I was very impressed, both with the letter, and with BYU for publishing it. Then I was disappointed when a few hours later, the link was no longer available.
Fortunately, Jon Adams was able to get Crall's permission to post the letter in its entirety on USU SHAFT's blog.
As Jon says, hopefully no disciplinary action comes against Crall for his honesty (or the editor who was brave enough to publish the letter), but should action be taken, I'm behind Crall.
Showin my support
ReplyDeleteCrall will not be disciplined. He is the star student of the BYU neuroscience department. He scored 44/45 on the MCAT, and that put him on the front page of the DU a while a go. Crall is heroic for using his local prestige to speak truth.
ReplyDeleteKudos to Crall for his boldness.
ReplyDeleteWhat an excellent human being. I too would like to see everyone, not just Mormons, who oppose equal rights, admit to themselves and to the world that it's simple bigotry.
ReplyDeleteThank you for linking to this. The letter is quite insightful. It's understandable that the advocates of Prop. 8 did not dare bring their obvious lies into court testimony, where they could be held accountable and exposed, unlike in the back-and-forth of a political campaign.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if Crall is penalized for telling the truth. To paraphrase Voltaire, it is dangerous to be right when the religious authorities are wrong.
Geez! I was afraid something like this might happen. I'm glad the USU blog picked it up, though. Doesn't the LDS Church realize how mind-numbingly dumb this sort of thing makes them look? (Rhetorical question.) Thanks for posting this update, Leah.
ReplyDeleteShame on them. Pulling the letter was petty and foolish.
ReplyDeleteJohn Gilmore's quote is as relevant as ever: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
--Leah @ Unequally Yoked
I think pulling the letter was the worst thing strategically they could have done. Things don't go away on the internet just because you take them down. In fact trying to hide something usually has the opposite effect! The fact that they don't want people to see this is going to make it spread twice as fast.
ReplyDeleteI was talking with Jon Adams today whether all the publicity would make disciplinary action against Crall more or less likely. Hopefully less, but we'll all have to wait and see. All he did was tell the truth. If BYU comes down on him for that, it will be a PR nightmare for them.
Pharyngula's posted about this now.....It will become widely known.
ReplyDeleteInfidel, I saw that! Very exciting!
ReplyDeleteWhat happened to people having opinions? And why can't people accept the fact that people voted Prop 8 to be a law... Just because you have an opinion about something doesn't mean that everyone else's is wrong.
ReplyDelete@Tommy: You can hold whatever opinion you want, but you aren't entitled to your own set of facts. When an opinion is based on lie upon lie, it's a wrong opinion.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, "opinion" should mean "preference" and when it does, yes, you're entitled to whatever opinion you want. However, most of the time people are not referring to mere preference. In such cases, "opinion" simply means "conclusion about reality" and guess what? Most of those are verifiable to some degree.
And of course, I love the implication that, if the majority voted for it, the minority should suck it up. That's bullshit too. I mean that in a technical sense; it's a deliberate miscommunication of a concept. It doesn't matter who you are, one person's rights end where another begins; the minority needs protection from the majority. A judicial ruling that a given law is unconstitutional is one of the clearest expressions of our system's ideals. Especially when one removes religious bias from the reasoning for a law, which of course, is the whole bloody point.
Move to Canada, then. This is America. We vote for stuff to happen...
ReplyDelete@Tommy: You can hold whatever opinion you want, but you aren't entitled to your own set of facts. When an opinion is based on lie upon lie, it's a wrong opinion.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, "opinion" should mean "preference" and when it does, yes, you're entitled to whatever opinion you want. However, most of the time people are not referring to mere preference. In such cases, "opinion" simply means "conclusion about reality" and guess what? Most of those are verifiable to some degree.
And of course, I love the implication that, if the majority voted for it, the minority should suck it up. That's bullshit too. I mean that in a technical sense; it's a deliberate miscommunication of a concept. It doesn't matter who you are, one person's rights end where another begins; the minority needs protection from the majority. A judicial ruling that a given law is unconstitutional is one of the clearest expressions of our system's ideals. Especially when one removes religious bias from the reasoning for a law, which of course, is the whole bloody point.