Mormons at it again

[marshlander]

... I know people who go to the church in that school every Sunday to get tuition waiver, and are still not Mormon.

They can get away with just doing Sundays? Don't they have to do Institute classes too?

I hope your friends are not gay.

I don't know what the climate for gays at BYU is currently, but it has an appalling history. These moral police work from the chillingly named Standards Office of the university. During the late 1960s security staff engaged in entrapment activities in on-campus toilets, students were pressured into outing their friends who were in turn recruited to spy on the fellow students. The Stasi could have learned a lot from these people. It was a horrible witch-hunt that resulted in a lot of ruined lives. Moving into the 70s and other practices involved sending security men into the city to check for BYU parking stickers on cars parked near bars where gay men were known to meet. Spencer Kimball, in his role as gay-finder general, had files on hundreds of students. An increase in these purges in 1975 resulted in at least one suicide of a married member of staff. The President of BYU during this period was one Dallin Oaks, a name one might remember from far more recent news in connection with the LDS' church interference with democracy over the Proposition 8 vote in California. He proposed the formation of a body called "The Values Institute" which he announced would "attempt to harmonize professional concepts with a religious approach to human problems". With BYU Psychology professor Allen E. Bergin appointed as director it later transpired that the primary purpose of the Instutute was to produce a paper which would "set forth significant empirical evidence in support of the Church's position on homosexuality".

In 1978 Gerald Dye, Chair of the BYU Standards Office explained the procedure for dealing with homosexual students sent for counselling. He reported the following:

• "They are asked to a personal interview with Standards...to determine the depth or extent of involvement; previous involvement, if any, of offender; does the student understand the seriousness of the matter; if the branch president or bishop [is] aware.
  
• The individual's branch president or home bishop is contacted.
  
• Standards is to determine if the offense is serious or not
  • a. serious: repetition; anal/oral intercourse.
    
  • b. less serious: experimential [sic]; mutual masturbation.
    
  
  
• Action taken.
  
• If determined to be serious, the student is expelled.
  
• If less serious, the student may remain at BYU on a probationary basis.
  
• Standards also acts as an intermediary between the student who remains and counseling service; Students who remain are required to undergo therapy."
  

The therapy included electric shock treatments and the administration of poisons designed to make the patient vomit violently and repeatedly. These would be administered whilst they were forced to watch gay porn, which in itself was an act so at odds with "church standards" as to have been unbelievable. Many men suffered real and lasting damage from the "therapy" they received at BYU. Some couldn't cope and committed suicide.

AIDS changed everything in the 80s, but there is evidence that these "therapies" were still happening despite official denials. In other words, the LDS Church lied ... again.

Coming back to where I began this thread, Boyd K. Packer, it was he who, in a sermon delivered in 1976 called "To Young Men Only" (reprinted in full in a pamphlet freely distributed at church) implicitly gave the green light to respond to someone making a perceived gay pass with violence. He openly and proudly condoned a "gay panic" excuse for gay-bashing. To the best of my knowledge this pamphlet is still available as an exemplar to the youth of the LDS church.