[Thursday, May 21, 1959] I left home before 8 a.m., arriving in Salt Lake at 9:00. Studied in
the Church Office Building on matters to be presented to the two Executive Committees
until recently 11:00. Then attended a meeting of the Executive Committee of the
Beneficial Life until 12:30, then got back to studying again about twenty
minutes to 2:00, which was not long enough because I did not really get over
all of my material.
Brother Moyle came in first and announced they could give us only a very
few minutes today. This irritated me, and I told him I had come all the way
from Provo especially for this meeting and it was the last one of the year and
we had a lot of things that needed to be acted on. I agreed I would go as fast
as possible. Despite the fact that President [Joseph Fielding]
Smith had already given me a similar warning when we called asking for a
meeting, the Brethren, all of whom were present except Brother [Hugh B.] Brown,
seemed to be quite relaxed and settled down for a real discussion on various
matters. Two of the matters for discussion were whether the [BYU] Dean of
Students should send questionnaires to bishops asking whether students had any
propensity for stealing or immorality or anything of that kind. And the other
question was the growing problem in our society of homosexuality.
These two problems
interested the Brethren very, very much (they of course concern themselves more
about these matters than some of the technical problems of education), and so
we had a long discussion on them. I was informed that President McKay in one of
the [Salt Lake] Temple meetings had said that in his view homosexuality was
worse than immortality; that it is a filthy and unnatural habit. I was
therefore instructed that whenever we had cause for this kind, except where the
students were really repentant and immediately working out their problems, that
we should suspend them from the University. The question arose as to whether in
suspending them from the University we should record the reason for suspension
and pass the record on to another university. It was decided that since the
students confessed to our counsellors, which was confidential, we could not
tell them the reason for the suspension. This would eliminate any libel suits
against the University which, because of the confidential nature of the
information, we might not be able to defend. . . . (Ernest L. Wilkinson, Journal, May 21, 1959,
in Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson,
1951-1971, ed. Gary James Bergera [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2025], 241-42,
ellipsis in original)
