Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners.

To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community, please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking the Donate button on the top right side of the page.

All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you.

Thanks for your support.

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John DeLin.

It is July 19th, 2017 and today we are very excited to have with us Ruthie Robertson.

For those of you who haven't heard, Ruthie is an adjunct professor at BYU Idaho. I believe she teaches political science there.

I was a political science major so maybe we can geek out at some point Ruthie.

But the reason why we are interviewing her, Ruthie contacted me, I think about a month ago, letting me know that she was under investigation.

We will talk about it but under investigation for coming out publicly on her Facebook page as an LGBT ally.

We didn't talk for a few weeks because I think some administrative things were going on or Ruthie was waiting for the right time.

Yesterday I saw it on KUTV.com but the news broke that Ruthie had been fired from BYU Idaho or at least that's what the headline says.

For her Facebook post in support of LGBT people. The purpose of this interview is not going to be a super long interview.

It's going to be about an hour long because I have to run to a meeting.

But we are going to get a good hour in with Ruthie to talk about her story and to talk about a little bit of her background, a little bit of what's going on, what happened, why she did it, what she was thinking, and what the process was for getting fired.

And what her plans are for the future. So we're going to cover all that. We've got already 43 people joining us live on Facebook.

We really love doing these things live because they allow us to take questions to have them be interactive.

So those of you listening, please start posting your questions and comments now because we want to hear from you.

Kevin writes, wow, super excited to have this also soon just read about this story this morning.

Crazy censorship. So that's the first comment.

A lot of good friends joining us, Doug and Pat and Jenna and Jarely Cody.

Lots of cool people joining us. So thanks to everyone for joining us.

...