President Oaks.
I have come to you and you have not sent for me. I have no appointment. I have no calling. I will offer no credential for it matters not.
I am no prophet. I speak for no god. I carry no stone and I wear no garment and I hold no keys "righteously."
You now know this.
We can proceed.
I have come prepared to the table, and offer no citation for I trust the reader's due diligence more than my own.
I have read your record. And I have read their record.
And I have compared them.
And they do not agree.
And you know this too.
What of the boy in the basement of the Smith Family Living Center—a counseling building on the campus of Brigham Young University, the institution you led from 1971 to 1980?
He was nineteen, maybe. Twenty. He had been told his whole life that he was broken in a way that could be fixed. He believed this. He wanted to be fixed. He walked down the stairs himself. He signed the forms himself. He thought he was being obedient.
They put electrodes on his skin. They showed him images of men. When he responded to the images—when his body responded, because bodies respond—they sent electricity into him.
I think of the leper who came to him. And stretching out his hand he touched him. The law said do not touch. The institution said unclean. And he touched.
And his body shook. And he learned to associate his own desire with pain. And someone wrote it down.
Max Ford McBride wrote it down. He was a graduate student. He was given a master's degree for documenting the process—for running the study, recording the results, and submitting the thesis to the university. The thesis is titled "Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy." It is dated 1976. It describes fourteen subjects. It has your university's name on the cover. It has your seal.
You became president of Brigham Young University in 1971. You left in 1980.
The boy in the basement was under your presidency.
I do not know what happened to the boy after.
I do not know if he stayed in the church. I do not know if he married a woman and had children and taught them to be obedient. I do not know if he left. I do not know if he found someone to love. I do not know if he is alive.
I know that he walked down the stairs believing he was broken. I know that your institution broke him further and called it repair. I know that the record does not include his name, only his data. He is Subject 7 or Subject 12. He is a line in a thesis. He is a degree on someone else's wall.
What man among you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? Your institution did not go looking. Your institution made the wilderness.
If he is alive, he is in his seventies now. He has carried this for fifty years.
If he is not alive, I am speaking for a ghost.
Either way, it matters not to the eternity of God, I believe we could agree.
In 2021, at the University of Virginia, you were asked about this.
You said: "Let me say about electroshock treatments at BYU, when I became president at BYU that had been discontinued earlier and it never went on under my administration."
The thesis is dated 1976.
I am not here to ask if you lied.
I am here to ask what word you would use instead.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. But what do we call it when a man bears false witness against history itself? When the neighbor is everyone who was there?
What of the student who was recruited to go undercover?
His name was John Neumann. He was asked by BYU campus security to pretend to be gay. To go to the places where gay students gathered. To make friends. To take names.
For this work, he was given course credit.
Thirty pieces of silver bought a field. Three credit hours bought a conscience. The economy of betrayal adjusts for inflation but the transaction remains: someone trusted, someone sold.
The course was called Justice Administration 299R—an independent study in BYU's department of criminal justice. It is in the catalog. It was administered by the university. It was overseen by faculty. There is a paper trail: a course number, a credit hour, a supervising professor.
His work led to the arrest of a student named David Chipman.
David Chipman was caught being what he was. John Neumann was rewarded for pretending to be what he was not.
One received course credit. The other received institutional discipline.
This is in the record. This is your record.
What of the men in the parking lots?
Your security officers conducted surveillance at gay bars in Salt Lake City—off-campus, outside your jurisdiction, in a city thirty miles away. They sat in cars in the dark. They wrote down license plate numbers. They cross-referenced the plates against student records, against faculty records.
And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying: This man receives sinners and eats with them. They watched from a distance. They kept records. They could not understand why he would sit with such people. Your officers also watched. Your officers also could not understand. But your officers had license plates.
And then they called those students into the Standards Office—BYU's internal disciplinary body, which adjudicates violations of the university's honor code. And asked them questions. And wrote down the answers. And doled out discipline.
What of the men who answered the ad?
Your security office placed personal advertisements in gay publications—newspapers and newsletters that served the gay community. The ads looked like what lonely people place when they are looking for other lonely people. Someone to talk to. Someone who understands. Someone like them.
There was no one on the other end of the ad. Only your security office. Only a mechanism designed to identify and record and punish.
They lay snares, they catch men. The prophet wrote this about the wicked. Your institution designed a trap shaped like loneliness. Shaped like hope. Shaped like love.
A young man answered the ad hoping to find someone like himself.
He found you instead.
I do not know his name. The record does not preserve it. The record preserves the method—the ad, the response, the identification, the discipline. The record does not preserve what it cost him.
Maybe he was nineteen and it was the first time he had ever reached out. Maybe he had written the reply six times before he sent it. Maybe he checked the mailbox every day for a week.
And when the knock came, it was not what he had hoped for. It was the machinery. It was the institution. It was you.
I do not know where he is now. But I know that he hoped for connection and received punishment. I know that he reached out and was caught. I know that your institution designed a trap shaped like love.
In 1975, you said publicly:
"Two influences we wish to exclude from the BYU community are active homosexuals and drug users, and these subjects are therefore among those with which our security force is concerned."
When asked why he ate with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus answered: Those who are strong have no need of a physician, but those who are ill do. Go, then, and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. You desired sacrifice. You built an institution around it. You called the exclusion righteousness.
You said this out loud. You said we wish to exclude. You said our security force. You were describing policy, not aberration. You were taking ownership.
In 1979, you ordered these practices stopped.
One does not order stopped what was never happening. One does not discontinue what never was.
For eight years, under your presidency, the machinery ran. And then you turned it off. And decades later, you said it was never on.
What of history?
About the Book of Abraham—a text Joseph Smith claimed to translate from Egyptian papyri, though Egyptologists have since determined the papyri contain standard funerary documents unrelated to Abraham. About the multiple accounts of the First Vision—the foundational story of God and Jesus appearing to Joseph Smith, which exists in several versions written years apart, with significant variations in who appeared and what was said. About polyandry—the marriages Joseph Smith contracted with women who were already married to living husbands. About the Kinderhook plates—metal plates presented to Joseph Smith as ancient artifacts, which he began to "translate" before they were revealed to be a hoax. About the witnesses who later left the church but never denied seeing the plates—and what it means that they saw with spiritual eyes rather than natural ones.
They came with questions because they were taught that questions were welcome. They were taught to seek learning by study and also by faith. They were taught to ask.
And you told them: Research is not the answer.
Your own scripture: Seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith. They sought. They studied. They found. And you told them the finding was the failure.
What of everyone who brought you a criticism?
They saw something wrong. They said something. Maybe they said it privately. Maybe they said it publicly. Maybe they were gentle. Maybe they were not. But they said a true thing about a leader of the church.
And you said—you said this in 1986, in a talk called "Criticism" delivered at a Latter-day Saint Student Association fireside in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, later published in the Ensign in February 1987, and it is written down, and I have read it—you said:
"It is quite another thing to criticize or depreciate a person for the performance of an office to which he or she has been called of God. It does not matter that the criticism is true."
It does not matter that the criticism is true.
I think of Abinadi. Your own prophet. He stood before King Noah and his priests and spoke true things about a leader of the church. Noah's court said: the speaking is the sin. The content does not matter. And they burned him for it. Your scripture calls Abinadi a martyr. Your institution would have called him apostate.
I need you to understand what you built with that sentence.
You built a room with no exits. You built a system where truth is not a defense. You made accuracy irrelevant to morality. You said: The content of the criticism does not matter. The direction of the criticism is the sin.
In your system, a true accusation and a false accusation are equally wrong—because both are accusations.
In your system, the only safe response to seeing something wrong is silence.
You canonized silence. You made silence into loyalty.
And you made speaking into betrayal.
In 2007, on camera, for the PBS documentary The Mormons, you said:
"Not everything that's true is useful."
Useful to whom?
And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Your doctrine says truth is light. Your practice says some light must be managed. Must be measured. Must be dispensed according to usefulness. You have made yourself the lampstand. You decide who sees.
What of the ones who were told, in November of 2015, that their marriages were apostasy?
Not sin. Apostasy. In your church, apostasy is a specific category—a renunciation of the faith, a betrayal of covenant. It is the charge that triggers mandatory disciplinary councils. It is the charge that leads to excommunication.
In November 2015, the church announced a new policy: members in same-sex marriages were apostates by definition. And their children could not be baptized. Not until eighteen. Not until they moved out of their parents' home. Not until they signed a document disavowing their parents' marriage.
Let the little children come to me and do not prevent them. The word is prevent—the active verb. Your policy did not passively exclude. It prevented. It required a child to wait a decade and then renounce. The disciples tried to keep children away once. Jesus rebuked them. He did not require a disavowal first.
An eight-year-old in your church can be baptized—it is the age of accountability, the age when a child is considered capable of choosing. But an eight-year-old with gay parents could not. That child had to wait a decade. That child had to renounce.
In January 2016, President Russell M. Nelson—then a senior apostle, now your predecessor—stood before a worldwide audience of young adults and described how the policy came to be. He said: "And then, when the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord, each of us during that sacred moment felt a spiritual confirmation. It was our privilege as Apostles to sustain what had been revealed to President Monson."
He did not call it a policy. He called it a revelation. He described sacred confirmation. He invoked the name of God.
In April of 2019, you stood at the pulpit at General Conference—the church's biannual worldwide broadcast—and announced that the policy had been reversed.
Same-sex marriage was no longer apostasy. Children could be baptized without waiting, without disavowing.
And then you said:
"These changes do not represent a shift in Church doctrine."
The First Presidency—of which you are a member—attributed the reversal to "continuing revelation."
I need you to help me understand.
If the 2015 policy was revelation—confirmed by the sacred witness of every apostle—what was the 2019 revelation correcting?
If the doctrine did not change, what was the revelation about?
If President Nelson heard God clearly in January 2016, and you hear God clearly in April 2019, and the messages contradict—who misheard?
If both were revelation, can revelation contradict itself within forty-one months?
If the first was not revelation after all, why did President Nelson say it was?
If the second was not a reversal, why did the policy reverse?
When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD and the thing does not happen and does not come about, that is a word the LORD did not speak. Your institution taught me this was how to know. Now I am applying the test. And I am not permitted to say what I find.
I am not permitted to ask this. You have taught me that the asking is the sin. You have taught me that the critic is wrong even when the criticism is true.
But I am asking.
What of your grandson?
Jared Oaks has spoken for himself. He does not need me to speak for him. But I am marking that he spoke, publicly, to the Salt Lake Tribune, in October of 2024.
He said: "My grandfather has made a religious career out of anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, not prophecies."
He said: "When we are taught that others are morally corrupt or dangerous for acting on the way they love, we create an environment ripe for violence."
This is family testimony.
I have only read your archive. He has watched you from inside the house. He has eaten at your table. He has seen you in the rooms where you are not performing.
And he spoke anyway.
And a man's enemies will be those of his own household. You taught this as prophecy about the cost of discipleship. You did not teach it as prophecy about yourself.
You were trained in the law. I know your record there too.
You clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren on the United States Supreme Court, though your conservative inclinations put you at odds with his judicial philosophy. You edited the University of Chicago Law Review—a position given to the top student in the class. You joined Kirkland & Ellis, one of the most prestigious law firms in the country. You became a professor of law. You served on the Utah Supreme Court.
In 1970, while still a professor, you wrote an article about the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule is a doctrine in American criminal law that says evidence obtained illegally—through unlawful searches, unconstitutional seizures—cannot be used in court. The rule protects defendants by making the truth inadmissible when the process of obtaining it was corrupt.
You argued it should be abolished.
You said the truth should come in. You said the method of obtaining evidence was less important than the evidence itself. You said accuracy should not be sacrificed to procedural purity.
Justice William Rehnquist called it "the most comprehensive study on the exclusionary rule." Your article was the second most cited in the history of that law review, after only Antonin Scalia's "The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules."
You believed that the truth should be admissible.
And now you lead an institution whose entire posture is exclusion.
Criticism is wrong even if true. The truth is inadmissible.
Not everything that's true is useful. The truth is suppressible.
Research is not the answer. The truth is discouraged.
The church doesn't apologize. The truth requires no response.
You have built an exclusionary rule for your own history. You have made the truth inadmissible—not because of how it was obtained, but because of what it reveals.
The man who argued that illegally seized evidence should still be heard now leads an institution that refuses to hear legally obtained evidence about itself.
Differing weights are an abomination to the LORD, and false scales are not good. You have one scale for the courtroom and another for the chapel. One weight for defendants and another for prophets. The law student and the apostle cannot both be right. And you know which one was right.
I do not call your founder a fraud.
A fraud is someone who makes nothing and calls it something. Joseph Smith made something. The making was real.
He read and he listened and he borrowed and he synthesized. He took folk magic from the culture of rural New York—divining rods, seer stones, treasure-digging. He took Masonic ritual—the signs, the tokens, the penalties, the progression through degrees of knowledge—and wove it into temple ceremonies that still bear the marks. He took Protestant revival energy—the camp meetings, the visions, the direct encounters with the divine. He took hermetic tradition—the idea that ancient wisdom had been lost and could be restored. He took the King James cadence and wrote scripture that sounds like scripture because it sounds like the Bible his readers already knew.
And he wove them into something new. The weaving was brilliant. I do not deny his brilliance.
But he said an angel handed it to him. He said he translated when he had curated. He said he received when he had assembled.
Your scripture warns: Priestcraft is that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world. I do not say Joseph sought gain. I say he set himself up for a light and called the light something it was not. The making was real. The naming was not.
The Joseph Smith Translation—his revision of the Bible, which the church holds as scripture—was not translated from ancient sources. By BYU's own published scholarship, it was compiled. It was revised. It was constructed from existing English texts with additions and alterations. Your own academics have written this. It is in your journals. It is in your archive. It is on your university's website.
The Book of Mormon contains patterns—numerological structures, chiastic forms, literary architectures—that indicate authorship. Chiasmus is a Hebrew poetic form where ideas mirror each other in an A-B-C-B-A pattern; your scholars point to it as evidence of ancient origin. But it is also evidence of deliberate composition. It is evidence of a writer making choices, shaping text, crafting structure. It is evidence of art.
Joseph was an artist who could not admit he was an artist. He was a curator who claimed to be a conduit.
And you have inherited the costume. And you know what is underneath it.
I said I am no prophet. I meant it.
I do not think Jeremiah thought he was a prophet either. I think Jeremiah was a man who saw something and could not stop saying it. I think Amos was a farmer who looked at the temple and saw rot and opened his mouth. The book of Amos begins: I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was a herdsman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit.
The institution calls them prophets now. The institution names things after the danger has passed.
I am not a prophet. I am someone who was inside your house.
I was given the mantle young. I was told it came from God. I wore it because I was told to wear it, and I did not know there was anything else to wear.
The mantle managed my calendar. It managed my decisions. It managed my sexuality and my doubts and my questions. It was like firmware—software installed so deep in the machine that the user does not know it is there, does not know it is running, does not know it can be removed.
And then I read the record.
Your record. The church's record. The documentation that your own institution produced and then discouraged anyone from reading.
And the firmware was not from God. And the mantle was not from angels. And I had to build my own operating system by hand, line by line, because the one you gave me was never mine.
I am one of thousands. I am one of tens of thousands. We are the ones who read the record and could not unread it.
You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. You taught me this verse. You did not teach me that the freedom would feel like exile. That the knowing would cost me everything I had been given. That the truth would set me free from you.
Some of us are angry. We are the loud ones. We write letters. We file our names from the record. We stand outside temple square with signs.
Some of us are silent. We sit in the pews next to our parents and sing the hymns and say nothing. We do not have the luxury of leaving. We would lose too much.
Some of us are dead. The rates are documented. Your own institution has studied them. LGBTQ youth in your church take their lives at higher rates than those outside it. This is in the data. This is in your archive. You know this.
I am not blaming you for their deaths. Causation is complex. Despair has many fathers.
But I am asking you to hold the weight of it. I am asking you to sit in the room with the ones who could not stay and could not leave and so they left another way.
The record does not preserve their names either. But I am speaking for them.
The voice of your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground. God heard Abel. God asked Cain the question. Your institution has not asked the question. Your institution has commissioned studies and filed them and moved on. But the ground still cries. And someone is still responsible for answering.
You said research is not the answer. You were right about one thing: research ends the question. Research closes the door you said was open. Research makes it impossible to go back.
I am not here to take anything from you.
I am not here to remove your priesthood or your presidency or your place in the succession of the institution.
I am only here to read your record aloud.
You are not guilty of being wrong.
Prophets may be wrong. Seers may see dimly. Revelators may receive static. I do not damn you for being human.
You are guilty of knowing and speaking otherwise.
You are guilty of building a house where knowing cannot be spoken.
You are guilty of calling the silence faith.
You are guilty of calling the speaking sin.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. You have called the silence good and the speaking evil. You have put the institution's comfort for light and the truth-teller's pain for darkness. The woe is not mine to pronounce. But the prophet pronounced it. And the prophet was talking about people who did what you have done.
There are people who love you.
There are people who have sat in conference and wept when you spoke because they believed you carried something holy. There are people who have made covenants because you told them the covenants were real. There are people who have given their lives—their labor, their money, their years—to the institution you lead.
I am not mocking them. I was one of them.
Their grief is not my grief. Their grief is the discovery that the gift was not what they were told. Their grief is waking up in a house they built with their own hands and realizing the foundation is not what the architect promised.
Some of them will read this and hate me for it. I understand. A part of me hated the first person who showed me the record.
But I did not hate them for long. Because the record was there. And once I saw it, I could not unsee it.
I do not sentence you. I have no authority and I claim none.
The sentence is the archive.
The sentence is that your words are written, and they will be read, and they will be compared, and they will not survive the comparison.
I have no revelation.
I have only the record.
And by the mouth of two witnesses shall every word be established. This is your scripture—Deuteronomy 19:15, repeated in Matthew 18:16, codified in your Doctrine and Covenants. You taught it to me. You taught it to all of us.
I am one witness.
The record is another.
You taught me that. You.
Melody Jack
December 2025
