The double standard of anti-Mormon Christians

For your readers, Mormonism is what you [the anti-Mormon writer] say it is. It is to establish the thesis that you have been at such pains with your personal buildup. Once entrenched as an official guide, you can take the readers where you please. It is not the thing you are showing them from then on, but your interpretation of the thing. It has been the practice of religious polemic in every age to attack not what the opposition practice and preach but our impression of what they practice and preach. "Blasphemy!" was the heading of the first published report on the Book of Mormon, and Alexander Campbell sincerely believed it was blasphemy. The early anti-Christian writers were just as sincere. Blasphemy had been from the beginning the stock charge against Jesus and the apostles, just as it is the favorite word of anti-Mormon writers. Didn't Jesus recommend publicly that those who "offended" should be glad to have a millstone hung about their necks and be cast into the sea? Blood atonement! Didn't he instruct his followers to hate-yes, hate-their own mothers and fathers and children? Horrible, horrible! To hate their own lives? A cult of suicide, no less! And then to have innocent babes and venerable ancients damned eternally for no other sin than not having had the ridiculous dunking that so shocked Ann Eliza; and to proclaim that an offender should cut off his own hand or pluck out his own eye-a cult of self-mutilation! And didn't the founder spend his time in private "conversations" with women, including women of ill-repute? And weren't his followers the dregs of society, who admitted that respectable people avoided them? Didn't they preach the shocking doctrine of a physical resurrection?--even doctors of the Church like Origen and Jerome squirm uncomfortably. Their notorious "love feasts"--too indecent to write about--show they meant it literally when they called each other "brother" and "sister" and then proceeded to intermarry in a cult of incest. ("Sounding Brass", Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass)