[Newcomers to Keepa: This is a discussion about verifying the legitimacy of quotations attributed to LDS leaders, not an invitation to discuss politics. All purely political commentary is removed.]

You’ve probably seen this meme, thrown into a discussion by someone reminding the participants that reading shouldn’t necessarily be believing.

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The tendency to accept bogus statements as genuine quotations seems to be especially rampant in Mormonism – at least, the misattributed statements that come to my notice are most often misattributed to Mormon figures. This habit of sharing the counterfeit seems to me to have a particularly pernicious effect among us, because many such “quotations” are not merely wise thoughts expressed with felicitous language, but appear to carry prophetic authority.

I suppose most such false attributions begin innocently enough: A speaker quotes someone else in a speech, and a meme-maker carelessly attributes the quotation to the speaker rather than to its original source. Somebody thinks a statement sounds like something a prominent figure might have said, and not caring or knowing how to find verification, sloppily attributes that statement to him. Somebody retells a story he heard about a prominent figure, and some listener polishes the paraphrase into a pithy summary – and voilà – a “quotation” is born.

It isn’t always easy to trace the route by which a counterfeit “quotation” enters the culture – usually online culture, but then spreading more widely through the use of handouts for Relief Society, statements made in Elders Quorum … – but it is easy enough to estimate the validity of a supposed quotation before you spread it.

The difficulty in writing about these things, though, is that I have to give examples, and we run the danger of those examples planting themselves in the back of your mind so that later on, having forgotten just what you read, you give added credibility to a false statement because it is somehow familiar. Be careful out there!

Example 1: “If you vote for the lesser of two evils …”

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This one is making the rounds of Facebook right now. Is it an authentic quotation, with the weight of prophetic authority behind it?

The first step in tracking questioned quotations is recognizing their questionability in the first place.

Does it sound like something the purported author would say? Well, maybe; President Benson’s concern for the American political process, together with his abiding belief in God’s guiding hand in the course of American history, give a certain plausibility to the statement.

But is the quotation too perfect? That is, does this statement from the past fit today’s needs a little too perfectly? What’s happening right at this moment when you read that meme? An election, with two front runners whom many Latter-day Saints despise, leaving many of those Latter-day Saints searching for alternate possibilities.

If you consider both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to be evils, doesn’t this “quotation” bolster your friends’ urging you to consider a third-party candidate as the only righteous choice? It’s that perfection-to-the-moment that ought to raise your suspicions just a little bit.

In trying to pin down the reliability of a supposed quotation, Google is your best friend. Google “Ezra Taft Benson” with some distinctive phrase from the meme – “lesser of two evils,” say, “or “worst possible candidate.” Your search results will vary from mine depending on which words you choose, but almost certainly a quick scan of hits will reveal these:

** Multiple “quote book” websites or Pinterest pins that repeat the supposed quotation with an attribution to Ezra Taft Benson, but without any pointer to a speech or book or other original source. Ignore these sites. For purposes of validating a quotation, they are worthless.

** An absence of the appearance of this quotation in sources during Ezra Taft Benson’s lifetime. This isn’t an entire deal-breaker – it’s possible for new papers to come to light after a person’s death – but the longer a person has been dead, the more careful you should be. What are the chances that a new document written by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln is going to surface in, say, 2001, carrying an eminently quotable line that just happens to speak to today’s hot issues? When that does happen, it will be in the news, and Google will point you to it.

In the case of our Ezra Taft Benson “quotation,” its first appearance seems to have been in 2012 – an election year, and therefore somewhat suspicious for our purposes – where the statement is not called a “quotation” but is said to be “loosely associated” with President Benson. In the intervening years, that “loose association” has morphed into a firm claim of authorship.

** You may not be the first person to wonder whether a statement is authentic. In this case, Google returns hits from others who have been searching for its origins. Take advantage of their discoveries. In this case, the statement, or some form of it, seems to have originated in a political campaign, with words lifted from a claimed personal letter from Ezra Taft Benson to a candidate, distributed by that candidate’s opponents. This should raise all kinds of red flags: Why would Ezra Taft Benson be sharing these thoughts with a young, unknown future politician? (He might, but you don’t find him sharing those thoughts in public or with other known private correspondents.) Did the personal letter ever exist? (Maybe it did/does, but it hasn’t been published, to date.) The lines were made public by the candidate’s political opponents – is the statement a fair representation of the letter’s words, or was it skewed in the political interest of its distributors? (Nobody knows – nobody has seen the letters.)

So is the statement a legitimate quotation from the writing or speech of Ezra Taft Benson? It appeared out of nowhere, under questionable circumstances, and no credible, checkable source is known. While we may not know its precise origins, there is too much doubt and no support for it. If you care about authenticity, don’t spread this one, even if it fits neatly into your political viewpoint.

Example 2: “I would educate my daughters …”

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This meme, attributed to Brigham Young, has flown around the ether in the past few months. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Brigham Young, who is already known to have spoken favorably of the education and employment of women, is now championing the education of girls above that of boys. Not equal to, but superior to … if he had to make a choice, at least.

But is it authentic?

It may be hard to believe when you look at the vastness of the Journal of Discourses, and know that many of Brigham Young’s talks appeared in the newspapers even if they weren’t selected for the Journal of Discourses, and have heard how extensive his correspondence was – I say, it may be hard to believe that scholars have pored over all of those sources, compiling all of the known words of Brigham Young. It’s what we do. Such research projects are massive, true, and you may not want to undertake them, but for some of us, this is what. we. do. So if some meme-maker has a Brigham Young quotation, reason tells us that the scholars should have the same quotation.

Google it. Google “Brigham Young” with one or another of the distinctive phrases. Do you see the statement appearing in any print source before the internet age? One place, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But does it appear in the known writings or speeches of Brigham Young? There is no evidence of that on the internet. That should always, always be a giveaway. Things that should have been known for many decades, but which suddenly appear in the 21st century attached to the name of an historical figure, are almost without exception false. Brigham Young did speak favorably of women’s education, but the explosive idea in this “quotation” – that it would be more important to educate girls than boys, if some magical circumstance prevented the education of all – appears nowhere in the known words of Brigham Young.

Not only that, but the concept is absent from Brigham’s lived history. He sent many of his sons gifted with special talents to universities in the East, even to West Point, for specialized, full-bodied education, the best to be had in North America. His daughters received ordinary elementary education, and a few of them received musical training in the East, but none of his daughters, intelligent and gifted though many of them were, received anything like the formal education provided to his sons. Even if the quotation were authentic, I’d be skeptical of its value, under those circumstances.

Beyond the “quotation’s” sudden appearance, there’s another suspicious clue to recent origin, one that often appears in these sketchy claims. That term opportunity constraints is weird. It doesn’t sound like Brigham Young. It doesn’t sound like the 19th century at all. It sounds like professional or academic vocabulary of recent origin. Sure enough, the use of Google’s N-Gram viewer – a program that counts the appearance of words and phrases in enormous libraries of printed material from at least 1800 – very clearly demonstrates the recent origin of that term:

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A few paragraphs up, I mentioned one appearance of this purported Brigham Young statement before the internet age. That was an April 1988 talk by Gordon B. Hinckley, printed in the Ensign the following September, in which he said: “The story is told that Brigham Young was once asked what he would do if he had to choose between providing education for his sons or for his daughters. He replied that he would educate his daughters because they would become the mothers of his grandchildren.” No source citation is provided. It is not presented as a direct quotation, but as a third-person paraphrase.

Where did then-Elder Hinckley find that story? I don’t know – his telling of the story doesn’t change the fact that neither the story nor the supposed quotation appear in Brigham Young’s known body of work. The year 1988 evidently precedes the date when General Authorities called upon librarians in the Church History Library to help with citations. Perhaps it was folk history, or perhaps he was relying on a memory of other statements he had heard that kinda sorta approximated what he attributed to Brigham Young. In 1975, for instance, Dallin H. Oaks, then president of Brigham Young University, gave a talk on Women and Education, in which he quoted Harold B. Lee:

Some have observed that the mother’s vital teaching responsibility makes it even more important to have educated mothers than to have educated fathers. “When you teach a boy, you are just teaching another individual,” President Harold B. Lee declared, “but when you teach a woman or a girl, you are teaching a whole family.” (Relief Society Magazine, January, 1965, p. 8.)

That Gordon B. Hinckley’s 1988 talk is the direct source for the dummied quotation seems evident when you compare the end of his sentence, “…because they would become the mothers of his grandchildren” to the rest of the bogus quotation that often appears in textual quotations but not in visual memes, like the one illustrating this post: “… You educate a man, you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”

If the 1988 talk is the origin for the meme, then someone has taken what was manifestly not a quotation, and has written words which he puts in Brigham Young’s mouth.

Be careful out there.

UPDATE, 17 October:

A week ago, I wrote a post featuring memes supposedly quoting LDS authorities. Keepa readers, true to their track record of superior comments, understood that the purpose of the post was to learn strategies for evaluating comments, and you didn’t argue at all about whether or not you agreed with the purported quotations.

That post was quickly plundered by so-called “journalists,” including a TV reporter and two online LDS magazines, who broadcast/posted the unreliable ETBenson meme, announcing that according to “their” research, the quotation was unreliable. Representatives of those publications tell me they did not take anything from Keepa, but instead did their own “research” on each others’ sites in an incestuous cycle where they’re all copying from each other and denying taking anything from Keepa. Well, somebody had to start the story, none of them claim originality, and their stories all appeared a day or two after Keepa’s post and its valuable comments from readers.

For the record, I’m not upset that they robbed from Keepa without acknowledgment – I’m used to that. Happens all the time, especially with one of the online LDS magazines. Doesn’t make it right, just familiar.

What does bother me is what happens every time they do that. They strip the importance out, and leave just the sensational husk. In this case, they stripped out the caution against blindly accepting internet memes, and they stripped out the lesson on how to determine the legitimacy of a quotation. What was left was the ambiguous “He said this in a private meeting,” which opened up the way for their readers to ignore any deeper point and merely argue with whether or not Ezra Taft Benson was correct when he said this thing which there is little reason to believe he said. (Also for the record, I’ve never said that the rememberer lied about his visit with Ezra Taft Benson. Instead, I note the unreliability of a 44-year-old unsupported memory.)

Keepa readers are smarter than the followers of too many other LDS sites. You always are. Keep it up.