifically ordering the state's militia to do this. And it's not even a generic order to the militia; it directs specific, named officers to raise X number of troops under their command for the extermination. The governor is vesting this authority in specific people who died long, long ago. By 1976, the order wouldn't have been actionable by anybody even as written (let alone by actual legal standards under which anyone would definitely be convicted); rescinding it was purely a ceremonial act of goodwill.
It definitely still would not hold water if it were telling citizens (or even generic militia members) they could freely kill Mormons, but it's not even that murky. The loophole not only doesn't exist in practice, but it doesn't exist even in writing.
Ex-Mormon here. There was an urban legend that went around my community for years about some dude who got into an argument with a neighbor, and killed him. His lawyer got him off on the charges, arguing that the Extermination Order was still in effect, so murdering his neighbor was perfectly legal.
The other versions I heard were a serial killer who only targeted Mormons because he could get away with it, and organ harvesters who were kidnappings Mormon missionaries in Missouri to steal their kidneys... it's a long list of bs that probably started as speculation, and it evolved into narrative, and then it evolved into an urban legend.
Ohohohooo
Hey. Ex-Mormon here. Funny story, my ancestors were the ones named in that extermination order.
For context, this came after Mormons had been chased out of Kirtland, Ohio for scamming the local populace with a securities fraud case.
There was an urban legend that went around Mormon communities that the reason why Governor Kit Bond rescinded the order was because of a murder trial in rural Missouri, where two neighbors got into a disagreement. The killer supposedly got off scot-free because his neighbor was Mormon, and the Extermination Order was still in effect.
While the term extermination was used in the order, Boggs would claim later in his life that his main desire was to subdue the Mormons without bloodshed.[20] Historians Alexander L. Baugh and Steven LeSueur suggest the word 'exterminate' reflects the historical usage of the term, which more broadly encompassed the expulsion or removal of a group or population from an area.
While Governor Boggs' intent in the order was to forcibly expel Mormons, the state militia still killed 17 people at the battle of Hahn's Mill.
Congrats, Governor Boggs, you gave this nascent cult enough reason to fuel a couple centuries worth of victim narrative.
Here's some extra context
The unfortunate lack of an ensuing investigation of the massacre was not because the law affirmed and upheld the killing of these Mormons, as some might infer. It was due to the fact that the whole situation of the Mormon War was out of control. Those non-Mormons who killed at Haun’s Mill, as well as the non-Mormons who engaged in the burning and looting of Mormon homes, were never tried and convicted; just as those Mormons who killed a State Militia soldier, and participated in burning and looting of non-Mormon homes, were never tried and convicted. LDS historian Stephen C. LeSueur affirmed, “No Mormons were convicted for crimes committed during the Mormon War” (The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, 256). It is true that the terms of surrender presented to and accepted by the Mormon community placed an immense burden on them; however, the massacre at Haun’s Mill, as horrible as it was, does not support the assertion that it was legal to kill a Mormon in Missouri.
Add on top of that Joseph Smith Jr.'s stay in the local jail, his followers had plenty of reasons to turn Far West into a warzone. Understandably, no one was happy about this.
Ah mormonism, the gift that keeps on giving trauma.
Mormonism is the end result of Protestant theology mingling with Capitalist economics.
The same experiment has produced Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, and dozens of other systems of social exploitation draped in religious clothing. Anywhere people need to believe an end to our industrial age self-flagellation is nigh, but cannot conceive of a society organized outside of theocratic principles, falls back into the same ritual of spiritualized mass marketing.
Funny story, Ol' Joe was almost a socialist, but not quite. He was positively greedy for power, but he made some actual attempts at baking socialism into his cult's doctrine in the early days.
They called it 'The Law of Consecration'. When I was growing up, I was taught that the reason why communism keeps failing is because it could only work under a completely moral theocracy, so capitalism was our next best bet. It was just one of several lies I was told as a child.
The cult's always been obsessed with scamming people out of their money. Smith was disingenuous about many things. The way he saw it, collective wealth meant that he could skim even more off the top under the guise of it being for the collective good. Just take a look at the Ensign Peak Investments lawsuits if you wanna see just how sincere they are about sharing anything with the rest of their followers. The leaders are self-dealing theocratic capitalist scum, it's all prosperity gospel. It always has been.
You mentioned Kirtland, so I thought I'd let people know that the Mormon nonsense in Kirtland continued to fairly modern times. Here's the AI blurb on the "Kirtland Cult Killings:"
The 1989 Kirtland cult killings involved the murder of five members of the Avery family—Dennis, Cheryl, and their daughters Trina, Rebecca, and Karen—in Kirtland, Ohio, by cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren and his followers. Lundgren, a radicalized former member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, claimed the killings were commanded by God. He was convicted of the murders and executed in 2006.
Mormons are crazy at their best, but there are countless splinter groups like this one, that are downright psychopathic.
Bear in mind, I don't like AI either. Which is why I exercised the intellectual effort to collect sources I know firsthand to be reputable and share them publicly.
This is real life experience for me. I don't need a bot to give the Cliff's notes, and I don't want it to.
If I'm doing a deep response on an issue I care about, I go deep into sources, and post them along with my rants.
This was just an off-hand comment, and I was not motivated to go through a lot of work for something I care very little about. The blurb came up, my first instinct was to reject it, but I read it, and it said pretty much exactly what I wanted to say, so why re-invent the wheel?
If you want to verify it, feel free to research it yourself, and if you find that it's wrong, excoriate me for my laziness. But if the statement is accurate, and you just want to beat me up for posting a factual statement, them I've got no time for such nonsense.
Please don't post AI content
It was an accurate synopsis of the story, without forcing people to wade through some journalist's attempt at literature. I don't like AI either, but this a pretty benign use of it, as long as you can verify the facts. This one was fine.
"I don't like it, but now we rely on it"
Look I'm not saying you didn't use it responsibly, the tech can be used well. But it's just better not to incorporate it and normalize it. We are already having problem with kids of all ages losing the ability to think critically and if we push this tech into every corner of our lives and never take an intentional stand against it, or we draw no lines in the sand and say here but no further, we are headed in the same direction that has billionaires and other oligarchs choosing for us what is even available to us.
Even what you said, without forcing people to wade through some journalists attempt at literature, well that's a symptom of forcing journalists to turn every thing of interest they want to write on, into some opinion piece with a tasty juicy story that can be used for clicks and more traffic.
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man now, but I'm also someone who doesn't understand why people can't sit through a good movie, if it's more than 90 minutes. Like do you not enjoy the things you do?
It's the constant pressure to turn everything into a headline, and just looking at headlines, that has helped put us in such a sorry state.
I'm not arguing that it is or isn't a benign use of AI that's really not part of why I replied, at least to my way of thinking.
It's a stand against laziness. We have to hold ourselves accountable for the things we choose because they are convenient. Especially when they actually are because we as a whole can't be trusted to use convenient things as if they arent a worse choice almost every time
I'm a grumpy old man, too, and along with that comes realism. AI is here to stay, so we should encourage responsible uses for it, and strongly resist immoral uses of it, like replacing workers.
Having AI compile a quick answer to a simple question, so I don't have to research through a half-dozen articles, prepare my own blurb, then vote all the articles, is the kind of thing AI should be used for. I just wanted a quick synopsis of the incident, and it gave me an accurate one, and nobody has to lose their job. How dumb would it be to ignore that, and then go write my own, that would take a bunch of time, and probably wouldnt be as good?
And please don't write your own statement, put quotes around that, and attribute it to me. If I believed that, I would say it, but I don't believe that, and I didn't say it. Few things are more disengenuous than putting false words in someone's mouth, and then using that false statement as a poor argument to defend your own poor position against.
Reminds me of Oregon's black exclusion laws, though those didn't last as long, only a mere 80 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws
So until 1976 you could kill a Mormon in Missouri and get away with it?
{Sigh} Such a missed opportunity...