Do Honest Questions Aid and Comfort Anti-Mormons?

I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies’ usage
then I began to wonder


II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege

--Adrienne Rich, “North American Time,” from _Your Native Land, Your Life_

Rich’s poem calls me to consider the ethics of speaking into any fierce public divide and the ways the polemics of appropriation can deform what I hope to say. The “political correctness” she describes in the first section shrivels her voice as she notes what she shrinks from reporting “for fear of our enemies’ usage.” I’m very reluctant to use the term “enemy,” especially categorically. I certainly don’t consider someone my enemy simply because he has left or disagrees with the LDS Church. But as I see some of the uses to which those who actively oppose the Church might put our words here, I’m tempted to recoil from those hard and merciful interrogations to which the thoughtful life calls me and to censor myself until I only dimly echo the aphorisms of unthinking consent. On the Internet, how easily our words can fall into the hands of those would concatenate them into inexorable chains whose conclusions we would abhor. It’s not difficult to think of examples, historical and contemporary, of words written and repeated in willful innocence of the ways they have been brandished in bloody triumph over others’ broken bodies and souls, some of which Rich goes on to name in her poem. So, to paraphrase a question once put to Christ, who is my enemy, and what, besides the love enjoined in the Sermon on the Mount, do I owe her? What do I owe the enemy of my enemy who might find himself assailed by my words in my enemy’s mouth? In addition to the obligations to integrity and to mercy that attend all communication, I wonder how to take ethical account of the sometimes bitter public divide between Mormons and anti-Mormons into which our words here now inevitably fall.

My faith and covenants make possible all my inquiry, which I hope to conduct in a spirit of devotion. Although I cannot control the uses to which my words may be put by others, and although I remain committed to welcoming every honest expression of faith or doubt and every sincere question, I hope to foster a dialogue that honors its constitutive faith, even, and perhaps especially, in its most acute, most heartfelt interrogations.