The following remarks were shared as part of the United Kingdom Conference held in Leeds, England on November 14, 2023.

Knowing that I was coming over here, I found some quotes from Englishmen to use. Assuming that a proper education…

[Audio cuts out from 0:15 to 0:35 . Denver quoted Winston Churchill as follows: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”]

…That’s one of the problems with religion, generally, and the truth, almost invariably. 

George Bernard Shaw said, “Beware of false knowledge; [it’s] more dangerous than ignorance.” Ignorance leaves you, you know, still unaware; false knowledge makes you certain. And that’s where unbelief comes from. 

And then this other one, which I like most of all, from George Bernard Shaw, “All great truths begin as blasphemies,” which is where often we find ourselves. I had a Catholic friend—I still have him; I shouldn’t talk of him in the past tense—I had a Catholic friend who heard I had been excommunicated from the LDS Church for writing a book, and he called me excited about that, saying, “You know that when you write a book and get excommunicated from a religion, over time that makes you a saint!” He said, “Someday, you’re going…” Well, as a Catholic would think, “Someday you’re going to be canonized!” I thought, “Oh, settle down. You’re my friend because you coach baseball, and that’s what we talk about, not religion.” 

He’s an honest man, however. I went to the Rose Festival at the Catholic Church with him. He owned a motorcycle. I owned a Harley Davidson. We went on a poker ride (and this was a Catholic Church affair). On a poker ride, you ride from bar to bar to bar, and then you stop at the bar, and you get a card. And after you have made five stops, you have five cards. And depending upon the hand, someone would have the winning hand with the best group of cards. Now, when we got to the fourth stop, which was a bar in a little town called Lehi, Utah (full of cowboys and about 98% Mormon), the bartender was talking about how the Catholics were welcome; they ought to come back. They have a big affair every week on Wednesday evenings where the local Relief Society ladies come in for dinner at this Lehi, Utah bar. And so if the Relief Society could go on Wednesday evenings, I felt proper as (then) a Latter-day Saint attending the same thing. But it was going on too long, and I had to leave. So I gave my four cards to my Catholic friend, and I had to go home; we had some family thing going on. He kept my four cards. He went to the fifth bar, he collected two cards, and then he went back to the Catholic Church in Draper, Utah, submitted two hands of cards, and in my absence, my Catholic friend said I had the winning hand. I won a $700 leather coat as a result of winning the Catholic poker run. I wonder how many Mormon friends, Presbyterian friends, or others entrusted with the winning hand and in my absence would have surrendered a $700 leather coat because it was me that was the winner and not him. He’s a trusted friend, as a consequence. I know him to be honest. 

I’ve been listening to everything that got said here today, and I was struck in particular by Amberli’s statement about this singular individual: that murder went on among the Nephites, but it wasn’t coupled with “secret” until Gadianton, and then the account that she gives of how things progressed from there until the utter destruction of the people because of the prevalence of secret murder among the Nephites. And I’m persuaded by her book; I think she makes a very sad but telling point. 

When I was a law student at Brigham Young University, it was a very young law school, comparatively; I would be in the fifth graduating class. But every year, because the president of the university and the dean of the law school and several of the other members of the faculty had been clerks at the United States Supreme Court, every year during the moot court competition, we would have one or more members of the United States Supreme Court come to the law school to sit during the moot court competition by the students, and then they would meet with us afterwards. And I met a number of the Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice Warren Burger, while I was a law student. (And I was a member of the ad hoc committee with Chief Justice Warren Burger that founded the American Inns of Court, modeled after the British Inns of Court. And so someday, I hope in London to visit the Inns of Court there.) But one of the justices who visited while he was there was Justice Harry Blackmun. 

Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion in Roe vs. Wade, which in 1973 made abortion legal in the United States. No one voted on it; no one had a say on it; it went through the courts. And Justice Blackmun wrote an opinion which said that, through the third trimester, abortion was a constitutional protected right not found in the language of the Constitution but found in (and this is the language) found in the penumbra to the right to privacy. “Penumbra” is a word that describes that gray zone between light and dark; it’s not fully lit, but you’re still somewhat out of the darkness. And in that vague, poorly illuminated (if you can call it that) area between the right to privacy (that we think is brightly lit in the Constitution) and some things that may possibly be implied, there was this right to privacy that guaranteed a woman the ability to have an abortion. 

There’s a scathing dissent written by Justice Rehnquist (who also would come to our law school while I was a law student), and Justice Rehnquist said, “There’s absolutely no precedent for finding this to belong to the right to privacy. It didn’t exist at the time the Constitution was written; it was illegal and considered immoral—in fact, criminal—in every one of the original 13 states that adopted the Constitution, and it is, by and large, illegal throughout the nation at this time.” 

And so you have a “penumbra” in the majority opinion, and you have an outright declaration that what Justice Blackmun had written is a load of crap! However, there is a majority opinion and a dissenting opinion written by Rehnquist—there were other opinions that joined in for other reasons—but Blackmun’s was the majority opinion. And it was like they were speaking opposite one another in different directions with different reasoning, without ever coming together to meet one another’s arguments. 

So when Justice Blackmun opened up the meeting for questions in the moot courtroom, and I was raising my hand to ask a question, and Dean Lee knew that was problematic, Dean Lee was relieved to see Blackmun was calling on people throughout. I was on the far left (I guess I would have been on Justice Rehnquist’s far right, which is probably a little more symbolically suitable). And after trying to be called on for some time, Justice Blackmun said, “Oh, I’ll take one more question. I haven’t called on anyone from over there.” And he called on me, and Dean Lee looked like, “Gah. I could have gone all day without having this!”

So I stood up, and I said, “Justice Blackmun, we have a dissenting opinion in Roe vs. Wade.” Okay. I just spoke the tragic words “Roe vs. Wade.” He’d been on campus for like two weeks, and no one had invoked Roe vs. Wade, and now there it is in all its messiness, sitting right on the table. 

“In the dissenting opinion written by Justice Rehnquist in Roe vs. Wade, you in the majority seem to be like two ships passing in the night. Would you please respond to Justice Rehnquist’s dissenting opinion and explain why he got it wrong?” 

[Impersonating Elvis]: Thank you very much. Elvis has left the building. 

And I sat down, and there was this long, awkward pause while Justice Rehnquist Justice Blackmun paced back and forth up behind the bar at the front of the moot courtroom, rubbing his hair back. And after a long silence, he did not answer my question, but essentially said… Well, he first told the story about how when he came to the Supreme Court, the Sergeant at Arms came into his newly assigned chambers and dropped a large book on the table with a loud thump and said, “Sign it.” And he looked at the book, and it was the Bible. And it had the signatures of venerable prior justices: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Taft, there were a number of names that he listed, and he’s kind of being a tourist looking at the signatures in the Bible, when the Sergeant at Arms [clearing his throat loudly] clears his throat like, “Get on with it.” And he signed his name, and the Sergeant at Arms closed the Bible and left. 

He said he was a religious man. He said he was a man of faith. And he said that religiously there was no way that he could justify abortion. But he said constitutionally he did not see any way to prevent it. And therefore, what he wrote in the majority opinion, he felt had to be done—all of which got sent down the river by a decision of the Supreme Court just in the last few years, in which they overruled Roe vs. Wade, and they sent the decision back to the states for the states to grapple with, and not as something that gets imposed from the top without the public being able to vote on the matter.

This is from the Book of Mormon: Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right, but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right (Mosiah 13:6 RE).

In 1973, the people did not have a vote; they were not given the opportunity to decide that. A single man, acting in the role of Gadianton, imposed upon an entire nation of over 200 million people the judicially imposed, from-the-top-down ed