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Show The Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, December 14, 1969 The BYU-Stanford Incident 'Coalition' Interferes With LDS Rights practice its own faith as it was for the jolly jesters of the Third Reich to force Germany's Germa-ny's Jews to abjure theirs. The BYU students, incidentally, inciden-tally, have an impeccable record rec-ord in regard to the above criteria, and, what's more, stayed soberly in class last year while the Stanfordites were bloodily occupying administration' ad-ministration' buildings and raising hell generally. I guess what raises "my hackles the most about this whole affair is the delightfully double standard employed by Stanford and its inquisitorial allies. Plenty of colleges these days boast black athletes who are avowed Muslims, and who cherish their faith's firmly held conviction that all white men are devils. I'm not aware that the Palo Alto pecksniffs, however, have severed relations with any of these scholarly sanctuaries of racist hatred simply because some of their team members belong to a church which not only refuses to make bishops ovit of us honkies but which actually assigns as-signs all of us forthwith to hell. Ah, well. Buck up, BYU. Football is supposed to teach your students sportsmanship, fellowship and fair play. I'm sure you can find some schools beside those of the Coalition Co-alition to supply this desired mixture one which won't also expose your players to the added and unwelcome ingredient, ingredi-ent, official hypocrisy. By Dr. Max Rafferty California Superintendent of Public Instruction To avert the storm I can see coming in the wake of this column, I'd like to make one thing clear: I'm not a Mormon. I'm an Episcopalian. But I'm also a believer in the right of Mormons, Baptists, Presbyterians Presbyter-ians or, for that matter, the Sons and Daughters of I-Will-Arise to profess and to practice prac-tice their own religions and to do their own religious thing in their own way. That's why I take a pretty dim view of Stanford University's Univer-sity's current foray into the unlovely field of religious persecution. per-secution. It seems that Stanford Stan-ford recently and scathingly severed athletic relations witH Brigham Young University because of one of the fundamental funda-mental tenets of the Mormon faith: that the descendants of Canaan are ineligible by Old Testament mandate to hold the highest offices in the church. Inasmuch as those descendants are held by long tradition to be black, Negroes are thus disqualified from taking their place in the high-est high-est offices of the Mormon" faith. Anti-Mormon Coalition Result: Not many Negroes are Mormons. Additional result: no black football players at BYU. So Stanford joins several other colleges in a kind of anti-Mormon Coalition Coali-tion which is boycotting the Utah school until it mends its allegedly wicked ways, and they currently are writing unctuous letters to each other congratulating themselves on their own virtue. So far, so good. But let's carry the argument one step further. The Coalition is not trying merely to get Brigham Young to put Negroes on its football team. Unlike some Southern schools which the Coalition somehowe didn't get around to denouncing, BYU is perfectly willing to do just that, and has in fact featured black basketballers and track-sters track-sters at various times in the past. What the Coalition is demanding is something far different. It's that the church of the Latter-day Saints repudiate repu-diate part of its established dogma, given to. it about a century and a half ago, according ac-cording to its scriptures, by divine revelation. Aims at Church Now this is quite another matter. Brigham Young University, Uni-versity, you see, is a church school. Its policies must perforce per-force reflect the teachings of that church, and cannot contravene con-travene them, in effect, the church is the school, and vice versa. So the Coalition isn't really just demanding that a sister school simply change an athletic policy; it's conducting con-ducting an organized boycott of a deeply held theological belief, and this sort of religious reli-gious persecution in the final third of the 20th Century is absolutely ab-solutely intolerable. It's as though the Coalition were to boycott an Episcopalian Episcopa-lian college because we Episcopalians Epis-copalians don't permit females fe-males to be bishops, or to put pressure on a Jewish university univer-sity because that faith won't allow ham sandwich-munch-ers to become rabbis. I don't happen to agree that the color of a man's skin should keep him from becoming a priest, a bishop or a Pope, so far as that goes, in any church. But as I said, I'm not a Mormon, and what the Mormons devoutly believe Is simply none of my Episcopalian business. busi-ness. Record Impeccable Nor is it the Coalition's. So long as BYU keeps up its academic aca-demic standards, behaves itself properly on the playing fields and opens its classrooms class-rooms and its athletic teams alike to all who qualify for entrance en-trance regardless of color or race, It's as outrageous for the Coalition to try to interfere inter-fere with a church's right to |
