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The

kindly light a myth in circling glue

lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home.

Lead them welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John Dillin and today we have what I think is a very important topic to discuss.

Today we are going to be discussing an initiative that that hopes to make a pretty important change within kind of the LDS church and specifically within the BYU community, which includes BYU community.

Which includes BYU provo but I think it also extends to BYU Idaho Hawaii and you know any other LDS church affiliate university.

The website that we're going to be talking about is free BYU.org. You can go to free free BYU.org or free BYU.com.

Either one is a website and as it says on the website, their mission is to promote freedom of thought and freedom of religion at BYU.

And specifically they're asking that the honor code be updated to allow LDS students to change their personal beliefs without being expelled from the university and evicted from their housing.

And so that's what free BYU is about and unless you've actually heard sort of you know across several internet blogs or Reddit or wherever, you may not have heard that there are instances where a student at BYU will sort of lose their faith or have a crisis of faith or be seriously struggling.

And in those instances if a church leader happens to find out, you know one possible scenario is that their ecclesiastical endorsement which has to be signed every year can be denied which can prevent them from being able to continue at BYU.

Now that in and of itself is kind of an issue and we'll get into this. But what I've seen is even more troubling what I've seen on the internet or instances where a student may have lost their faith but then but then tried to just simply graduate or transferred to another university.

And from what I've seen on the internet and I'm going to be looking to these gentlemen to kind of correct me if I'm wrong but what I've seen on the internet is some instances where it suggests that transcripts were held so that so that people's credits from BYU actually couldn't transfer to the universities or in at least one or two instances I've heard rummings on the internet of people actually not being allowed to graduate.

Now I'm not sure if that's really how bad it can be but I guess I guess for the purposes of today we're going to kind of cover you know the whole gamut of hopefully what people have experienced.

And I'll just say as a quick disclaimer the purpose of this isn't to bash BYU the purpose isn't to bash the church it's actually quite quite different at least from my point of view.

The purpose of this podcast is just to bring light to some pain and suffering and inconvenience that I think it not only affects the students and families involved but also reflects really poorly on BYU in the LDS church.

And so our hope is simply I think to improve you know BYU the BYU uses institutions to the extent that we can and most importantly to improve the experiences of many of its students.

And so to discuss these issues I've got five gentlemen with me and I'll say I lament that we only have males on the podcast today but that's just you know there's a lot of risk in BYU.

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