I saw this on a post on Twitter, and I think it may be the best summation ever of the history of Latter-day Saint persecution at the hands of “the world.” (The comment is not from the person who painted this painting but instead from the person who posted this painting on Twitter. I thought his comment relevant to the painting itself).

I am just going to make the following point: Jesus Christ himself warned us in the scriptures multiple times that his followers would suffer persecution, even sometimes from our friends.

Matthew 10: 34-36: “34Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. 35For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. 36And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

Modern-day revelation says the following: (D&C 101)

1 Verily I say unto you, concerning your brethren who have been afflicted, and ^apersecuted, and ^bcast out from the land of their inheritance—

2 I, the Lord, have suffered the ^aaffliction to come upon them, wherewith they have been afflicted, in consequence of their ^btransgressions;

3 Yet I will own them, and they shall be ^amine in that day when I shall come to make up my jewels.

4 Therefore, they must needs be ^achastened and tried, even as ^bAbraham, who was commanded to offer up his only son.

5 For all those who will not ^aendure chastening, but ^bdeny me, cannot be sanctified.

The message I receive is: Latter-day Saints who follow the prophet will be tested and will have to suffer persecution. Part of the test is that we should maintain principles of kindness and charity, even for our declared enemies, but at the same time, we should not believe that abandoning the precepts of our faith is the solution. Another part of the test is that we must become better Saints even as we suffer persecution.

Joseph Smith said it best:

“The Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done.”

(History of the Church, 4:540).

This message still applies in our time.

(I am going to assume that almost all readers know that this painting is a depiction of the mob that attacked and killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith in Carthage, Illinois on June 27, 1844, but for those of you who may not know, now you know).

Almost three years after the world-changing COVID-19 pandemic began, the New York Times finally accepted reality Tuesday.

This op ed, which can be read in its entirety here, included this:

When it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.

Don’t count on it. In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change. If she ever wonders why respect for the C.D.C. keeps falling, she could look to herself, and resign, and leave it to someone else to reorganize her agency.

That, too, probably won’t happen: We no longer live in a culture in which resignation is seen as the honorable course for public officials who fail in their jobs.

But the costs go deeper. When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.

The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

This was exactly the point that many of us made in opposing mask mandates from the beginning of the pandemic.

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The Church supported the Respect for Marriage Act because it protects religious freedom and provide other protection to churches, Elder Oaks clarified in a talk today.

Speaking this morning, Elder Oaks pointed out that many Church members are unsure why the Church, long opposed to same-sex marriage, supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which codifies same-sex unions.

While the Respect for Marriage Act codified same-sex marriage in federal law, the act also provided needed protections for religious expression. “Putting such protections in the federal law was a big step forward,” said President Oaks, a former Utah state supreme court justice and professor of law at the University of Chicago. 

He explained that the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges had already established a federal right to same-sex marriage in the United States.

The focus of the Church’s efforts in support of the national Respect for Marriage Act “was not on same-sex marriage, but on ensuring the act contained the necessary protections for religious freedom,” he said, adding that at the time the act was adopted, “the Church publicly reaffirmed our Church doctrine approving only marriage between one man and one woman.”

Marriage bills previously proposed in Congress made no attempt to protect religious freedom, said President Oaks. “The Church came out in favor of amendments that added religious freedom protections to the proposed Respect for Marriage Act,” he said. “The amended bill was signed into law, but its overall effect was misunderstood because many news stories focused on only the part of the act that affirmed same-sex marriage.

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I am the greatest advocate of the Constitution of the United States there is on the earth. In my feelings I am always ready to die for the protection of the weak and oppressed in their just rights. The only fault I find with the Constitution is, it is not broad enough to cover the whole ground.

Although it provides that all men shall enjoy religious freedom, yet it does not provide the manner by which that freedom can be preserved, nor for the punishment of Government officers who refuse to protect the people in their religious rights, or punish those mobs, states, or communities who interfere with the rights of the people on account of their religion. Its sentiments are good, but it provides no means of enforcing them. It has but this one fault. Under its provision, a man or a people who are able to protect themselves can get along well enough; but those who have the misfortune to be weak or unpopular are left to the merciless rage of popular fury.

The Constitution should contain a provision that every officer of the Government who should neglect or refuse to extend the protection guaranteed in the Constitution should be subject to capital punishment; and then the president of the United States would not say, “Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you.”

( Source: Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith 326-27 )

It is important to understand Joseph Smith’s perspective. The U.S. Constitution promises Americans that they will have freedom to worship as they please, but nevertheless the prophet was persecuted for his religion all of his adult life.

Because of this persecution, Joseph Smith traveled to Washington, DC in November 1839 to appeal directly to President Martin Van Buren and the U.S. Congress. And he was told that for political reasons very little could be done for the early Latter-day Saints. President Van Buren told Joseph Smith that his cause was just but nothing could be done without losing the votes of the state of Missouri, where a lot of the persecution took place.

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On Friday, New York State Supreme Court Judge Gerard Neri held that the COVID vax mandate for healthcare workers was immediately “null, void, and of no effect.” The court found that the mandate was “arbitrary and capricious” since the shots don’t stop transmission, destroying any rational basis for a mandate in the first place.

In fact, the judge underlined, italicized, and boldfaced the words in his order:

This happened almost exactly a year after the worst newspaper in the world, the Salt Lake Tribune, called for martial law against the unvaxxed.

As we reported a year ago:

If you want to see yet another example of crazy COVID hysteria in action, you only have to look as far as Utah’s largest newspaper, the increasingly out of control Salt Lake Tribune. There, we find an editorial with this paragraph:

“Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

Civilized? Only if you consider Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Cambodia under Pol Pot civilized.

A year later, I will note that the SL Tribune is no longer calling for people to be starved to death if they don’t get the jab. So, perhaps there is some progress. Will the SL Tribune ever apologize for its tyrannical and unscientific opinions on the COVID vax? I am not holding my breath.

In case you need a reminder why this is important: the worst things in society happen during times of pressure and fear. This is when people are tested to see whether they will keep their principles, whether they will uphold the liberty and dignity of others, whether they will engage in true tolerance. During the pandemic M* remained virtually alone in the LDS intellectual space in calling for people to avoid being motivated by fear, to avoid government mandates, to avoid destroying the liberty of others.

For this, we were insulted and pilloried endlessly, including by many former writers for this blog. It turns out we were right and they were wrong. I have gotten a few apologies, but there are literally hundreds of people who should be writing or calling to apologize. This is not a personal thing, although that of course would be nice. It is really about learning from our mistakes and from history. There will be another pandemic again someday, or there will be other international crises. How will you react when those crises happen? Will you act rationally or will you let your fear cause panic?