Wow, that sure is a radical shift. "Feminism" used to be the big bad specter to our Mormon friends, and now any general criticism of it is equated with demeaning women? I'm glad to see that they've done a 180 regarding feminism, but I wonder if they'd judge Boyd K. Packer with the same vitriol that they've judged why me.
I remember Mopologetic history differently. The core group of women at MDD who exited ZLMB I think have been consistently "feminist". Remember, their apologetics is literally super glued to academic liberalism, the very kind BCSpace and Droopy regard as Satanism. If some fashionable liberal professor at Yale writes a book on religion, then this is what the Church had always taught, and those of us who found these positions unrecognizable in a Mormon context were lone turnips that had bounced off the truck of true-believing commoners.
It's the core MI group that tends to pronouncedly right wing, and now that the've "spun off" on their own, there is no liberal influence at all to keep them in check as there had been with the rise of Mormon Studies. Lou might be the odd duck here, but I'm not going to attempt to pscyhoanalyze him. At MDD, interestingly enough, a conservative influence has found its way in as apparently, liberalism itself is useless without the technology to deliver the message. Mormon IT geeks tend to be shallow conservatives, and so there's this other element there. It's probably more of a tolerated situation rather than one of differing perspectives informing each other as I never see any interaction between the two forces and explains some schizo moderation. Of course, I probably spend about 10 minutes a month on that board now, so I could be wrong, but I still think I'm right.