Criticism of Response To Internal Dissent
See also: Academic freedom at Brigham Young University and September SixThe Ostlings say that the LDS Church retaliates against members that publish information that undermines church policies, citing excommunications of scientist Simon Southerton and biographer Fawn M. Brodie. They further state that the church suppresses intellectual freedom, citing the 1993 excommunication of the "September Six", including gay LDS historian D. Michael Quinn, and author Lavina Fielding Anderson. The Ostlings write that Anderson was the first to reveal the LDS Church keeps files on LDS scholars, documenting questionable activities, and the Ostlings state that "No other sizable religion in America monitors its followers in this way".
The American Association of University Professors, since 1998, has put LDS-owned Brigham Young University on its list of universities that do not allow tenured professors sufficient freedom in teaching and research.
Richard Abanes lists the following as church members excommunicated or censured for views unacceptable to the church hierarchy:
- Journalist Deborah Laake, for her book Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond
- BYU English teacher Cecilia Konchar-Farr, for her views on abortion laws
- Writer Janice Merrill Allred
- English Professor Gail Houston
- Anthropologist David Knowlton
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of Mormonism
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism, response, internal and/or dissent:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
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“Parents’ accepting attitudes can help children learn to be open and tolerant. Parents can explain unfamiliar behavior or physical handicaps and show children that the appropriate response to differences should be interest rather than revulsion.”
—Dian G. Smith (20th century)
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“Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)