FairMormon, Day Two, Part Two

I’m listening to Dr. Janiece Johnson right now, who is addressing the topic of “Restoring the Tapestry of the Restoration: Early Women’s Witness.”

It’s a good talk.

I posted a blog entry about a book that she was involved in some time back:

“The Witness of Women”

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Based on comments made by a poster on Facebook earlier today, I’m very worried about the conference’s concluding speaker, who is listed on the program for later today.

“He’s not funny,” she writes. “He’s nasty. He goes after doubters (at least the doubters who speak up and challenge his orthodoxy) like a barracuda. And his ‘logic’ is often so convoluted as to be impossible to follow.”

The man is, she continues, “positively toxic, so much so that I came within a hair’s breadth of leaving the church. I had questions and doubts and if FAIR was representative of what my church thought about people like me, then I knew I could not stay.”

“Instead,” she writes, “I quit reading FAIR Mormon and found my own path to understanding. Then when my sons started their faith transition, I returned to FAIR Mormon, hoping to find good resources. I was told that it it had changed from what it was. But no, there [that vicious speaker was], taking pot shots at Bill Reel and marginalizing him, the one person that was keeping my sons engaged in the church.”

I’ll confess that this comment took me a bit by surprise, since, despite my having followed his work fairly closely, I can’t really remember his ever saying anything about Bill Reel.

She goes on:  “I now tell everyone who comes to me with doubts, no matter what they do, do NOT go to FAIR Mormon if you want to preserve your testimony.”

I want to preserve mine, of course.  So perhaps I should walk out after Gerrit Dirkmaat’s second-to-the-last presentation.

I was happy, though, to see a practical suggestion from this indignant reader:

“Scrubbing all history of him from FAIR is where I’d start.”

The creep that she’s talking about is, plainly, a real piece of work, a mean-spirited and heartless monster, and the sooner he becomes a historical non-person — chucked, with accompanying curses, down George Orwell’s “memory hole” — the better for the Church and for humanity as a whole.

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In the meantime, though, FairMormon gave out a $200 scholarship to a young man for a short video feature that he had created.  This is a great idea.  There are a lot of young, faithful, Latter-day Saints with basic video skills and, obviously, the sensibilities of a younger audience.  They should be encouraged to create lots and lots and lots of faithful videos.