Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast today. We have a very special edition of Mormon Stories podcast

This is sort of breaking news. I am your host John DeLin. It is March 21st

2023 and we are here to discuss the controversy

around Southern Utah University's decision to invite Mormon Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland to speak at a

I believe graduation ceremony coming up soon and the student backlash and the community backlash that has resulted from this invitation. I'm here with one of my partners in what I say is truth and righteousness

Herato Shimano. Hey, Herato. Thanks for being here. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my pleasure and I'm really excited to say most importantly that we're here with several students

from Southern Utah University. We had many people reach out including alumni and we just decided that the only people that we wanted to try and have on today's episode were either people who are about to graduate for whom this would be their graduation ceremony or other students that feel invested in the Southern Utah University community.

So that's kind of what we're in store for and I'll just kind of give you a little bit of what we're going to try and be doing today. I want to welcome everyone who's joined us on the live stream either on YouTube or on Facebook.

What we're going to do today is give a little bit of the backstory about what it is about Elder Holland and what he has done recently or in the past few years to make it so there would be this sort of backlash. Of course it has to do with his musket speech at BYU

and comments around Matt Easton, a gay valedictorian who gave a speech at BYU in a graduation ceremony self identified as gay and and Holland's president Holland or Dr Holland however we are referred to him today.

What Jeff Holland's comments were about Matt that play into the complexities of today's episode. So we're going to we're going to talk about the background of Jeff Holland and why he's controversial.

Then we're going to talk about Southern Utah University and what were some of the steps and items in the timeline that led up to this controversy.

We're going to talk about what the reaction was and I believe yesterday the president of the University if I have it right had a multi hour listening session from students to hear feedback about this decision and to listen to concerns voiced by students.

We're going to give a summary of that then we are going to invite several current Southern Utah University students to share their concerns briefly and like a three minute or three or four minute clip as to why they feel strongly about this issue and then we'll be ending maybe with next steps call the action so that people can know that if they want to participate or help raise their voices or participate in any way in the end of the day.

In whatever subsequent events will be over the next few days and weeks will let you know what the calls to action are so without any further ado I guess the way I want to start.

I want to go ahead and for a second bring on Kate and Ojge I would say Kate was one of the first people reach out to me and Kate and Ojge have been very helpful in organizing some of this and so let me just first start with bringing on Kate and Ojge.

I'm just going to ask them if there's anything they want to say at the outset or not before we jump in.

I'll just introduce myself my name is Kate I use she her pronouns and I'm Ojge I use anything interchangeably.

Okay and is there anything that y'all y'all want to say before we kind of jump into the timeline just in terms of kind of setting up today's presentation I do want to say that we all discussed as a group you know how we wanted to communicate today what our intentions were and you know Kate do you want to voice those or do you want me to cut a kind of voice what we agreed on.

Do you want to talk about what we are like intentions yeah with what we're doing I think.

My first thing is just that I'm both surprised and very happy that this has gotten the traction that it has I think it's really important to make queer struggles noticed by people by queer people and also by allies and I'm glad that we have allies here in like the chat today I'm really glad that it's got in the traction that it has but I think with that it is really important to everyone in this group that we do this with.

Decoral and that we have immense respect for President Mindy Benson and I think everyone here loves SUU and we wouldn't be this passionate if we didn't love being T-birds and if we didn't have the sense of community that the school is created it's obviously like a very appalling decision that has happened but we all do have a lot of respect for this university and are happy to be here and are very happy that we are happy with that.

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