Evicted because you changed religions? Welcome to BYU, home of the International Center for Religious Freedom Pharisees

"You left Mormonism for Mohammed? Get out of your apartment!"

Can an LDS BYU student who is excommunicated or resigns his membership be evicted from BYU Contracted Housing?

Answer: Yes.

Today was a strange day. It's a bank holiday, and I work for a bank, so I had the day off: which was fortunate, because I needed a good chunk of time to help out my friend "Matthew." I wrote in a Facebook post:

"Know any current BYU Law students or Provo locals that would be interested in helping a victim of BYU's religious freedom failure? A friend of mine is a current LDS BYU student who's decided to change religions. His stake president yelled and berated him in an interview yesterday and threatened to excommunicate him in two weeks if he doesn't repent. 

Rather than pretend to believe, my friend has decided to resign his church records (though on my advice, he hasn't started the process yet). Either excommunication or resignation could result in my friend being evicted and losing his job in November (he lives in BYU contracted housing and works for BYU), not to mention being blocked from finishing out the semester.

I've done some initial research to help inform him about his options (especially as it relates to the eviction), but the poor guy is young, understandably scared, and getting contradicting information from people. It would be great to pair him with a caring, mature, local advocate that can help him get reliable answers. Please let me know."

Here's the first draft of the referenced eviction analysis, rough though it is, which shows how eviction can result from an LDS BYU student's exercise of religious freedom away from LDS orthodoxy.


Matthew is currently enrolled in normal daytime classes and resides at ____ Apartments, which is listed in the 2013 BYU Housing Guide (http://housingguide.byu.edu/housingguide/pdfs/HousingGuide2013.pdf) as "BYU Contracted Housing." A typical example of a ____ contract is found here (http://och.byu.edu/PDF/2013-2014Student-LandlordRentalAgreement3.pdf).

The contract, in part, reads:

"I agree to comply with… the Residential Living Standards as listed below (collectively referred to as “Residential Living Standards”)... My violation of these standards shall be sufficient cause for eviction." (Contract)

Thus, Matthew's violation of the Residential Living Standards provides sufficient cause for his landlord to evict. One of the Residential Living Standards is:

"to conduct themselves in a manner consistent with the BYU Honor Code including abstaining from possessing, serving, or consuming alcoholic beverages, tobacco, tea, coffee, or harmful drugs both on and off the premises of Contracted Housing. Involvement with gambling, pornographic, erotic, indecent, or offensive material, obscene or indecent conduct or expressions, disorderly or disruptive conduct, or any other conduct or action inconsistent with the BYU Honor Code, in the sole discretion and judgment of the university, is not permitted on or off the premises of Contracted Housing. " (Contract, emphasis added)

In the case of excommunication or resigning one's LDS membership records, no judgment of the university is needed, since the Honor Code indicates the loss of Honor Code standing is automatic:

"Excommunication, disfellowshipment, or disaffiliation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints automatically results in the withdrawal of the student's ecclesiastical endorsement and the loss of good Honor Code standing. Disaffiliation is defined for purposes of this policy as removal of an individual's name from the official records of the Church." (Honor Code)

Disaffiliation from the LDS Church, an action Matthew is considering, is an "action inconsistent with the BYU Honor Code" because it automatically results in the loss of good Honor Code standing, and because the Honor Code states:

"The term "good Honor Code standing" means that a student's conduct is consistent with the Honor Code."

Matthew's stake president's decision to excommunicate Matthew would also remove Matthew's good Honor Code standing. Thus, either excommunication or disaffiliation would qualify as a violation of the Residential Living Standards, and thus be sufficient grounds for eviction. In effect, a never-Mormon student can live in a BYU Contracted Housing without special risk of eviction, but a recently resigned or excommunicated Mormon student cannot.

Failing this theory, a landlord could also claim eviction on a separate ground: that the loss of good honor code standing constitutes a change in student status. Loss of good honor code standing results in discontinuation of enrollment:

"A student's endorsement may be withdrawn at any time if the ecclesiastical leader determines that the student is no longer eligible for the endorsement... Students without a current endorsement are not in good Honor Code standing and must discontinue enrollment." (Honor Code)

Discontinuing enrollment is inconsistent with the certification of student status in the Contract:

"I am a full or part-time student of BYU, enrolled in daytime or evening classes."

Further, the contract states:

"I agree to live in Contracted Housing under the principles of the Residential Living Standards, and the gender separation policy and remain eligible as a student as defined in this paragraph." (Contract)

Because the paragraph defines a student as being enrolled, discontinued enrollment places Matthew outside the eligible student status. Further, the contract states:

"I also understand if I am banned from BYU, I am not eligible to live in BYU Contracted Housing." (Contract)

Any change in student status is grounds for immediate termination of the contract:

"I recognize and understand that my Certification of Student Status is material to and relied upon by the landlord in entering into this rental agreement and any misrepresentation found

herein or change in student status is reason for immediate termination of this agreement and such other legal and equitable remedies as the landlord may pursue." (Contract, italics added)."

Thus, the Landlord could evict based on change of student status. The termination of the contract could be triggered as early as the date of discontinuation of enrollment. Because excommunication and disaffiliation automatically withdraw endorsement, the discontinuation date may be the same as the excommunication or disaffiliation date. 

Conclusion:

Matthew could be evicted solely due to his stake president's decision to excommunicate him, or solely due to Matthew's decision to formally resign from the LDS Church.

An Open Letter to Maurine Proctor and Those Pressing Against Ordination

By Rebecca Johnston

October 1977

An Open Letter to Maurine Proctor and Those Pressing Against Ordination

Dear Tyrone,

As the co-founder of Ordain Black Men, you are planning to march with a group of  black men to the general priesthood meeting of the LDS Church Saturday night to press for entrance. I don’t believe that you think entrance will actually be granted, because your requests for tickets have already been denied, so your motives must be for something else.

It seems clear that you are hoping for media attention for your cause, that you want to agitate or stir up emotions to support your goal: “Mormon black men seeking equality and ordination to the priesthood.” Perhaps you are hoping that creating a high profile will draw others into your ranks and that your numbers will swell.

You are by profession an international human rights attorney. For your career, you have learned an adversarial paradigm. Your world-view is based on clamoring, arguing and mounting evidence for the causes you believe. It is toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose, making points with contention and argument, reason and will. It’s not just the way of the attorney; it is the way of our times. This is a generation of people trained at divisiveness and attention-mongering for their viewpoint. Our public discourse these days is discordant. That might work well in furthering some causes in a court of law or even in the court of public opinion, but now we are talking about the Church.

If you are a hammer, then the whole world does indeed look like a nail.

In this case, however, if you choose to be a hammer, just what are you hammering against?

Believers understand that Jesus Christ is the head of this Church. He is the author of the doctrines and the organization, how and when things are taught and revealed. The Lord has given us prophets and apostles through which he communicates his will and reminds us, “whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:38). That is a bold doctrine, stating without hesitation that the Lord’s appointed prophets speak for him, which I believe.

This leads me to ask about your very public motives. If you have a question about black men’s place in the divine scheme of things, that is understandable. Of course, we seek answers to questions that impact our identity and understanding of ourselves.

Those who defend what you are doing like to point out how many revelations came because people brought questions to Joseph Smith and he, in turn, took those questions to the Lord. We think, for example, of Joseph Knight, David Whitmer, John Whitmer and Peter Whitmer (D&C 12, 14, 15 and 16) who each received revelation through the prophet because they asked him to query.

In each case, however, their query was about aligning themselves more perfectly with the Lord’s will for them. Their questions were essentially, what can I do to please the Lord? How can I serve Him better? What does he want of me? Their questions were asked in a spirit of humility, understanding who sets the terms of their relationship. Just as with our covenants, where we have made promises with the Lord in which he sets the terms, so it is with these questions asked and answered by Joseph Smith. The understanding is clear that those who had questions were stepping forward in a spirit of meekness striving to understand what the Lord wanted of them.

So I have a hypothetical for you. I wonder if you had the opportunity to have a private meeting with the prophet and were able to press for black men’s priesthood ordination and he answered that the Lord had said “no” would that be enough? If you asked him specifically if he had prayed about black men’s place in the kingdom and he said, “Yes, and what we have reflects the Lord’s answer,” would that be enough? With those answers, would you disband your group and go home?

Would you say to those whose profiles you are gathering, those who are planning to march with you to the Conference Center that the prophet has spoken? Go put your energies somewhere else?

I suspect not. This is the heart of what troubles me about your choice. You come from what I believe is a faulty assumption about the Kingdom of God on the earth because you are applying a secular paradigm. In the world, he who has the loudest voice and is clever about applying the most pressure often carries the day. Your agitation for ordination assumes that either the prophets will respond to pressure or that the Lord will. At the very least, it assumes that you have a better idea and are in a superior position to understand what will empower black men.

It assumes that the prophets are too spiritually dull or backward to see the important questions or to ask them. It assumes that through all the centuries of recorded spiritual history, the Lord forgot his black sons and their development.

There is a twist of intellectual dishonesty at the heart of this. You press for priesthood power, I assume, on the grounds that it is truly the power of God on the earth, yet at the same time you refuse to acknowledge that same power to act, discern, and reveal in the Lord’s anointed prophets. The implication of your agitation is that you don’t believe that the prophets act with real authority—the very priesthood power you are seeking for yourself.

That just makes no sense. Your motives become suspect. A large gap looms between a question that seeks for expanded understanding and confrontation that seeks for its own way.

I think it is the temptation of this fallen world to seek to instruct the Lord. Most of us have times, when assessing our own lives, we are certain we know more clearly than He does what He should do for us and what is necessary for our well-being. On the most personal level, I have found that when I take that approach to the Lord, I become divided from him. It is fundamentally a refusal to comprehend who He is and who I am, his glory which is unspeakable and my own complete dependence on Him even for the breath I draw.

How odd it is for the child to seek to instruct the Father. It is the same for any who would seek somehow to right the Church or steady the ark. There is a presumptiveness and arrogance about this, which is troubling. There is also, at its heart, an attack upon the idea that the Church is led by Jesus Christ and his servants.

Another hypothetical. What if the prophet invited you into his office, listened to your demands to receive the priesthood and then said, “Because you and your followers want this and have stirred up the world, it’s yours.” If that happened, what an insecure footing we would all suddenly be on. Instead of God being the sure foundation of this Church, the great immovable I AM, we might suspect that instead it is a Church dictated by white men—or black men.

P90X and the Atonement

I saw a TV ad the other day similar to the below:

Like many TV ads, the marketing message tried to convince the viewer that s/he is inadequate as they are, and that the product being advertised will make them whole. "You are flabby and unpleasant to look at. For just $XX.99 a month and some sweat, you can be made muscly and confident like us." Of course, almost every sales pitch follows this basic pattern: you're lacking somehow, and you need our beer, our insurance, our sports car, etc. to bridge the gap.

Sounds to me like the Atonement.

A few weekends ago, I floated the American River in Sacramento. I served my mission in Sacramento, and used the opportunity to reflect on the core of the gospel message I shared: (1) because you sin, you're unclean; (2) only clean people can live with God in heaven; (3) only Jesus can reconcile the cosmic balance and make you clean again. The explicit metaphor President Packer and others use is of a spiritual debt that only Jesus can pay:

Spiritual debt. I reviewed my law school debt this morning, so debt is fresh on my mind. Not the most pleasant thing, admittedly: I would and do pay a high price to hack away at debt. Similarly, I invited folks on my mission to pay a high price: commit to attend church every week, get baptized, read your scriptures, pledge allegiance to the prophets, pay 10% of your income, etc. And what did I promise them in return? That the spiritual debt incurred due to their sins will be written off, paid by Jesus because you followed His exclusive formula.  Your inadequacies will be washed away if you buy our... beer/P90X/car/insurance/_______.

I don't buy it anymore. I don't believe I'm fundamentally flawed and indebted, and I don't want to teach that psychologically harmful and confidence-sapping self concept to others any more. It's dehumanizing! I  have felt personally and seen in many of my LDS peers (my brother and a dear mission companion of mine, for instance) the severe damage caused by the guilt and God-is-taking-notes consciousness the Atonement paradigm can induce. The basic premise is that God has a perfect knowledge of your every act, and any performance level less that perfection puts heaven out of your reach. Romans 3:

23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.

Unfortunately, we simply have no reliable way to know whether God has forgiven us. The closest proxy, guilt, is neither proportionate nor universal: it punishes the sensitive soul a thousand lashes for a nickel of offense, and afflicts a thieving and murdering sociopath no more than a passing mosquito.

Yet there is no better substitute for checking your cosmic balance, and as a practical matter many Mormons rely upon it. Thus, we live in constant fear of failing heaven, and an awakened self-consciousness of our inadequacy becomes a draining misery imposed on us by the recipe of the Atonement doctrine mixed with the reality of the fickle, capricious physical emotion we call guilt.

Sure, conceptually it's useful to think of a cosmic account that we debit through harming others and credit through benefiting them. This concept can aid in administering justice, for instance. However, the conceptual utility does not create the reality of a cosmic account subject to manipulation by deities, and no other evidence suggests the existence of such an account. Acknowledging that fact would cause a morally sensitive community to carefully safeguard freedom, vigorously detect and disincentivize oppression, and adopt the twin ethics of non-malevolence and benevolence (avoid harming and seek to benefit others) as moral guides. Such an acknowledgment might prioritize preventing autocracy and corruption, for instance. Instead, many invest their energy into exercising faith in Christ via religious activity, the mental effort involved in prayer, and proselyting. I can't help but think those energies would be more profitably invested in solving the governance and economic problems which are primary drivers of the net avoidable suffering extant in the world today.

In any case, the standard of perfection is irrationally high. Yes, I can reduce my moral errors: but if I don't eliminate them, I'm not in spiritual debt that only Jesus can pay. I'm a limited human being, for Buddha's sake. I don't have the intelligence, insight, energy, or wherewithal to analyze every moral decision (and all decisions are moral in my view, since all decisions have consequences). I lack the discipline, as does every other human on the planet, to execute the best moral alternative at each of those decision points.

I have a new ethic now. When I witness suffering caused by the immoral actions of others (e.g. suffering of Syrians affected by the current conflict), I am more interested in establishing institutions and practices that stop that suffering and prevent similar suffering in the future, and less interested in whether Jesus may or may not rectify the balance of justice in some distant future. I'm more interested in holding people accountable for their immoral behavior, and less interested in whether they have faith in Christ. I am more interested in making increasingly moral personal decisions now because it's the right thing to do, and less interested in reducing my spiritual debt or lessening Jesus's suffering in the garden or paying the price of God's forgiveness.

Lacking strong evidence for the existence (to say nothing of the details) of God's judgment, I am interested in the equation of human suffering and happiness that precedes death. There is no shortage of work to be done in that space, and it is there I choose to thrust in my sickle with all my might, and no longer spend my limited energy on the post-death equation my LDS peers claim to know so intimately. To the Atonement doctrine, I now say the same thing I say to the P90X and beer and sports car pitches on TV:

Religious Liberty For All!* (*Except at BYU)

Because I'm a BYU Law graduation, JRCLS (J. Reuben Clark Law School) emails appear in my inbox every month or so, much like the below:

I appreciate these emails, which help me stay up to date on happenings, and occasionally participate in JRCLS initiatives. It was the "Inspiration" portion of this particular "JRCLS Happenings -- Updates and Inspiration" that caught my attention today. It reads:

I couldn't help but be struck, once again, by the sanctimony of BYU Law-founded proclamations about the meaning and importance of religious liberty. The very institution that BYU Law is governed by, BYU, severely burdens the religious liberty of the vast majority of its own 30,000+ students. LDS BYU students, including LDS BYU Law students, are obligated to comply with the honor code. That honor code penalizes disaffiliation from LDS faith as an offense resulting in the inability to (1) enroll, (2) graduate, or (3) have their degrees post. As I have argued almost to excess, and as evidenced by my own brother's getting kicked out of BYU for converting to atheism, this practice unquestionably coerces pretense and inauthenticity among LDS BYU students whose religious convictions change while at school. They are not free "to witness their beliefs in public," for fear their Bishops will withdraw their ecclesiastical endorsements. The are coerced, on pain of their otherwise earned academic degrees, "to act contrary to [their] sense of religious duty." LDS BYU students who feel called to Islam, or to question, or to abandon theism altogether, do not enjoy "the right to change one's beliefs and religious affiliation." Instead, they pledge allegiance to the flag of Joseph with their lips, and populate LDS pews with their bottoms. I find it tragic that so many bow their heads, and say... something other than what they truly believe, because of the religious freedom that is denied them.

I feel that statements like this inspirational thought should be required to have an asterisk by them: "this applies to everyone but us."

My related posts:

The Emperor's Clothes: Religious Freedom and BYU Law's International Center for Law and Religion Studies

http://bradcarmack.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-emporers-clothes-religious-freedom.html

BYU's Policy of Kicking Out LDS Students That Convert: Addressed by Managing Director of BYU's International Center for Law and Religion Studies

http://bradcarmack.blogspot.com/2012/12/byus-policy-of-kicking-out-lds-students.html

Religious Freedom? Not at BYU

http://bradcarmack.blogspot.com/2011/01/religious-freedom-not-at-byu.html


My rebuttal to Robert George on a different subject:

And They Shall Be One Flesh: Why Robert George’s “What is Marriage?” May Falter

http://bradcarmack.blogspot.com/2011/05/and-they-shall-be-one-flesh-why-robert.html

"What is Marriage?" My Response to Robert George

http://bradcarmack.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-is-marriage-my-response-to-robbie.html

And They Shall Be One Flesh: Why Robert George's "What is Marriage?" Falters

http://bradcarmack.blogspot.com/2011/10/and-they-shall-be-one-flesh-why-robert.html

My book is on Amazon!

My book became available online the same day that SCOTUS issued the Prop 8 and DOMA decisions (27 July). Talk about your serendipity!

You can buy my book in hard copy:

or on Kindle.

Enjoy!

Mormons: Why do we get same-sex marriage so wrong?

Today I posted in one of my Facebook groups:

Sunday School teacher just mentioned how romantic Ruth 1:16-17 is (whither thou goest I will go...). It's obvious she doesn't realize that the quote is spoken by one woman to another. Good thing my friend is here to keep me from pointing out the legitimacy of same-sex family relationships as evidenced in this story.

Some of the subsequent thread debated the nature of Naomi and Ruth's relationship. I share my response in this post.

I feel I should clarify. I can see that my inclusion of the word romantic may have led to the conclusion that I assert a romantic relationship between Ruth and Naomi. I do not see any evidence for that assertion.

Instead, my appeal would have been to the more central aspects of relationships that merit being categorized as familial. Those aspects include, most predominantly, three: (1) a long-term commitment to caretaking, (2) an economic partnership, and (3) cohabitation. Though not new to the stage, (4) companionate, (5) romantic, and (6) sexual love are fairly recent occupants of the lead role, and even in the present are, I argue, lest central to the concept of family than the first three. 

For instance, consider the case of a couple who wants to get married, and are committed to (1), (2), and (3). Further imagine that the woman in that relationship recently underwent a vaginectomy (or imagine the man lost his penis in an accident), and that the couple does not intend nor are they capable of genital sex. None would consider them barred from marriage candidacy, nor would their relationship fail to constitute a family.

Similarly, parent-child relationships elicit the three core aspects of a family relationship: (1) a commitment to caretaking (though admittedly in only one direction, though it could hardly be otherwise because a child is dependent by nature), (2) an economic partnership (primarily in just one direction, again unsurprising), and (3) cohabitation. In these three important senses, family relationships are genderless.

(4) Companionate, (5) romantic, and (6) sexual love are frequently associated with the subset of family relationships that are spousal, but are less central, and if you go back a century or two or three, generally, less central still. Thus, and this would have been my point: Naomi and Ruth's relationship strikes us powerfully as being familial, and same-sex relationships do as well, _for the same reasons_. (1-4 anyway, 5 and 6 being rather awkward for two presumptively straight women from different generations and living in their culture and century). 

I believe Mormon practice is incredibly good at getting family right, most things considered. Latter-day Saints understand and emphasize the importance of commitment, stability, and much to their credit, building the social capital needed to support the demands of keeping families healthy. Many church programs, teachings, and even its very structure (e.g. the local ward) are seemingly calculated towards founding, maintaining, and nurturing healthy families.

For those reasons, it is at once both painful and surprising that we get this one so wrong. There is so little that matters about what anatomical structures are found in your crotch, and so much that is harmed by presuming that your birth genitals do tell us something about your fitness for governance, or about what genitals you should be paired with in marriage, or about whether you're a candidate for ordination. 

As I've argued extensively (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocUHzmK6IjU, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNAIB3cxiLA,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1jDUcBKml0) and continue to maintain: the sooner we acknowledge our baseless presumptions, the sooner we regain hemorrhaging credibility as a people and as an institution, and the sooner we cease to wrongly stigmatize LGBT persons, same-sex relationships, and those who fail to express a penis at birth (i.e. women). And that, in my opinion, would be a wonderful thing.

LDS Transsexual Policy: A Critique

My presentation at the 2013 Mormon Transhumanist Association Conference, held 5 April in the Salt Lake City Public Library.

An earlier draft version of the paper version is here.