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I'm Lord One and welcome back to part two of my interview with Ruthie Robertson. It's July 19, 2017. We didn't plan on this interviewing and being two parts, but the Internet Gods or if you're a conspiracy theorist, the LDS Church and the BYU Idaho Authority.

We had a really large group of people tuning in over 250 people live tuned in. Now we're trying to start again. We've got about 70 people joining us.

Ruthie, welcome back to Mormon Stories Podcast. It's good to have you back for part two.

We've already talked about your upbringing in the church. We've talked about your time at BYU, how your faith grows stronger to the point where you ask to take out your dominance, even before getting married or separate from serving a mission.

We talked about how as an LGBT, sort of as a millennial or post-millennial whatever the term is these days for people your age. You just always felt like LGBT people deserve love and respect, but you just sort of maybe figured out the church was wrong or you just, you know, were able to sort of exist with your support of LGBT people knowing you had an approach that was different from the churches.

And then we talked about how November, the November 2015 policy sort of was a breaking point for you where you just knew that you saw things differently. But having said that, it wasn't until 2016 that you started teaching, is that correct?

Correct.

And you were teaching international relations, is that right?

And so one of the things I think I asked you, and maybe this is where we can start the interview is, what does a BYU Idaho professor agree to or not agree to when they sign up to be a professor?

You did talk about this at the end, but that was when things were really spotty.

Yeah.

Let's just pick up from that point. What do you sign an agree to or not when you're a BYU Idaho professor?

So the biggest things is number one, professors live by the honor code as well as the students. So the BYU honor code is what faculty members agree to as well.

And that's the major portion of like how we're supposed to conduct ourselves inside and outside of the university and our classrooms.

And if you look at the honor code, there's absolutely nothing in it that says you have to agree with 100% of what the church says and it doesn't say anything about using social media to express yourself or anything.

It doesn't cover that on the honor code.

And then once you get down into the nitty gritty part of like the faculty handbook, it talks about conduct within the classroom.

And within that, of course, it's about building and supporting the testimonies of Christ.

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