As the dozens if not hundreds of books, newspaper articles, debates, discourses, dissertations, monuments, ancestral associations that hold annual conventions and now a full-length movie timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the atrocity attest, the Mountain Meadows Massacre is never going to die.

Why this is so is open to about as much conjecture as to why a band of otherwise God-fearing, church-going, peace-loving Mormon men slaughtered some 120 defenseless men, women and children who were part of a wagon train in the Mountain Meadows area southwest of Cedar City on Sept. 11, 1857.

Some would suggest the event's uncommon staying power is commensurate with the awfulness of the crime. A century and a half later, the dead still cry out for justice.

But that doesn't square with legions of cases of mass murders that history has long since forgotten.

My guess is that it has more to do with it being the exception rather than the rule.

In the 150 years since that dark day in September, and in the 27 years that preceded it, the collective common history of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is devoid of such behavior. There have been controversies — polygamy, blacks and the priesthood and so forth — and there have been migrations from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois to Utah due to persecution, but no homicidal tendencies, no inexplicable shooting sprees.

For those with an agenda to attack the LDS Church, the Mountain Meadows Massacre remains by far the biggest target on an otherwise almost empty range.

The massacre's latest re-telling — the movie "September Dawn" that was released nationally this week — follows a predictable script: The dead are innocent and the killers are not. And whatever mitigating circumstances the filmmakers might have glossed over, at the end of the day it's hard to dispute that.

What is not hard to dispute — and this is where the movie shows its bias and loses its credibility — is the presentation as absolute fact that LDS President Brigham Young ordered the massacre.

Historians have been digging for 150 years and have never found any such evidence.

Not to mention the fact that nothing Brigham Young did in 33 years leading the church suggested so much as an inkling toward such action.

Young's descendants — and it isn't a small number — ought to sue the makers of "September Dawn" for everything they own.

But they no doubt won't. As time has demonstrated, it is not their way.

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Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.