Mormon Stories Podcast
January 24, 2022
"A discussion about the groundbreaking Federal Investigation against Brigham Young University for its treatment of LGBTQ+ students with attorney Paul Southwick and Legal Fellow Joe Baxter. We discuss the investigation and its relation to recent changes in LDS and BYU policy. We also analyze BYU's initial response to the Office of Civil Rights and what you can do to help advance equality at BYU."
CHADWICK MOORE
Advocate
APRIL 29 2016
Ryannah Quigley grew up in a modest home in Kaysville, Utah, with 22 siblings. Her father was a bishop, the head of a congregation, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The family was staunchly Mormon.
By age 7, Quigley — who was assigned male at birth — began to wear women’s clothing, at times taking down the curtains to make dresses. On many occasions, her parents attempted to quash the problem — as they saw it — but to little avail. Worried that this behavior not only would induce their other children into perversion, but might hinder the entire family’s chances of meeting God in the hereafter, the Quigleys relinquished custody of their child to the state foster care system, where she bounced around from foster homes to treatment centers to hospitals around the state.
At 15, Quigley was living at the Mill Creek Youth Center, in Ogden, where over the next 18 months she would be raped four times by four different men residing at the state custody facility. When she nearly became victim to a fifth rape, Quigley fought back and injured the assailant. The police were called. Although Quigley had acted in self-defense, she was arrested for assault. Standing before an orthodox Mormon judge, she was tried as an adult with a fourth-degree felony and sentenced to two years at the Weber County Jail, where she would be placed in solitary confinement (called “protective custody,” due to her gender identity), raped an additional 11 times, and assaulted many more times, once ending up in the hospital to get 27 stitches after being stabbed. She attempted suicide by hanging and was in a coma for three days.
In Utah, the covert theocracy behind policy-making, the insular and unquestioning faith of Mormon families, and vague, often contradictory statements and actions from LDS church leadership combine to form a unique and particularly dire crisis for LGBT and gender-nonconforming kids. There are, by most estimates, 5,000 kids experiencing homelessness in Utah at any given time. Roughly 42 percent of them identify as LGBT, and most come from Mormon households. This means, of the 450,000 people in Utah between the ages of 15 and 24, a projected 22,000 to 35,000 of them will experience homelessness at some point, according to data provided by outreach workers.
The LDS church has a well-documented anti-LGBT agenda. By 2008, it had funneled more than $20 million to support Proposition 8, California’s anti–marriage-equality initiative. The church had been aggressively battling same-sex marriage since 1994 (when it stepped into Hawaii’s court battle), but as the national tide turned to favor marriage equality, church leadership appeared to back off. The faithful lawmakers in Utah, however, did not.
In early 2015, attempting to bridge the gap between so-called religious freedom and LGBT rights, Utah’s governor, Gary Herbert, a Mormon, with the support of the LDS church and the ACLU, signed an antidiscrimination bill into law, referred to as the “Utah compromise,” that protects LGBT citizens in housing and employment. It was soon revealed that the law had provisions that would not fly in other states or under federal law, allowing religious groups and religiously affiliated nonprofits — such as schools and hospitals — to be exempt from the antidiscrimination laws protecting LGBT people, just as they are exempt from many women’s equal rights laws. LGBT people are also not protected in Utah from discrimination in public accommodations like restaurants, hotels, or restrooms.
Following the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision last year, Utah lawmakers pushed at least three bills through the legislature that targeted the rights of LGBT people, all sponsored by Representative LaVar Christensen, a member of the LDS church. Another bill which was presented earlier that year but did not become law, would have given heterosexual couples preferential treatment over gay couples when adopting children.
Then, on November 5, 2015, in response to the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage nationwide, the church leadership secretly issued an edict to the leaders of its 30,000 congregations worldwide. The order instructed them that children being raised in same-sex headed households cannot be blessed, baptized, or ordained, nor can they serve as missionaries — regardless of that child’s sexual orientation or gender identity — and that church members in “same-gender” relationships — married or unmarried — are apostates subject to excommunication. The policy, which was issued as an update to a confidential handbook, was leaked to the press. There were mass resignations by former church members partial to the gay rights cause or embarrassed by the punish-the-child policy. Within a month of the policy being made public, suicides of LGBT kids in Utah reportedly soared to 32 deaths in a span of four weeks — a figure that would typically have accounted for half the yearly average for the state.
The number-one cause of death for people under the age of 24 in Utah is suicide. Nationally, Utah ranks among the top five states for youth suicides, and by some estimates it has the highest rate of LGBT youth suicides in the country.
Rev. Marian Edmonds-Allen, a United Church of Christ minister who acts as a liaison between LGBT youth and the Mormon church, is heading a state-funded suicide-prevention program. She used to run a youth center in Ogden that served about 700 individuals a month.
“Every single youth I spoke to had a friend or acquaintance who died of suicide. And over 60 percent had attempted suicide themselves,” she tells The Advocate. “The culture of the church has to change. It’s a culture of fear. It’s a culture where if you break the ranks, you can be shunned. There’s a real disconnect between the leaders of the church that I deal with — who say, ‘We tell families to not throw their children out, we tell families to love your children no matter what’ — and the rank-and-file members and the bishops who say, ‘You need to kick your child out if they don’t straighten up.’”
Edmonds-Allen also says there’s a rampant culture of homespun reparative or "ex-gay" therapy, of Mormon parents isolating their children and trying their own brands of pray-the-gay-away.
“The approach here is, ‘We are going to scare you straight.’ They don’t have the sort of mental-health access here as they do in other places where I’ve lived. [Families] just refer to their bishops,” she says.
Activists say the November 5 policy may have caused a spike in homeless numbers as well. In the entire state, there is one LGBT youth homeless shelter, in Ogden, 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. And it has a mere 14 beds.
“There are more services for animals in this state than there are for homeless youth,” one activist says. Because many kids fear entering the foster care system, which is dominated by orthodox Mormon homes — similar to the ones many youth have fled — these homeless kids in Utah have established roving tent cities in the parks and canyons outside Salt Lake City and Provo, 45 miles to the south, and elsewhere.
For the runaways living in these canyons and riverbeds — they call it being “off-grid” — it is perhaps the best of many bad options. The shelter system, like in many cities, is saturated with drugs, alcohol, violence, and prostitution. Mormon children grow up notoriously sheltered and naive and are particularly ill-prepared for life on the streets, outreach workers say. Scores of them become funneled into the sex trade and trafficked out of state. Outreach activists say nearly 100 percent of unaccompanied youth in Utah are approached by sex traffickers within the first 48 hours of hitting the streets, and many of them are shipped off to major cities on the East Coast.
The LDS church entered mainstream politics in the 1970s; the church’s massive lobbying effort was one of the reasons for the demise of the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1993, LDS apostle Boyd Packer, who was second in line for the presidency of the church, proclaimed that the three greatest threats to Mormonism were the gay rights movement, the feminist movement, and intellectuals. The church’s attitude toward LGBT people has not improved.
Openly supporting gay rights is an excommunicable offense; excommunication means the loss of a place to worship, and also the loss of one’s entire culture, community, and often family. As many told this publication, the tightly knit nature of Mormon communities is wonderful and supportive — until it turns brutal.
Starting in 1989, the LDS church referred gay members to a Salt Lake City–based nonprofit called Evergreen, a reparative therapy program that attempted to diminish same-sex attraction through widely discredited, borderline-abusive therapy techniques. In January 2014, fearing potential litigation as governments cracked down on such programs, Evergreen disbanded and reformed as North Star. Literature, personal essays, and confessional videos found on North Star’s website, which has a separate resource section for youths, encourage gay Mormons to enter into opposite-sex marriages and continue onto the heteronormative family path. Same-sex attractions are not a sin, North Star reassures, but acting on them is a very different story.
On whether to tell parents and bishops about same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria, the literature is discouragingly vague, telling young people to pray on it and come to their own conclusions. It goes without saying that there are zero referrals outside of family or church recommended to young people through North Star, and kids are also told they may experience a backlash from the gay community if they don’t dive headfirst into the gay lifestyle.
Berta Marquez was born in Guatemala. Her parents were members of the LDS church, which deploys a massive proselytizing effort in Central and South America. Mormons believe the native inhabitants of the Americas are descended from the tribes of Israel, that they arrived here on a boat, and that they need to be brought back to their ancestral faith.
Marquez’s religious upbringing differed from the Mormonism most people imagine. She says many Hispanic Mormons grow up with a variegated religion that is more similar to socialism than it is to the neo-con, pro-capitalist, American-exceptionalism version of Utah Mormonism (see: Mitt Romney). Though Utah is the uber-Mormon environment, many Mormons across the United States, and around the world, often raise their eyebrows at what happens in Utah, she says.
When she went to Brigham Young University, the Mormon-owned and operated private university in Provo, in 2005, she was shocked by the ultraconservative atmosphere.
“It’s a very heavy courtship culture. You’re expected to seek out marriage as a part of the plan of salvation,” she says, sitting in her living room in a small town near Provo.
The pressures on family members and congregations to keep one another in line is intense, cultish, and debilitating for anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. Before she came out as gay, Marquez had a very specific suicide plan to make it look like a hiking accident, to avoid casting shame on her loved ones.
“It can be a beautiful way to grow up. You are cradled in this culture where there is a network of support and a whole community is rooting for you,” Marquez says. “As an LDS kid, you’re raised to want a family very acutely. From the time you are tiny, you learn about being [married] in the temple. At BYU, all of your friends are dating actively, all seeking out their eternal companion, and you’re raised to want that, to want companionship.
“There’s a lot of shame, secrecy, and terror if you have an LGBT child. ‘My child no longer fits this narrative; what’s going to happen to us? We’re not going to be together forever.’ It’s not necessarily spite or malice, but parents are not prepared with the skill sets for inclusive thinking,” she says.
Since the November policy, Marquez and her wife Cathy, a fellow Mormon who is also a survivor of the Columbine High School massacre, stopped going to church.
In Mormonism, there is a mantra that goes something like, “When the prophet has spoken, the thinking is done.” The prophet, or the president of the church, is believed to have a direct line of communication with God.
“You’re expected to fall in line,” Marquez says. “So you never have to examine if what you’re doing is ethically correct.”
Slight rain washes through City Creek Canyon just outside downtown Salt Lake City as I make my way off the tidy jogging path and up the muddy and wooded eastern slope. The Utah State Capitol building looms marbled and elephantine atop the opposing western ridge, nearly casting a shadow on this landscape littered with hundreds of sleeping bags nestled between the trees. For any kids who might still be living here, they would be gone during daylight hours to avoid drawing attention to themselves, or risk having the police confiscate or destroy their few belongings. Some trees have been rudimentarily hacked down and bushes twisted into makeshift shelters, and there are backpacks and scant belongings hidden among the rocks. I come across one sleeping bag with dozens of discarded snail shells surrounding it, as though someone had been eating them. Along another site, with three makeshift beds, someone had adorned a leafless tree in several pairs of ballet slippers tied at the laces and looped over the branches. It is a virtual city unto itself here. Alongside a brook, there’s a scrubby pine tree with tattered silver garland and a few Christmas ornaments still clinging to it. Yesterday was Easter, and next to one sleeping bag I find a pink plastic egg, where inside, the words “Love yourself enough to love all beings” are scribbled on a scrap of paper.
Before the November 5 policy was made public, the LDS church made a donation of an undisclosed amount of money to the Utah Pride Center, a Salt Lake City LGBT nonprofit. It was reported that the money was meant for homeless youth services. It seemed to be a strange, almost guilty gesture. Or perhaps it was meant to buy influence and suppress discontent. According to multiple sources with intimate knowledge of the Pride Center who wished to remain anonymous, the nonprofit routinely, almost as policy, turns away homeless youth who enter its doors, whether they’re seeking a shower, a meal, social services, a respite from the elements, or just someone to talk to.
Once upon a time weekly breakfasts were held there to feed homeless LGBT youth, some days attracting more than 50 kids, but as the Pride Center came under new leadership, the breakfasts stopped. One of the most popular programs at the Pride Center was free HIV testing provided by the state health department. This year, that service stopped as well.
“They continue to solicit and accept donations for homeless youth services and they’ve discontinued services for homeless youth. They turn youth away,” one source said. “Kids come in there, and maybe they smell and maybe they’re dirty and the Pride Center doesn’t want that image, so they kick them out,” another source said. The Pride Center was unable to be reached for comment.
Cai Noble spent her entire 20s being homeless in Utah. She’s since helped found Operation Shine America, a youth homelessness advocacy group, after she walked across the United States a few years ago to visit homeless camps and raise awareness. She grew up in a trailer in Cheyenne, Wyo. Her mother was married 12 times, and Noble lived through persistent trauma and abuse. After ending up in the hospital, at age 14, she was put into foster care and sent to live with a Mormon family in Utah. Her adoptive father was a bishop. She went from failing her classes to getting straight A’s in school, but as she began to express her queer identity, her adoptive siblings abused her, physically and verbally. When she came out to her adoptive father, he, naive but well-intentioned, plunged himself into learning everything he could about the Mormon church’s beliefs on homosexuality.
“He came home with a stack of books,” Noble says. “He says, ‘You’ve been hurt. All you’ve known is brutality. You’ve been sexually abused, so of course you’re gay.’ What he found in the literature was that gay men are pedophiles and sex addicts and beyond salvation. But for women, it appears they’re merely sick and they can be cured.”
Noble and I drive to an encampment site along the Jordan River outside Salt Lake City that looks to have been recently cleared by law enforcement. In a clearing, a mound of belongings appears to have been bulldozed to the center, but some settlements remain, many of them impressive structures built from plywood and tree limbs. Some even have doors. Some are dug into the muddy slopes along the river, like pueblo homes. There’s evidence of children being reared here: diapers and bibs and cans of formula are littered about.
When Noble left home, after being expelled from a homeless shelter in suburban Sandy, Utah, she was approached by a sex trafficker. “The predators go out and look for certain kinds of kids. They know exactly what they’re looking for,” she says. She ended up in the guy’s car, almost robotically, and as he drove her out of town, the car overheated; when he pulled over, she snapped to and fled.
“The Mormon ones don’t have the street smarts, and they are more trusting. They get sold and shipped all over the country. They just disappear,” Marian Edmonds-Allen says.
Laurin Crosson runs a safe house in Utah, called Rockstarr Ministries, for the victims of sex trafficking. She was trafficked for 20 years and says the average age of children who are picked up by pimps on the street is 13; they end up in the “West Coast circuit” — Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland — and many of them will be murdered before they reach 21.
“We have this horrific culture of throwing away kids here in Utah,” she says. “These pimps are waiting for these people. They are exactly what they are looking for. They don’t care about your sexuality or your gender identity. You’re flesh, and you’ll bring in a paycheck of about $150,000–200,000 a year.”
It was many years into Crosson’s forced prostitution before she heard the terms “human trafficking” or “sex trafficking,” and she sees the situation in Utah as clandestine and grim. For those kids who may be on the verge of homelessness, because of Utah’s conservative policies, people like her are forbidden to address public-school students about human trafficking.
“The church is the state here,” she says. “In Provo, there’s even an image of the Mormon temple on the metal badges that police officers wear. What else do I need to say?”
http://www.advocate.com/current-issue/2016/4/29/ghost-children-mormon-country
Rape survivors at Brigham Young University, considered the ‘Mormon Harvard’, face penalties under its strict honor code. Now they’re fighting back.
Maria L La Ganga and Dan Hernandez
The Guardian
April 30, 2016
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| Madi Barney |
Madi Barney sat sobbing in the Provo, Utah, police department. It had been four days since the Brigham Young University sophomore had been raped in her off-campus apartment.
She was scared – terrified – that the officials at her strict, Mormon university would find out and punish her.
Nonsense, the officers told her, they’ll never know, and they won’t hurt you. But a month or so later, there she was with her attorney in Brigham Young University’s Title IX office – a place where rape victims are supposed to get help – and offered an ultimatum by a university official.
Rape victim could be punished under Brigham Young University’s ‘honor code’
Barney was told the school “had received a police report in which ‘A) it looks like you’ve been raped and B) it also looks like you may have violated the honor code’”, she recounted, and that “I was going to be forwarded to the honor code office unless I let them investigate me. I said absolutely not.”
The university has told Barney that she cannot register for future classes. She is no longer welcome at the institution her father attended before her, along with aunts and uncles and two cousins, a university that devout families consider the Harvard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Attending the graceful campus at the foot of the snow-capped Wasatch Range is an aspiration for many young Mormons, and being thrown out is a black mark that can follow the devout for life, estrange them from their families, derail their education and ultimately their careers.
It can bring with it “horrible guilt and shame and dishonor”, said sociologist Ryan Cragun, who specializes in Mormonism at the University of Tampa. “If it’s tied to the honor code, not only is it tied to academic failure, but you’re a sinner. This could cause ramifications for your eternal salvation.”
So what did the 20 year old do? She fought back. And in the process, she helped galvanize many other rape survivors to come forward with their own stories of “re-victimization” at the hands of BYU officials in what has evolved into a grassroots effort to change one of the university’s most stringent sets of policies – the honor code.
The public outrage that followed has shone a spotlight on the school at a time when victim-blaming has appeared in headlines elsewhere in the country. This week, a court in Oklahoma declared that state law did not criminalize oral sex with a victim who was incapacitated by alcohol. And on 15 April, at a campaign event in New York, Republican presidential candidate John Kasich advised a college student concerned about rape: “don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol”.
Going public exposed Barney to yet another wave of abuse, this time via newspaper comment sections, social media posts and threatening emails – a sign of the tough job ahead for BYU students and alumnae as they push against a culture that both nurtures and punishes.
“Are we to understand that this young lady wants her transgressions overlooked while holding others accountable for theirs?” wrote one online skeptic. “In the end, be moral and don’t break the rules and you’ll be better off”, scolded another. Asked a third, “Why do people think that a sexual assault means ‘everything I did is irrelevant and I am in no way responsible?’
Going public
Barney told her story publicly for the first time on 7 April at a rape awareness conference at BYU. The details are chilling.
The suspect, 39-year-old Nasiru Seidu, lied to her about about his age and name. He told her he was single. According to police documents, he raped her while she cried out and screamed, “no”. The police confirmed the details during a staged phone call between Barney and Seidu after she filed the report.
Seidu, who was arrested after the September rape, is free on bail. His wife attends court hearings by his side. Barney has protective orders requiring that he stay away.
A Utah County sheriff’s deputy, a friend of Seidu, passed a copy of the police report to the BYU honor code office. The document, Barney said, has pages of details about the rape, a statement from the nurse who examined her, “medical records of trauma to my body after a rape”.
The way that BYU has treated me has been so callous that it’s been almost as bad as the rape itself
School officials, she said, used that report to launch their investigation into whether she had violated the honor code, which prohibits students from inviting members of the opposite sex into their rooms. They must be “chaste,” dress modestly, stay away from drugs and alcohol, and attend church services.
At the advice of her attorney, she refused to take part in the investigation. She has been banned from ever registering for classes at BYU again. After Seidu’s trial, she plans to transfer to another university.
BYU officials, she said, told her “they couldn’t give me the services that they would give a rape victim because they couldn’t prove that I was raped. I filed a Title IX complaint against them, like, a week ago.”
What she wants people to understand, she said, is that “I’m not attacking BYU ... I’m not saying throw out the whole honor code. You just need to add one small clause, which is common sense.”
That clause, she said, would grant sexual assault victims immunity from honor code investigations so that, if they wanted to, they could report the crimes against them without fearing retribution.
“If I hadn’t reported my rape,” she said, “none of this would be happening to me. The very thing I was supposed to do, the right thing, led me to getting kicked out of school. The way that BYU has treated me has been so callous that it’s been almost as bad as the rape itself.”
Transgender and Mormon: keeping the faith while asking the church to change
Read more
After Barney spoke at the rape awareness conference, many other women approached her to say they’d gone through the same thing.
BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins would not respond to questions about the specifics of Barney’s case. But she did say that the university would “never illegally obtain a police report” and has launched a study about the school’s policies.
The universtity, she said in an email, “cares deeply about the safety and well-being of our students. When a student reports a sexual assault our primary focus is on the safety and well-being of the victim. A Title IX investigation is never conducted to harass or re-traumatize a victim.”
That said, “sometimes in the course of an investigation”’ she continued, “facts come to light that a victim has engaged in prior honor code violations.”
Those facts are investigated, which causes what the school describes as an “inherent tension”.
Jenny McComb, an LDS churchgoer who handles sexual assault cases for a British university, said the honor code is designed “to promote a nice environment for LDS students”.
“A lot of students feel very positively toward it,” she continued. “But if the honor code is acting as a shield to protect and conceal sexual violence, that’s not working. There is nothing honorable about protecting sex offenders.”
Familiar stories
When Hailey Allen walked into an athletic store two years ago, she saw a pair of workout shorts identical to the ones worn by the man who drugged and raped her when she was a freshman at BYU in 2004. Suddenly, she felt as if the assailant was right there in the room.
“My whole body froze and I could feel myself shaking. I couldn’t talk or move and felt completely helpless.”
It was one of many flashbacks that the now 30 year old said she experienced a decade after the sexual assaults that upended her life. Along with the flashbacks came the terrible dreams in which her rapist hurt other women. When Allen decided to track the assailant down, she discovered that he was a high school athletic coach.
“He’s in this position of trust,” she said,” “and it just makes me ill thinking about what could be happening.”
In 2004, when Allen told BYU officials about the assaults, they said her allegations would be difficult to pursue. And besides, they told her, if she did, she would be expelled for honor code violations. It didn’t matter if she’d been drugged. Eventually, her bishop intervened, and she was allowed to remain in school – but on academic probation.
Since then, she’s become an advocate for women and started Helping Save (Helping Sexual Assault Victims Everywhere), a not-for-profit that steers victims to counseling and legal services.
Allen also lobbied her alma matter to adjust the way it deals with victims of sex crimes, overtures that have mostly been ignored. Her request to set up a Helping Save booth at BYU’s rape awareness conference in February was rejected, too, but she attended the event anyway.
My whole body froze and I could feel myself shaking. I couldn’t talk or move and felt completely helpless
That’s where she met the slight, dark-haired Barney, along with dozens of other survivors. Since then, their fight has escalated into an international cause. An online petition urging BYU to grant rape survivors immunity from honor code violations related to the attacks has gathered more than 110,000 signatures.
This year, inspired to join the debate and lobby for change, Colleen Payne Dietz also came forward with her own story. The now 34 year old remembers her attacker as a well-dressed man in his mid 20s who drove a fancy car, and was the uncle of one of her friends in the BYU dorms.
He shared her love of music, he told her, and invited her to burn CDs at his home in the foothills under Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple.
What was supposed to have been a couple of hours listening to music turned into two days of imprisonment. She had no phone, no clothes, no way to leave.
“Up to this point in my life, I’ve never been vocal about it,” Payne Dietz said of the 2001 incident. “I haven’t really been in a place in my life where I’ve been able to be as active as Hailey. But now I am.”
She recalled confiding the details of her rape to a bishop, who said she would be expelled. Her father intervened, and the religious leader backed down. But she was forbidden from receiving the sacrament at church.
“The most devastating part,” Payne Dietz said, was when the bishop told her: “‘If you’re pregnant because of this experience then you will need to leave BYU’.”
“My parents met at BYU and were married at BYU,” Payne Dietz said. “I was born at BYU. There was never another option for me ... Sitting in their office my whole world – everything that I knew for my future – was being taken from me over something I had no control over.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/30/mormon-rape-victims-shame-brigham-young-university
Hemant Mehta
Patheos
April 23, 2016
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| Elder L. Whitney Clayton |
During the commencement ceremonies for Brigham Young University on Thursday, most of the speeches were pretty typical, even for a school affiliated with the Mormon Church. Pursue your passions. Family comes first. Money isn’t everything. Don’t watch porn.
Typical stuff.
Elder L. Whitney Clayton, a leader in the Church’s Quorums of the Seventy, gave the main commencement speech. In addition to making the no-porn comment, he made this incredible remark:
The faithless often promote themselves as the wise who can rescue the rest of us from our naiveté. One does not need to listen to assertive apostates for long to see the parallels between them and the Corihors and Nehors and Sharoms of The Book of Mormon. We should disconnect immediately and completely from listening to the proselytizing efforts of those who have lost their faith, and instead reconnect promptly with the holy spirit. The adversary sees spiritual apathy and half-hearted obedience as opportunities to encircle us with his chains and bind us, and he hopes to destroy us. We escape his chains as we voluntarily chose to bind ourselves instead to God.
To put it another way, after spending several years in college, after being exposed to different perspectives, and after all that preparation to head out into the Real World, these graduates were told by their commencement speaker to cut themselves off from people who dared to challenge them.
Someone more confident in his beliefs could easily have said, “We’ve prepared you well at BYU. So if anyone challenges your faith, we hope you’ll challenge them right back.”
Instead, Clayton’s strategy for dealing with religious dissenters amounts to “RUN AWAY FAST!” That’s some Scientology level shit right there. It’s not just bad advice to college students, it gives away the weakness of Mormon beliefs in the face of criticism.
The only good thing to come from that speech would be if some of those students now graduating from BYU finally have reason to leave the Church for good.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/04/23/mormon-leader-at-byu-graduation-disconnect-immediately-from-those-who-have-lost-their-faith/
