REPENT YE, REPENT YE, YE STEADIERS OF THE ARC, A RESPONSE TO LAMAN AND LEMUEL-LIKE MURMURING ABOUT BYU STATUES

I am Brother LaVernal Jorgeson, and I am the Undersecretary for Honor Code Implementation.  I also head the Standards Society, and it is in those capacities that I respond to the troubling news that your website has published.  Here at Honor Code Implementation and at the SS, we are very concerned about your righteousness and how our campus-wide righteousness is viewed.

Those who have been writing about Brigham Young University’s beautiful sculptures seem to be taking the very wide, broad roads of gossip, of questioning divine authority, and of iniquitous murmuring.  Such steadying of the arc can only end in darkness, sin, despair, dressing like a hipster, enjoying the smell of coffee, majoring in Humanities, rooting for the Utes, and marrying a fatty.

Oh the blindness of those who do not see the inherent modesty of Chief Massasoit!  Ye can only look on the outward appearance, while we know that God and the righteous see his noble, proud yet humble Lehite heart, burning with the solemn hope for the blossoming of his people in the latter-days, thereby clothing him in Zion’s pure and beautiful garment.  He holds a pipe, but would never, ever inhale.  He looks out, his gaze trained above the teeming masses, and while you question how this paragon of righteousness lives his life, what are you doing? What have you done to rescue his people from their long, dark night of sorrow, sin, casino gambling, and, in the case of South America, soccer?  What, what, oh ye unfair ones?

And as for the honorable depiction of Karl Maeser—all you can do is discount all of his work by attacking his facial hair!  We are all very sure that the noble book he holds is not hollowed out so that he can furtively carry a caffeinated beverage.  We know that his elegant coat looks nothing like trench coats favored by adolescent male mall shooters.  He stands as a powerful reminder of how educators, specifically white, male educators, only convey pure truth without mixture or mythology, never diluting that truth with stereotypes, half-truths, or emotional appeals in the place of real argument.   In other words, within a matter of days, next to the powerful figure of Maeser we can expect an equally powerful and inspiring sculpture of Randy Bott.

The greatest shame is the scorn you have heaped on the celestial family whose image graces our campus.  Only those looking to be offended would be offended by the lack of wedding rings.  The righteous know the truth, the truth sets them free, and the truth is that this child had, only days before, asked her parents about those glorious symbols of their eternal union and her parents tried to explain those rings to her, to which she replied with questions about whether there are other physical symbols or embodiments of their complete and total commitment to each other and if that physical embodiment was somehow linked to how God gets spirits to come to mortality and if couples could use alternative ways to embody that total union that might keep some spirits from coming a little too early but might still celebrate their passionate love in a fun and creative way.  So of course they just took their rings off.

For the pure in heart and the strictly obedient, the sculptures lift the heart and steady the weak, but from those who are bent on stuffing the turkey through the beak, here at Honor Code Implementation and the SS we say, “REPENT YE, REPENT YE!”