MrStakhanovite wrote:Wade,
You are a good guy, and I like you a lot, so I’m gonna level with you. My Dad has a few ties with some of the Brethren via business, he was able to put me in touch with two individuals, who had the common decency to hear me out. I calmly explained to them, that I thought Will was bad PR, and that he would damage the Church’s image if any of his work saw the light of day. Both seemed very interested and told me they’d have a talk about M.I. and see if they couldn’t do something about it.
The “threats” you probably heard about were from me. I couldn’t let Will’s work get out there, I had to do something and I did.
Well, we already know, from the email David Bokovoy shared, that information about the sharper flavors of Schyrveriana had reached the Maxwell Institute, and that their reaction was to dump Schryver as someone whose behavior did not meet their standards. Now from your message we have information as to one possible route by which the information about Schryver's unusual behavior on the internet reached them.
However I still have some questions when I put your message next to posts like the following from wenglund:
wenglund wrote:I am under the impression that threats (along the lines of raising a stink in the press and such if the paper were published) were made that influenced the decision to jettison Will's article. I have no impression as to where and how exactly the alleged threats were made or conveyed to the person or persons who made the decision.
It is clear from this and from other posts that when wenglund talked about "threats" he did not simply mean that somebody told the MI about MsJack's collection of unpleasant posts by Schryver, but meant some kind of threat in the classic form of:
"If you do not do X, then I shall do Y, which would be unpleasant for you".
In this case, the threat that wenglund had in mind took the particular shape of:
"If you do not dump Schryver from your publication program, then I shall create a fuss in the papers."
Now it is clear that all that Mr Stakhanovite did was to ensure that the MI were made aware that Schryver was a potential embarrassment (as many people would agree he is to any religious organisation), and far from threatening to cause embarrassment he seems to have wanted to help the MI avoid it. He didn't threaten anybody. So it does not seem that Mr S's avowal was really the kind of thing that wenglund's posts on "threats" were really about.
But one thing I would like to clarify with Mr S. - why was it that you were so anxious not to "let Will’s work get out there", and felt you "had to do something"? to stop that? Was it because you thought that:
(a) It was bad scholarship and ought not to have been published for that reason.
Or:
(b) You wanted to protect the reputation of the Maxwell Institute, and through it the LDS church, from association with a person whose conduct you believed to be in certain respects reprehensible?
If the latter, I am a bit puzzled, since I did not have the impression that you were very worried about preserving the reputation of the CoJCoLDS. I am not being ironic when I say that, and it may be that I have simply read your posts too carelessly to get an accurate impression of your religious position.
