[Spencer W. Kimball] [In response to a comment by Meredith Wilson, dean of the School of Education at the University of Utah, regarding the Deseret News's criticisms of the U of u Pen affair (promoting literature critical of the church):] He [i.e., Wilson] felt that the Church made much of little. I told him this was not little'it was not a coincidence that all this array of Church enemies and their long list of scatological writings should be grouped together in the first pages all together in the PEN and should come out on this Centennial day. I told him that we were sorry too for a little girl who had made a mistake but I felt sorrier for the hundred of thousands of good Latter Day Saints dead and living who had been insulted and defamed and attacked by the Pen and its writers held up by it to glorification. I told him we or I felt that the University should be strictly non-religious. They had no more right in the classes, in their magazines or otherwise to belittle the Church than they had to teach its doctrines. ... I do not know what impression I made upon him, but I told him many things in a quiet kindly manner in those two hours that I hope will sink in and help him. I told him again that I was not so much concerned with the tirade which could easily be forgiven. The thing which distressed me greatly was that it was splitting our L.D.S. people apart and that so many of our own people had lost the sense of injustice and preferred to worship the spirit of free thinking and expression than the spirit of loyalty to a Cause and to our people who were responsible for this great empire and the University and most all else.
[Source: Spencer W. Kimball Diary, as quoted in Minutes of the Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1910-1951, Privately Published, Salt Lake City, Utah 2010]
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