Here’s a throwback episode with Paul Toscano. I thought it would be great to re-visit our previous interview from January 9, 2023 since we discusses Paul Toscano so much with the Janice Allred interview. Enjoy!

It’s been 30 years since six intellectuals were excommunicated all in the month of September from the LDS Church. This is why they’re know as the Sept Six. News spread quickly and sent a chill in the academic community. Paul Toscano looks back on those events from 30 years ago, and tells what happened, why, and who was involved. Check out our conversation…

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GT  00:32  Welcome to Gospel Tangents. It’s been 30 years since the September Six. And so in [remembrance] of that, I have one of the original September Six. Could you go ahead and tell us who you are?

Paul  00:45  I’m Paul Toscano. And I was and am one of the September Six.

GT  00:51  This is going to be fantastic. We’ve already gotten Mike Quinn. Unfortunately, Mike passed away, so we won’t be getting him. But we’re going to try to get as many of the others [on] as we can. For those who aren’t familiar with the September Six, can you give us a little brief definition and then a little summary, as we get started here?

Paul  01:12  Yes, I’d be happy to do that. The September Six; September is referring to September of 1993. So, that’s 30 years ago, coming up soon. And the six [people] are Lynne Whitesides, who was disfellowshipped on September 12, 1993. She was supposed to be excommunicated, but her bishop couldn’t do it to her, but it wound up that she’s permanently disfellowshipped. So, I don’t know the difference between that and excommunication. I think they’re probably very close. Avraham Gileadi, who does not like to think of himself as a member of the September Six, for whatever reason. He was excommunicated on September the 15^th, which was the following Wednesday. And then Maxine Hanks was excommunicated on Sunday, September the 19^th in Salt Lake City. It so happens that on the same day. I was excommunicated in Cottonwood, which is south of Salt Lake City in the Murray/Cottonwood area, and that was on the 19^th. And then on the 23^rd, which was, I think, a Thursday, if I recall, of September. Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated, although she did not attend her High Council or her bishops court or whatever it was that they held on her. And then, on the 26^th of September, which was a Sunday, Mike Quinn was excommunicated. Memory does not serve me as to where he was. I know that he could have been in Salt Lake. But I think he might have been in Rancho Cucamonga in California. That’s where he lived later and where he died last year. Well, it would be 2021 he died.

GT  03:16  Right.

Paul  03:18  And so I’m going to introduce you and the audience to two books. One is this book by Philip Lindholm. And I hope you can catch it on camera. And it’s called Latter-day Dissent. And this, it contains interviews with the September Six and some others. My wife is interviewed because, actually, Boyd Packer went after her before he went after any of the six and it was because he went after her that I got involved. And then he went after me through Kerry Hines, our stake president who was an old friend of his. That was because Margaret is just a nice person, and I’m much more obstreperous and obnoxious, much more suitable for excommunication fodder. But, anyway, this book, it’s a really good book. It has a great introduction to the things that led up to September of 1993. And it has the interviews, and it also has an interview from Dean Jesse who talked about the Church’s position, and why they did what they did. I’m not sure it’s as candid as it should be. But there it is, in the book.

GT  04:24  It seems like I remember Philip, because I read that book, and he said that most interviews were generally unedited, except for Dean Jesse, or the last one there. His was edited quite a bit, quite highly.

Paul  04:38  Yes. Yes. I don’t know that. But I don’t have any doubt that Lindholm was telling you the truth. The other book I could introduce is a book that I wrote called, Road to Exile: Conversion and Excommunication of a Mormon Misfit, that’s me. And that caricature was done by my daughter, Mary, who’s an artist. And in this book, it’s really not about all of the others. It’s not about the September Six. It’s about how I got excommunicated. But I get converted from Catholicism to Mormonism in 1963. And then 30 years later,1993, I’m excommunicated. And so, after 30 years in the Church, I’m booted out. This tells about how that happened, and about my personality that would lend myself to being excommunication material.

Paul  05:42  I’m proud of the part at the back. I put a lot of copies of letters and we didn’t have the email. So, they’re just letters back and forth. And there are articles from the Salt Lake Tribune that covered this. And they’re all in, I got permission from the Salt Lake Tribune to republish them. So, they’re in this book. But this is a memoir. And this is really more of an interview book. But together, with his introduction in this book, I think you get a pretty good idea of what happened.

Paul  06:15  So that’s who the September Six are. And it was a purge. The Church says it wasn’t a purge. But there’s evidence that it was a purge.

Paul  06:32  And it was, I think, orchestrated mostly by Boyd K. Packer, who’s no longer with us, he’s gone to his great reward.

GT  06:40  So, we won’t be talking to him.

Paul  06:41  We won’t be able to talk to him, although the veil is thin. He may show up and defend himself. But the reason why he was able to do this, not in the First Presidency; he was in the Council of the Twelve. He was a senior member of the Twelve. But he wasn’t the senior member. It was because Ezra Benson was, I think he fell off his horse or something. And after that, he was non-compos mentis, and he was mostly comatose, or in and out of that. You can get a better picture of that, from going to Steve Benson’s website. If you look up Steve Benson September Six, or I can get that information to you. You can put it into the transcript, but he tells about how his grandfather was not functioning as President of the Church.

Paul  06:41  So, when that happens, when a president is not functional, the way that Church governance happens is that the first and second counselor to President Benson, who were then Gordon Hinckley and Thomas Monson, in that order, and those two joined with the Twelve Apostles to create 14 people that become the apostolic interregnum. That is, they, as the Council of the First Presidency of the Council of the Twelve, they run the Church. And that gives the members of the Council of the Twelve a lot more say so, because they’re actually functioning as in the First Presidency, so to speak, in this temporary situation. Because of that, Boyd Packer was able to convince the others, because he’s very convincing, and he bullied people, certainly.

GT  08:43  Howard Hunter was the President of the Twelve, at the time, wasn’t he?

Paul  08:46  I believe so.

GT  08:47  Because he was the next president of the Church.

Paul  08:48  Well, I think you’re right. I think he was President of the Twelve. But he wasn’t a counselor in the First Presidency.

GT  08:53  Right.

Paul  08:54  So, he was the President at Twelve. Incidentally, I have a story that I got about the time I was excommunicated in about October of ’93. I had a law partner who was very close to the Hinckleys and the family leadership of the Church, the Huntsmans. And she told me that she was at a party right after I was excommunicated with some of the Hinckleys and the Huntsmans and some other people. And I don’t want to be that any more specific than that, which is specific enough. And Gordon Hinckley was there with Marjorie, and he didn’t participate in the conversation, but he was listening to it. And his son said, “Well, if Paul and Margaret had been in our stake, they’d never been excommunicated. Because they didn’t do anything that was apostate.” And Huntsman said that he was the stake president for Howard Hunter.

GT  10:09  Is this John Jr. or John Sr.?

Paul  10:11  Senior.

GT  10:12  Okay. He recently passed away.

Paul  10:14  Yeah, he recently passed away. He was the stake president for Howard Hunter and Howard Hunter [was at the party.] He [Paul’s friend] told the story at this party. He said that Howard Hunter calls me up periodically to give him a blessing, because he has such negative feelings and depression and general dark feelings whenever he’s around Boyd Packer. So, I derived from the stories that I was told by my law partner, who was present at the party, that the decision to excommunicate the people in September of 1993 was not a unanimous, revelatory decision of the leaders of the Church.

GT  11:09  Well, it’s funny to me because Packer was probably middle of the Quorum of the Twelve, back in ’93. Right?

Paul  11:17  He always overextended himself. When he was a junior apostle, a junior apostle, he managed to get Harold B. Lee to make him in charge of the Adult Correlation Committee, to make Hinckley in charge of the children’s program, the Primary, because he was such a bully. I mean, I remember when I was at BYU, and Scott Duncan was the editor of the yearbook when I was a senior, or maybe I was a graduate student.

GT  11:55  Did you grow up in Utah?

Paul  11:56  No, no, I was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Southern California.

GT  12:00  You don’t sound like you’re from New York.

Paul  12:02  Well, I can sound like that. Anyway, if you get me off, I can’t get back. I don’t know what I was talking about.

GT  12:14  (Chuckling) We were talking about somebody at your school that was this student body president.

Paul  12:19  Oh, gosh, I was going to tell a good story.

GT  12:21  Sorry.

Paul  12:22  That’s okay. I can’t remember what I was going to say. What was I talking about? I was talking about Boyd Packer. And I think you asked me a question.

GT  12:34  He was in the middle of the pack of the Quorum of the Twelve.

Paul  12:36  He was in the middle of the pack. And I was saying that he bullied his way to get into the leadership. He had more authority than his seniors in the Council of the Twelve, because he was very good at positioning himself. He just was that way. He was tough. He wanted to punch homosexuals in the face. And he made these statements to missionaries about that he wasn’t averse to violence under certain circumstances. He’s no longer with us. So, anyway, I got myself derailed and I can’t get back on. So, I will let you ask me the next question. What were we talking about talking about?

GT  13:26  So, it’s just funny because, basically, you said the President Benson was incapacitated. So, Hinckley and Monson kind of went with the Quorum of Twelve.

Paul  13:40  Right. And so one of the things that Boyd Packer engineered, I think it was a month or two before September, was that Avraham’s stake president, who think was his name was Randall Gibbs down in Salem, Utah. He [the stake president] wouldn’t excommunicate Avraham. He was told by Malcolm Jepsen, who was the area president of that area where Salem is and Utah County and San Pete County.

GT  14:10  He was a Seventy.

Paul  14:11  He was a Seventy and he was told to get Avraham excommunicated by, he said the First Presidency and the apostles, that’s how he put it in his journal. But really, I think it was Boyd was taking the lead on that. And Randall Gibb wouldn’t do it. So, they changed stake presidents and got a BYU religion teacher by the name of Leaun Otten. And Leaun Otten. he spells his name like Leaun and he did it. He excommunicated Avraham. And Avraham, within 18 months got rebaptized. And he never wanted to do interviews. He never wanted to participate in anything related to the September Six, because he was humiliated by the whole experience and felt like he had never done anything wrong.

GT  15:14  Well, the five of you were more left wing, right? And then he was more of a right-winger? Is that a good way to say it?

Paul  15:22  I suppose. We’re not talking politically.

GT  15:24  Right.

Paul  15:25  We’re talking religiously, Avraham is very conservative. He not only observes all the Mormon holidays and federal holidays and state holidays, but all the Jewish holidays. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he just lives his life by the liturgical calendar. I mean, I knew him. But that’s over 30-35 years ago.

GT  15:52  So, you think he participates in Lent, as well?

Paul  15:54  I don’t know. I can’t answer for him. I think that he moves more toward fundamentalism, than– I wouldn’t say polygamous fundamentalism, but he’s more fundamental in his thinking. I mean, I can tell you what I think he taught. He taught about Isaiah. He presents himself as an Isaiah scholar. I am not qualified to make a judgment on that. I don’t know how he would be received among credentialed Isaiah scholars–schools of theology, but he may know more than they do, for all I know. Because I understand what credentials are actually worth. It depends on the person, not really the school and their firepower. And I think Avraham had considerable firepower, it wasn’t that. I think one of the things he may have said that got him crosswise, to be honest with you, is that throughout the Book of Mormon, and in some places, in the Old Testament, there is a phrase that the Lord will set his hand, again, the second time. This is repeated in several places in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Ether, Nephi, Alma. There’s this phrase about how the Lord will set his hand, again, the second time. Well, you can interpret that to mean, Mormons can interpret that to mean the Restoration, Jesus came, and then the Restoration of the gospel happens through Joseph Smith. And that’s again the second time.  But you can also interpret it to mean a second, second time.

GT  17:29  A third time.

Paul  17:29  A third time, right. If Avraham was giving that idea out, there isn’t going to be yet another restoration because Mormonism failed. Right? If some people were picking that up from whatever– I’m not saying he presented that. I’m saying if that was picked up, then it could have led to a misunderstanding that would have led to his excommunication. I am not saying that’s what happened. I’m just saying that, as I recall, if memory serves, that was one of the things that I’d read in his book on Isaiah. But my memory isn’t that great.

GT  18:15  All right. So, tell us what precipitated the whole problem. Because it sounded like your wife was kind of the one who was headed off, right?

Paul  18:24  Well, yes. In a way, the fuse was lit over her, although the explosive had been being stacked up for a year before it. Lindholm does a great job of talking about this. And my memory isn’t good enough to remember all the details. But if you go back to ’91, I believe it was before the Sunstone Symposium of ’91. There was some kind of a memorandum or I can’t think of the right word, about symposia.

GT  19:06  Statement Against Symposia.

Paul  19:07  That’s it! Statement Against Symposia. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here to help me. But it came out in 1991. Now before the Salt Lake Sunstone symposium, which happened for many years, beginning in the 1970s, it was called the Theological Symposium. It is not that anymore. Theology is nowhere to be found; I think. But back in those days, it was called the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium. And BYU professors would come to it. People from the other universities in the state, teachers, PhDs, researchers, historians, Church employees from the Church Historian’s Office would come and they put on quite a show. It was quite a show. I never really attended Sunstone until 1985, which was the year the Hofmann bombs went off in October. But I went to the Sunstone Symposium that year. I made my first presentations, then. And then I made two presentations a year, right up until the time I was excommunicated, and I think maybe in 1994. And then [I] took a hiatus until about 2003. Margaret made her first presentation a year before mine, in 1984. So before that, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on. But when I went the first time in ’84, when I went to hear Margaret, I mean, when I went first time to hear Margaret’s in 84. And then made my own presentations in ’85. Everybody came to Sunstone. It was not considered off limits until 1991, when the Church issued a statement on symposia, putting it off limits.

GT  21:12  And that was in 1991, that they issued that statement.

Paul  21:14  Yes, 1991, when they did that. That kind of got things–there was tension, the intellectuals began to feel tension.

GT  21:25  See, I can remember because I was in college, and I remember being like, “What are they talking about?” Because I don’t think I’d even heard of Sunstone in 1991.

Paul  21:34  And then somewhere along the line, Dallin Oaks, who was made an apostle in 1984. In ’84, I actually went to see him because I was his research assistant, briefly, for a few months when he was president of BYU. And so, in ’84, after he became an apostle, I think we had an exchange where he was worried about something that I had written and published in a book called Gospel Letters to a Mormon Missionary, where I had said that you can be ordained to the priesthood, but not have the Spirit. Or you can have the Spirit, without the priesthood. I said, “Optimally, priesthood bearers should have the office and the charismatic gifts, but they don’t necessarily come.” That’s what the Section 121 says, “The powers of the priesthood are inseparably connected to the powers of heaven. But if they aren’t, amen to the priesthood of that man,” which means that if you don’t have these charismatic gifts, if you’re not connected to the Godhead through the Spirit, your priesthood, I mean, your official functions are going to be valid, but you’re not really going to be functioning in the priesthood in any significant way.

Paul  22:51  Well, he was all worried about this. Dallin Oaks is telling me, “Don’t you think this is dangerous?”

Paul  22:59  I said, “Well, you’re worried about people who have charisma, but you haven’t appointed them. That’s what you’re worried about. I don’t see that happening a lot. What I see happening a lot is you ordain people who don’t have the spirit. You’ve got mission presidents who see the missionary program as a sales program.” I mean, that’s why you had baseball baptisms in England. That’s why this kind of stuff happens. You send boys on mission, and you send men. You get them out of business, and you think somehow their business experience is going to translate over into being mission president, a spiritual leader, a priest of the Most High God and they’re not there. They’re just not and you don’t seem to worry about this.

Paul  23:51  And he said, “Well, we’re doing our best.”

Paul  23:53  I said, “I don’t see that. I don’t see that you’re doing your best.” And I may have told this story before. But I said to him, “I’m not saying you’re not apostles. You’re just the worst apostles we’ve ever had in the history of Christianity.” He was so startled at that statement, because no one addresses the apostles as equals, which is the reason, really, I was excommunicated. I was insubordinate, by which they mean, I treated them as equals, and they cannot tolerate that. And so that really was the root of my excommunication.

Paul  24:31  Margaret’s excommunication, which came seven years after 1993, on November 30 of 2000. She was excommunicated for advancing the priesthood promises that were made by Joseph Smith to women, and that’s why she was in a pickle. Mike Quinn was in a pickle because he [wrote about] post-manifesto, polygamy but, also, because he was a homosexual and so they were all upset at this, and they can’t think through these things very well. Because they grow up marinated in privilege. And they’re marinated in a certain set of ideas, especially Boyd Packer. Now, this was not true of some of the other apostles. I mean, it was certainly not true of Howard Hunter. And there are other apostles, I think, even like Jeff Holland, he makes mistakes. But you can see he’s not marinated in the sense of elitism and privilege. But some of them are. Certainly, I think Russell Nelson is, and it’s hard to know what Henry Eyring was thinking about anything. He’s balancing the books and counting the money that’s in the Ensign Peak account with 124,000 millions of dollars. You know, he’s got his hands full. And they’re building temples all over. So, they’ve got their hands full managing the Church. They think I’m an enemy of the Church, even now, because I’m so frank. But the Church does a lot of good things. It’s just not good when it comes to theology, and when it comes to the gospel. It’s not good at that. And I would say these things, this was all for 30 years I’ve said them and then for the years before. So, yes, the symposium was shut down. So, now who’s going to the symposium? Only people like me, who have complaints. The people who are defending the Church, don’t go to the symposium anymore. And that was good. We could talk to each other, and we would listen to each other. I mean, when I was complaining, then, about the Church, I was…

GT  24:31  In the 1980s, you’re talking about.

Paul  25:37  In 1991, and 1992, in that period of time, when I was complaining, which I started in 1985. So, eight years, from ’85 to ’93, I’m complaining. And my complaints are getting more hysterical, because no one’s listening. I’m telling them foundational things.

GT  27:07  When you say no one, are you saying the apostles are not listening?

Paul  27:10  Yeah, I mean, the people at Sunstone, listen, and I wrote essays that people don’t read, and you get the sense that no one was paying attention to you. I think they do listen. They do listen, but they don’t hearken. Like, for example, they wouldn’t have needed to excommunicate me. Boyd Packer could have picked up the phone and said, “Come up here,” and I would have come up to his office. He would be yelled at me, and I would have talked to him. And I said, “Look, why don’t we have a truce and just talk about this. Because I think your problem is that you take the gospel, and you take the theology of Mormonism, very seriously. But you’re not a close reader. So, you don’t know when you get up in conference, you don’t know how to straighten things out. Like, you take that statement that’s very ambiguous in the Book of Mormon,” you can help me, where it says, “We’re saved after all we can do.”

GT  28:04  Saved by grace, after all we can do.

Paul  28:05  It’s 2^nd Nephi, “We’re saved by grace, after all we can do.” Well, that either means we’re saved by grace, in spite of all we can do. After all we can do, it doesn’t amount to anything, what we’ve done, because we have to be saved by grace, it can mean that. Or it can mean we are saved by grace, only after all we can do. So, works matter. Well works always matter in the sense of horizontally, as we relate to other people, works matter. If I punch you in the face, that’s a bad work. And if I serve you free dinner, it’s a good work. Right? I mean, it’s horizontal. But works don’t matter on the vertical between us and God. We cannot do a sufficient amount of good works on this planet that will be enough to earn heaven. Heaven is so great and wonderful that nothing we can do on this planet, in this reality of entropy, where everything is always falling apart…I’m a perfect example of that. You can’t can’t earn your way. So, you’re saved by grace. And it there’s a prevenient grace that we’re born with, and we’re encouraged to seek truth, and the other thing is, if you fail in this regard, it doesn’t mean you’re going to go to hell, because Mormons don’t believe in hell. Let me remind you, folks, the big selling point, Mormonism doesn’t believe in Hell, we believe in degrees of glory. Even the worst people go to the incomprehensible kingdom of glory. See, I did that. They don’t do that. It’s a big selling point, but they kind of bury the lead. So, what are you going to do with these people? So, the saved by grace or the fact that we don’t believe in Hell is not the things they’re talking about. What are they talking about? They’re talking about silly things like birth control, which is none of their business. Or they’re talking about body piercings. Jesus had body piercings.

GT  30:09  Oh really?

Paul  30:10  Yeah. {Paul points to Jesus’s crucifixion wounds.} Jesus had body piercings. Some believe he had tattoos when he came out of Egypt. We don’t know. He was a little. Our leaders are not good religious leaders. I have to give them credit. They got the church out of debt. In the 1950s, they were in debt and now we’ve got huge tons of money. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.

GT  30:41  I don’t know what your original charge of apostasy was. But wouldn’t this be considered speaking ill of the Lord’s anointed?

Paul  30:48  Yeah, it is speaking ill of the Lord’s anointed, but it’s also true. Speaking ill means untruth, lying about them. Saying they’ve done something, that they’re running a child molesting thing out of the pizza place in Washington D.C. or some crazy thing like Hillary Clinton was accused of. That’s slander or libel. Yes, that’s evil speaking. But when you tell the truth, how do they? They don’t self-correct. I mean, when the Prophet in the Old Testament was going astray, he was spoken to by Balaam’s ass. Well, if Balaam’s can correct a prophet, so can I. The thing is, it tests their humility. I’m not saying that I’m the prophet of God. I’m not saying I get revelation, I’m just pointing out that there are serious they don’t [discuss.] I mean, if you listen to their conference talks, they’re horribly boring. I think Mormonism is one of the most interesting religions on the face of the planet. But they, somehow, if you go to sacrament meeting and the High Council is speaking, he may choose or may be required to give a speech on the name extraction program. And if you happen to have brought an investigator to that meeting, that investigator is going to wonder, “Where’s Jesus in all of this?” And it’s true, he’s on the Book of Mormon cover and on the chapel logos. But if you get into Mormon theology, you find that he’s the messenger of the Father. And I’ve said this in the last interview I did with you on the Serpent and the Dove. There’s nothing in Mormon scripture that would suggest that Jesus has a superior deity, or that the deities go back infinitely. That’s just kind of a Newtonian nonsense that we made up in the 19^th century. It’s silly. But what is true is that between ’85 and ’93, I was becoming more hysterical, because I could feel like the Church was doing things that was going to cause them to lose their membership.

Paul  33:16  So, in 1992, I and a number of other people, I think, I can’t remember all their names now. But we organize the Mormon Alliance. Janice Allred, Margaret and I, some other people. We all got together, and we formed the Mormon Alliance, with the idea of defending the Church from defamation from without, and also from abuses by leaders from within. So, the idea is that we don’t want to be abused, either foreign or domestic. We don’t want either one of those things. We want the saints to be able to think freely and express themselves without fear or favor, and that we can stand up to the people outside the Church who are getting the wrong idea about what kind of religion we were. Well, one of the things that the Mormon Alliance trustees took on, they took on two things that I can recall that were controversial. You can get still get these case reports about physical, sexual abuse by bishops on younger people. And we were collecting those reports and giving a voice to those people and trying to get the Church to respond to those and defend itself.  But they wouldn’t. They never responded. “We don’t apologize,” says Dallin Oaks. They don’t apologize.

GT  34:55  He also said something about, “Don’t criticize leaders, even if it’s true.”

Paul  34:59  Yeah, “Don’t criticize leaders, because we’re appointed by God. You can’t criticize us.” Well, then why in the Doctrine and Covenants, is there a whole section about how to excommunicate the President of the Church? Why is that there? Why did Jesus criticize the Sadducees and Pharisees? Yeah, he’s the Supreme Being, but not when He was on earth. He was just that Rabbi from Galilee that Podunk place up north. It’s crazy. Of course, you have to be able to bring your leaders to account, because if you don’t bring your leaders to account– and Joseph F. Smith, the sixth president of the Church, gave discourses about, “Don’t just be followers. You have to stand up to the leaders and don’t be cowed by us” Well, we bury that.  They bury a lot of things. So, yes, don’t criticize your leaders. So, the two things I was talking about were the things that the Mormon Alliance did. One was the case studies, which were about mostly bishops because they have the interviews with children and with young people. And there were cases where the bishops were sexually abusing. This is not about satanic stuff. It was just actual reports. And there were cases that went to court, and they were all sealed. And the Church settles these quietly. But these leaders have to be brought to account, because they’re not perfect people. They make mistakes, some of them commit crimes.

Paul  36:40  The other thing we did was that in early 1993, it was in April and May of 1993, so just a few months before the excommunications happened. The trustees of the Mormon Alliance got together at my house, and sometimes at a conference room somewhere. I can’t remember where it was. We were putting together a letter to the leaders of the Church, which we completed. It took six weeks of meetings where we would all meet together, editing this thing, working, so we could all agree on the language and on the content. And it was a wonderful letter. It’s in my book here, I’ve included it. And it was a wonderful letter that outlined what we felt the leaders needed to avoid doing. We weren’t telling them what to do. We were telling them what to avoid. One of the things that we told them to avoid was you can’t hold disciplinary church courts on people in the stakes that are being engineered from Salt Lake. You’re pulling the strings. I mean, if the Doctrine and Covenants says that a Melchizedek priesthood bearer has to be tried by the High Council, you can’t have the Quorum of the Twelve, instigating this from Salt Lake and pulling the strings. Because these high councilmen will lose all their independence. So, you can’t pretend. You can’t hide that you can’t do it. Stop doing that. Stop using the…

GT  38:18  They haven’t stopped now, have they?

Paul  38:20  No, they haven’t. I said you can’t use the bishop’s endorsement at BYU as a way of controlling kids. Their religion is separate from their education. You can’t threaten to throw them out of BYU and waste all that money in education. Even though a lot of it is paid by tithing, that’s not a reason. I mean, you complain about the federal government extorting us by handouts. You know, we won’t give you the federal money unless you obey us. That’s kind of what you’re doing. Stop. Because the kids will remember, and they will lose their faith. You cannot coerce morality and you cannot coerce spirituality and you cannot coerce devotion. But they love coercion. They do it to each other in the Council of the Twelve. The Council of Twelve isn’t this way [horizontal], the Council into Twelve is this way [vertical.] And every junior apostle has his nose planted firmly between the buttocks of the apostle on the ladder ahead of him. Yes, I know you don’t like it because it’s vulgar. What they do is much worse than vulgarity.

GT  39:35  Except Packer.

Paul  39:37  Well, Packer wouldn’t do that. That’s exactly right. He bullied his way around that a lot of the time but in the end, I mean, he was having arguments…

GT  39:46  And Lee was another one.

Paul  39:47  Oh, Lee was just very upset at everybody all the time he was there.

GT  39:56  It seems like J Reuben Clark, Harold B. Lee and Boyd K. Packer…

Paul  40:00  It started, really, with J. Reuben Clark, because J. Reuben Clark never went to church for 40 years and then was in the First Presidency. Here’s the guy who invented Family Home Evening, but never met with his own family. I’m not saying he couldn’t have a good idea. I’m just saying that when this stuff comes out, you begin to doubt how sincere [they are.]

Paul  40:33  Now, there’s still Mormonism in me. It’s 30 years after I’m excommunicated. And I know all the problems with the Book of Mormon and the translation and the Book of Abraham and all of that, the Pearl of Great Price. But I look at it like parables. I look at it like–historians are trying to find out, was Shakespeare written by the guy in Stratford, or was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Who was it?

Paul  41:12  And I’d say, “Well, okay, I really don’t care.” Because I’ve actually read the plays. There’s value in the plays, regardless of who wrote them. Now, of course, people like John Dehlin, and others are going to say, “But Paul, the book presents itself as a history.”

Paul  41:36  Yes, it does. But what if it isn’t? Then the fact that it presents itself as a history is part of the charm of the book. You have to figure out that it’s not a history. And why would God present us with a book that presents itself as a history, for which we can find little or no historical evidence? Why would he do this? It’s because we’re all trapped in a Newtonian view of reality. We all think that our perceptions are true. We all think that the world operates in one thing after another, cause and effect or even if not cause and effect, chronologically. One thing happens after another, because that’s how we experience it. Our sentences are one thing happen after another, subject, verb, predicate. Right? We’re trapped in this. Even the Chinese with their–they think logically. But what if it isn’t exactly like that?

Paul  42:41  One of the great investigators of UFOs is the astrophysicist and one of the guys who invented ARPANET, a very great scientist by the name of Jacques Vallee, whose books everyone should read, now that the Navy has admitted that the UFOs are not hoaxes, and not the product of deranged mental thinking. People should go back and read what Jacques Vallee has been saying for 50 years. They’re not extraterrestrials. They’ve always happened. And we’ve never taken the time or the money to find out what’s going on here. But one of his conclusions is that that these phenomena are happening to break us out of this perceptional trap that we have, that we understand that our perceptions are telling us the truth about reality, when, actually, it’s a partial reality. What we see is only a part. We’re seeing the elephant’s trunk and think it’s a snake, but there’s more to it. There’s an elephant there somewhere. And we get this when we–scientists are telling us that the universe is only, we only see 4% or 5% of it. 96% of the universe is beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s not something that we can even examine. And, how can we have the arrogance? How can we have the arrogance to believe that our perceptions and our science with this–it’s a great methodology. I believe in science. I love science. It’s silly to say you believe in science, because it’s not a religion. It’s a process. I believe in observation and experiments and quantifying evidence and getting the bad evidence out. I believe in all of that. I think that works, that works fine, but it doesn’t work for 96% of the universe, which we can’t observe.

Paul  44:44  And so, the Book of Mormon is in the tradition of sacred texts that are not susceptible to historical or scientific inquiry, nor should they be, because we should be looking at the content. We should not be looking around Denmark for Elsinore, and where did they bury Hamlet? Or trying to figure out where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern landed on the shores of England. We should be reading the play for what it tells us about human nature. And so, we should be reading the Book of Mormon for what it tells us on the frontispiece. What does it tell us about the Supreme Being Jesus Christ? That’s what it’s for. It’s not to prove we’re right. That’s why we want to find Zarahemla, so that we can say to all the other religions, “God’s talking to us and not to you.” But the Book of Mormon isn’t there to be about us. It’s there to pull us out of our conceptual bubble. In politics and in the secular world, if you want to know what’s going on, follow the money. But in religion, when it comes to consciousness, when it comes to the spiritual world, you have to follow the anomalies. And if you follow the anomalies, if you follow out of body experiences and near-death experiences, and remote viewing, and open your mind to the possibility that they’re not just hoaxes, and the product of mental illness and delusion. And you start looking at the studies that have been done almost for 120 years, by very competent people, you realize that the Book of Mormon falls in the tradition of that. It’s not a roadmap to certainty. It is, in fact, to break our lust for certainty, and to force us to live–like the man in the New Testament who said to the Lord, “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Paul  46:51  You know, we have peaks and troughs. We have to negotiate the fact that certainty, you can’t have it. The more the island of your knowledge grows, the more it borders on the sea of the unknown, the more questions you have, and the less you think you know.  People with a tiny island of knowledge are always certain, because they don’t have any cognitive dissonance. They don’t have enough Island. But if you have a big enough island of knowledge, you’re going to always feel like you don’t know anything. And your criticism of others has to be based on that. So, I’m reluctant to dismiss Mormonism just because Joseph Smith made mistakes or to dismiss the Egyptians’ religion because they seem to be heavily involved in very large blocks of limestone, and very physical. The pyramid was very physical. I can’t get in their mind. It’s too long ago. But I might be able to get into the mind of Joseph Smith and to Manuel Swedenborg. I could get in Joan of Arc and Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hildegard von Bingen, these mystics and Joseph Smith, I can think is like that. And soon as you get a mystic, the first thing they want to do is have sex with somebody. It’s like those camp revivals that they used to have in the south. All the kids would come and then they hear the preacher and then they go out and they’d have sex in the woods. What can you do, a human being? But that doesn’t mean, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t value. Right? Just because the gold mine is under a pig farm and you’ve got to dig through a lot of manure to get to the gold, doesn’t mean there isn’t a there isn’t gold down there. And there is, but nowadays, we are so concerned about the history of Mormonism that we have completely abandoned the theology.

Paul  49:02  So those are the kinds of things I was saying, between 1985 and 1993. I have books of essays, a couple of them republished by Signature Books, and a couple of them I self-published, because I wanted to have the copyright. And you can look those up on Amazon. You put Paul Toscano in Amazon books, and you can see the 14 or 15 books I’ve written. Most of them are–there’s a couple of novels. And there’s mostly essays, because I wanted to keep a record. And that’s why I wrote this book. It wasn’t really to combat the Church, but I wanted to leave my record of what happened to me. And I’m glad that Lindholm wrote this book, because it tells what happened. In 1992, we created the Mormon Alliance, and then in ’93, we wrote the letter. And then a lot of things were happening at BYU. There were BYU professors who were up for tenure, and they didn’t get tenure. I think David Knowlton was one of them. And then there was another professor, I forget.

GT  50:08  Rob Rees, Bob Rees.

Paul  50:10  I don’t think it was Bob Rees. It was a woman. It’s in the introduction of Lindholm’s book. He talks about it. And before that there was, in ’79, there was Sonia Johnson and then Fawn Brodie and Dale Morgan. There were other historians who got crosswise with the Church. But because the leaders of the Church have this linear idea that everything about the Church has to be perfect. This obsession with perfection–I’ve taught my daughters and my granddaughter, that perfection is the enemy to goodness. This obsession with being perfect destroys goodness. And this cancel culture, woke culture that we’ve got, now. If you make one mistake, you’re canceled. Well, that is a tiger you have by the tail, because it’s going to come back and eat you. You know? So, I think we tried to say these things. There was a writer, a Mormon scholar, who I like, I had conversations with him. He’s a good chap. He wrote Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy. I forget people’s names.[1] They slip out of my mind. Do you know who I mean?

GT  51:29  I do not.

Paul  51:30  Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy–well, I can’t remember his name offhand. Maybe it’ll pop into my mind. He lumped me and, I think, Dan Rector and other people who had written, Margaret, he said [that] we’re like Evangelicals. We’re not like Evangelical, we’re the opposite. We’re not fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalists. We’re not Mormon fundamentalist. But he listed us in the same category with Ernest Wilkinson, the President of BYU, which made me laugh. Because I met President Ernest Wilkinson, and he was a very lawyerly guy with almost no religious knowledge or experience whatsoever. The most religious thing is that that he died on April 6^th.

GT  52:21  (Chuckling)

Paul  52:23  I felt that was well-timed. I wish him well, wherever he is.

Paul  52:28  So by ’93, a lot of stuff was brewing. There was a lot of tension. I mean, I think that Dallin Oaks gave a talk about Alternate Voices, and how we can’t have any alternate voices. And you’ve always got to sustain your leaders, even if they’re wrong, that kind of thing. When the..

GT  52:50  Which is what happened in both Mountain Meadows and the Willie handcart disaster. Right?

Paul  52:57  Yeah, I mean, it’s a dictators, jackpot, “Don’t say anything mean about me. So, I can proceed to do all the mean things that I do.” It’s absurd. It has nothing to do with whether you’re called. A person who has the Holy Ghost, I believe who has the spirit, who is anointed, and is trying to do the will of God is going to welcome that. It’s unpleasant. No one likes to be criticized. I’ve had criticism. I don’t like it either. But I wouldn’t silence the person. Sometimes it’s very difficult to deal with people who criticize me, because they don’t let you defend yourself. Or they criticize you. I don’t want to–if somebody says I’m racist, I want to think about that, because I try not to be. And I admit, I might be, because I didn’t grow up with black people. I don’t have that benefit of having that kind of contact. Just, my life didn’t go that way. But I don’t want to be told I’m racist, just because I’m a white male that’s 77. Because I don’t think that’s fair. But I know that there are some people who believe that’s true. I would engage with them, if they would engage with me about it, because I think then we’d have to talk about nuance. But, if going to attribute to an individual person, the worst elements of the class to which he belongs, I think that’s bigotry. And I don’t want that to happen to me.

Paul  54:47  By the same token, I don’t want the apostles of the LDS Church, because they’re in the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency, to feel like there’s they are immune from [criticism.] They should be inviting criticism and have a mechanism to deal with it. Jesus never insulated himself from criticism. And notice they don’t criticize. They excoriate young people and their members in closed meetings, but they’re not speaking against inflation. They’re not speaking against the Starbucks guy that won’t let his workers unionize to get $15 an hour, which is not a living wage. They won’t speak and they won’t quote Amos 8, where the Lord says, “I’m done with you, because you tip the scales, and you rob the poor.” I don’t see our apostles inflamed with the desire to help the oppressed. I see them with 124,000 millions of dollars in Peak Ensign and not spending any of it. Of course, that’s not in a bank. Where is it? Mobil Oil, Enron. It’s invested. Invested with whom? I don’t know. They don’t tell you. They’ve got to repent. I don’t feel called of God to call them to repent. I just pointed out, you’re losing members because you get on the wrong side of nearly every single social justice issue in the 20^th and 21^st century. And of course, you’re going to look bad, and you can’t hide behind Jesus’s robes like they did. They blamed racism on the Lord. I can’t tell you how that infuriated me. They’re going to blame racism on the Lord or homophobia on the Lord or xenophobia on the Lord or misogyny on the Lord. Isn’t that crucifying him again, and putting them to open shame by blaming him for their sins?

GT  57:05  You know, Paul, I was talking to somebody recently, and he said, “Do you think Paul and Margaret would ever get rebaptized?” Maxine Hanks did and who was the other one? Oh, it was Avraham.

Paul  57:18  I would. I would get rebaptized. I would get be rebaptized if they’d let me say these things. But they won’t. They said that to me. They said [that] you can’t come back unless you say you’ve been wrong about everything, wrong about your attitude, wrong about the things you’ve said. We’re right, and you’re wrong. And I say, “Well, we’ll see. Death comes for us all.” Even for apostles it comes. Even for me, an apostate, it comes.

GT  57:47  So, you would get rebaptized if you didn’t have to change anything and didn’t have to…

Paul  57:52  Yeah, if they’d let me speak. If they let me go on the circuit like Fiona and Terryl Givens and give my version of what it is. Yes, I would.

GT  58:00  Wow.

Paul  58:01  But they’re never going to do that, because it undercuts their authority. But their authority isn’t based on truth. All authority has to be based on truth, or it’s a shambles. It’s the truth. And Jesus says I’m the WAY the TRUTH, and the life, I think. And if you move off the foundation of truth, you’re on sand and mud, and your building is going to collapse. And it’s going to collapse, like that building did in Florida. And you’re going to be paying billions of dollars in reparations, whether you do that metaphorically or actually, is what’s going to happen. Because it’s like in science. You can’t craft the evidence to fit the model. You have to follow the evidence and change the model. And scientists have a really hard time doing that. And like science, scientists, they’re very vain. And they like to be reminded of all the good they’ve done. But it’s the scientists who made fracking possible. It’s the scientists who made the oil companies as successful as they are at damaging the planet. It’s the scientists who perceive the ice shelf breaking off in the Antarctic, who have contributed directly to that happening. Science is the one who creates the antibiotic, but they also do the testing of the viruses, what they call the gain.  There’s a name for it where they tried to make the virus more virulent, so they can find an antidote for it, but potentially that can escape. They still have smallpox virus. I remember reading that in Russia they have it in a refrigerator that has a padlock on it. Oh, that just makes me so happy. And so yeah, scientists want to be thought of as the good guys but when you look past that and you remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the hydrogen bomb, things that they blew up and the downwinders that they damaged in southern Utah, because they said, “Oh, that cloud’s not going to [hurt anyone.] Yeah, it’s fine.” Or what is it? The reactor in Japan, Fukushima. I can’t remember. I’m terrible with remembering names. Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, I remember that one.

Paul  1:00:51  So, you have these examples of mistakes. Who did it? Scientists, technicians, and engineers. We rely on them for our comforts and for our civilization, and they should be honored for that, but we must not forget. And the same with the apostles. The same with the LDS Church. The LDS Church is not an instrument of salvation, it is the thing from which we must be saved. Our families are not instruments of salvation. They are the thing from which we must be saved. How do I know this? Because in the 23^rd chapter of Matthew, Jesus condemns the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the church leaders, because the religion of the Jews was killing them. And with the idea of the family, I mean, Jesus said, “You have to leave father and mother.” You have to leave father and mother. It’s not your father and mother that you–yeah, I believe in family sealings, but those family sealings were supposed to be sealings of cohorts of like-minded people, spiritual family. But it changed after a certain time, and it became the exaltation of the biological family. That’s why people are so worried. They’re worried that their kids who go out and have illicit sex or take drugs, they’re not going to be in the Celestial kingdom with them.

Paul  1:02:25  Well, they’re attributing to God, their own fear and their narrow-mindedness and their refusal to realize that people are on earth in order to experience things.  And as heartbreaking as it can be sometimes, you’re not going to be able to march arm in arm akimbo, goose-stepping into the Celestial kingdom, under orders. That isn’t what happens. That was exactly what Jesus was against. I mean, he made whips, one whip, I think, and booted the chickens and pigeons every direction, and was yelling at the Pharisees because they were so certain. They were the first Calvinists, at least as presented. And I don’t know how the Jews would see their own religion, because I’m not a Jew. But at least as it’s presented in Christianity. And I’m not saying that that’s an historical reality about Pharisees. I don’t know. But I do know that the idea of Pharisees is real, even if the Pharisees didn’t exist at the time of Jesus in the way it’s presented. And I’ve seen Pharisees. I’ve met Pharisees. I’ve heard Pharisees in the Mormon Church stand up and bear their testimony on fast Sunday. I know that they exist. There are Pharisees in the Council of the Twelve. Boyd Packer was a Pharisee. And a bigger Pharisee than him was Harold B. Lee, and a bigger Pharisee than him was J. Reuben Clark. And Brigham Young was a Pharisee. Because they believed that you could mandate righteousness. But you can only mandate a kind of corporate self-righteousness.

Paul  1:04:14  Real righteousness isn’t something that is imposed on someone. It comes out of them by kind of a grace. The grace of God brings it out, it unfolds. And it may take years for it to unfold. These are the kinds of things we tried in the ’80s to ’93. And when I got excommunicated, Kerry was very angry at me, my stake president. He said, “It’s like parents and children. I’m the parent, I set the rules. You obey.”

Paul  1:04:48  I said, Kerry, “First, you’re not that much older than I am. Second of all, you are a dumb real estate agent. I didn’t say dumb. I said you are a real estate agent. You don’t know anything about theology. Stay out of this. Because I can tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to do the will of Boyd Packer, your old friend. You’re going to excommunicate me. And then he’s going to throw you away like an old newspaper, because you will have done your duty and then it’s over.” And that’s what happened. Because, in a corporate structure like the Church’s corporate, the worker bees are like worker bees going to the hive. Hive is not, it’s a bad metaphor, but accurate. In a corporation, the owners treat the workers like machines. And when they break down, they get rid of them. And if they have to have more profits at the top, they squeeze them at the bottom.

Paul  1:05:58  And I ask you, the Church is built like that. The women do a lot of the work in the Church, but a woman, outside the home where she might, husband might be henpecked. But out in the structure, no woman can ever give a directive to any man, even a 12-year-old boy, really. And the 12-year boys know that. They have more authority, more power and more status than their mothers. That’s misogyny because it has no basis in scripture. Section 76 where it talks about the priesthood, and people lining up to go to the Celestial kingdom, does not put it in terms of men. The temple ceremony says with the robe on the right shoulder, you can do any ordinance of the Melchizedek priesthood. And that’s said to women at the same time, it’s said to men. If it means nothing to women, it means nothing to men. If it means what it does to men, it means the exact same thing to women. And because this will be aired, and the leaders of the Church will hear it, they’ll change that in the temple.

Paul  1:07:10  So yes. We said all these things, and because I did, I was excommunicated.

GT  1:07:16  One of the things I’d like to do, could we jump into the timeline a little bit closer?

Paul  1:07:20  Sure. You ask. I’ve done my thing. You’re going to cut and edit this however you want. And that’s right. Tell me what your question is. Lead me. Guide me. Walk beside me.

GT  1:07:33  We’ve got a good sense for the things that you’ve advocated and leaders had problems with. So, let’s talk about the timeline. About when did you first learn you were in trouble? Talk about the events that happened leading up to September of ’93.

Paul  1:07:50  It was in August. Well, first of all, on June 17, Margaret, my wife had a…

GT  1:08:00  This is in ’93?

Paul  1:08:01  In 1993. On June 17 of 1993, Margaret went down to BYU at the invitation of a woman’s group called Voice. It wasn’t a sorority, it was just a group of BYU coeds. And she was asked to give a presentation not on the mother in heaven. It was on images of the female divine. I’m going like this, folks. This means a slide projector. That’s what I’m indicating here. I carried the slide projector down and set up the screen and I would work the slides. That was my job. And she had a gazillion slides of artwork all over the world that showed images of female divinities. And that’s what her presentation was, female divine images from across the world and what they might look like and what they might mean. At the end of this presentation, the girls who are very perspicacious. They’re not dumb by any means.  They said, “Well, what do you think about the heavenly mother?”

Paul  1:09:21  And she says, “Well, I think Mormonism has a heavenly mother.”

Paul  1:09:24  “And why don’t we hear about it?”

Paul  1:09:26  “Well, the Mormon doctrine of the Heavenly Mother has been repressed, but it’s there,” and all of that. And they had a conversation that would then get out of the way. It turns out, though, that there was a reporter from the Daily Universe, the school paper there. And it also turns out that the faculty advisor to the Daily Universe newspaper, which incidentally, I had that job once in the past. I was on the communications faculty at BYU and was in charge of the student body papers when Dale Van Atta and others were there, that eventually became regular journalists.

Paul  1:10:06  And anyway, that advisor was on vacation, because it was in June. And so, I think I got the wrong date. I had to be on June 16 that we went down. Because on June 17, the very next day, the Universe appears, and Margaret’s picture is on the front page. And on it, it says, “Mother God repressed,” scholar says, something like that. I have a picture of that. Here it is. You won’t see it see it very well, because it was a very poor reproduction. But you can, here it is. I’ll show you that it’s June 7, and it says, “Mother God repressed, Voice told.” Voice being the name of this student group. Well, Boyd Packer reads it. I think he may have only read that newspaper back then. And he was furious. So, he finds out who the stake president is of Margaret and me. And it turns out to be Kerry Hines. And Kerry Hines was an old friend of his who worked in the Seminary and Institute program in Brigham City, before he became a general authority, before Boyd Packer became a general authority. And one of their buddies was Melvin Hammond. Melvin Hammond was in an area presidency in Mexico at the time. And Kerry was our stake president. And Boyd is in Salt Lake presiding, being an apostle. So, he doesn’t call Kerry directly. Because he knows he shouldn’t.

GT  1:12:03  Because that’s what the D&C says.

Paul  1:12:05  Thou shalt not influence the stake president over judicial matters, apostles. So, he picks up the phone and calls Melvin Hammond and triangulates. He said, “Well, why can’t Kerry keep her quiet? Why can’t he control that woman?” That woman is what he said. We learned this much later, in October of ’93 is when I learned about it. But what happened on June 17, was that.

Paul  1:12:38  Well, that day, Melvin calls Kerry and says, “Elder Packer called me, but he says, ‘Why can’t you control that woman?'” And so Kerry immediately calls Margaret, and calls her in for the next Sunday to meet with her.

Paul  1:12:51  And I said, “Well, I’ll go with you, Margaret.”

Paul  1:12:57  “No.”

GT  1:12:59  Did she know why she was being called in?

Paul  1:13:01  I don’t know what he said. He said he was concerned about some of the things she had been saying publicly. I think we knew that. And she didn’t want me to go. Well, the reason why, I guess I can say this, “Margaret, and I had an argument.” I said, “Well just give in, just tell him. I mean, if I went there, I’d just kind of give in and say that I’d do it, but then go on, and do what I want. I think you should maybe do that.”

Paul  1:13:34  And so she’s putting her hair up. And I’m watching her. She’s putting her hair up in the mirror. And she said, “You know, Paul, I’m not comfortable with that.”

Paul  1:13:47  I said, “Well, sometimes you have to just find a way to make things work” and then I said, “Of course, if it were me, I wouldn’t do that. I’d just confront them.”

Paul  1:14:02  She turned around and she says, “What makes you think I won’t confront them? I can confront them.” I may be remembering it [wrong.]  If she were here, she might correct me in exactly how I tell the story.

GT  1:14:13  I’ll have to get her side of the story.

Paul  1:14:15  Get her side of the story, but that’s how I remember it. I should