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The following article is from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 23, Number 1 (Spring 2007).
Still giddy over their best football season in years, students at the LDS Brigham Young University are brimming with school pride. The Cougars handily defeated the Aggies, my school’s team, and narrowly squeaked out a win over the Utes. But though BYU’s students have earned some bragging rights, I am not yet envious of their school choice.
They are missing out on the marketplace of ideas students at other universities enjoy. I’m not talking about the filtered porn or limited cable channel selection but about the onerous censorship of vital information about the government and the Mormon Church.
In 1998, the American Association of University Professors voted to censure BYU for infringements on academic freedom that were “distressingly common” and for a climate for academic freedom that was “distressingly poor.” Despite this condemnation, BYU has persisted in a systematic purge of freethinking faculty. The two most recent victims: BYU professors Steven E. Jones and Jeffrey Nielson.
Just a few months ago, tenured physics professor Jones was placed on paid leave because of a theory about the events of September 11, 2001, that he discussed outside of his classroom. The theory was too “speculative” and “accusatory” for BYU’s liking. Jones has colleagues across the country who share his views and have not been subject to discipline. Exhausted from having to endure the controversy, Jones has since retired from BYU.
Nielson, a faithful Mormon, was a philosophy instructor at BYU. Following the church’s statement in favor of a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage, Nielson exercised his free agency and respectfully disagreed with the church in a Salt Lake Tribune editorial. Nielson was fired, although BYU preferred to say his contract had “failed to be renewed.”
BYU’s actions have the blessing of LDS doctrine. In “The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect,” Apostle Boyd K. Packer cautioned LDS educators to avoid any teachings that are not “faith promoting. Some things that are true are not very useful,” he said.
BYU’s deficit in academic freedom is an obvious deterrent to my ever attending there, but of even more concern to me is its institutional discrimination against its gay students. Consider this statement of official BYU policy: “Advocacy of a homosexual lifestyle (whether implied or explicit) or any behaviors that indicate homosexual conduct, including those not sexual in nature, are inappropriate and violate the Honor Code.”
The school has unforgivingly enforced a harsh interpretation of this policy—the record is long, infamous, and well-documented. BYU’s security forces would, for decades, spy on gay students on campus and follow them on their weekend exoduses to clubs in downtown Salt Lake City. License plates of cars parked near the clubs were noted, entered into the university’s database, and analyzed for matches. And, with sometimes humorous results, security personnel would often go undercover to infiltrate the clubs and try to draw favors from students. If caught, these students faced potential expulsion. Within the past few years, BYU has even gone so far as to discipline “straight” students who regularly associate with gay students.
In BYU’s defense, it did try to help many gay students with their “mental illness.” That “help”: reparative therapy. In their efforts to cure homosexuality, BYU, as directed by LDS Social Services, has routinely subjected gays—some as young as fifteen—to possibly detrimental treatment without parental consent.
Affirmation, an LDS gay rights group, has documented the school’s use of shock therapy, in which the counselor would produce a mild electric shock in conjunction with slides of males in various stages of undress; no shocks were administered while images of females were shown. Ipecac, a vomit-inducing drug, was sometimes administered in place of electric shock. As early as 1969, bowing to scientific pressures and seeking to avoid lawsuits, BYU publicly distanced itself from these techniques. However, it did employ them throughout the 1970s and 1980s and may even have continued them well into the 1990s.
Here’s just one case: in 1995, Jayce Cox was referred to BYU by his bishop to undergo shock therapy. Electrodes were attached to his hands, arms, torso, and genitals. His emotional and physical scars serve as a testament to his horrific experience. Not surprisingly, and as the Deseret News reported earlier this year, Utah leads the nation in suicides among young men—many of whom are homosexual.
“You’re taught that the leaders of the church will never lie to you, never deceive you, and you’re taught to believe them blindly,” Jayce lamented in a 2000 interview in the Las Vegas Bugle. “I believed that through [reparative therapy], faith, temple attendance, prayer, and fasting I would be healed. I believed that through God anything’s possible.”
BYU still contends that homosexuality can be corrected. Beyond being offensive, this deluded notion is vehemently rejected by all mainstream professional medical and psychological bodies. But, apparently, faith is a sufficient substitute for sound science at BYU.
I honestly can’t say I expect anything different from a school that boasts the name of the church’s most despotic leader. Nor am I stunned by the student body’s acquiescence. It is, after all, the country’s third most conservative student body, within the country’s most conservative city and state.
Nevertheless, I am optimistic. The LDS church, being a social institution, has already had to divorce itself from its more draconian traditions: polygamy, hostility toward the federal government, and overt racism. Societal pressures will demand yet another convenient “revelation” of the first presidency to rescind the current homophobia. Tomorrow does not belong to yesterday’s bigots.
Jonathan Adams is a student at Utah State University and a former member of the Mormon Church.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
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