Here’s an article from the Salt Lake Tribune that serves as the beginning of 5 points about work place records.
1 For as long as we work at our various institutions, we should insist on seeing and reading and reviewing our official file.
2 We should insist on reviewing and photocopying every bit in it every six months.
3 If we find something questionable or just plain wrong headed in our official file, we discuss it point blank with our file leaders and get it amended.
4 If and when our leaders dismiss us, we demand to review and photocopy the complete file.
5 Federal law requires that certain types of documents stay in an organization for a year, or a few years, or forever. If the leadership has deliberately removed or suppressed documents in the official file, you can and should take legal action. Do not go gentle into that good night without your own set of documentation.
As to the details of why BYU fired Kendall Wilcox – it doesn’t take much of a sense of prophecy to know what has happened here. These sorts of firings turn into cases of he says/he says – and both parties then accuse the other of presenting only a certain percentage of the real truth. However, the issue in these sorts of cases is the difference between what official excuses the institution presents to the public and what its real reason actually turns out to be.
And now, the article.
Openly gay BYU producer, filmmaker fired
Response » School insists sexual identity wasn’t a factor, saying employee failed to show up for work or talk to supervisor
Preserved from the Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/52947893-78/wilcox-byu-jenkins-church.html.csp
By Peggy Fletcher Stack The Salt Lake Tribune
Published: November 18, 2011 03:35PM
Updated: November 18, 2011 03:43PM
LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University has fired Kendall Wilcox, an executive producer in the school’s broadcasting department who, on his own time, is making an independent documentary about being gay and Mormon.
Wilcox announced the move Friday morning on his Facebook page, saying he was terminated the previous week by his BYU supervisors who “cited certain tasks and communications that I had not performed to their liking.”
The Emmy-winning filmmaker, who did not immediately return phone calls and emails Friday, defended himself in his post. He said he faced “an increasingly hostile work environment over the last several months with which I refused to continue to engage.”
BYU spokeswoman Carrie Jenkins said emphatically that Wilcox wasn’t let go for being gay or for his work on the documentary.
She mentioned Wilcox’s August interview about his life and work with Radio West’s Doug Fabrizio, in which he told the radio host that his BYU supervisors “were very respectful and loving” when he told them about his homosexuality and documentary project.
“They kept reminding me over and over about our friendship,” Wilcox told Fabrizio. “and since then all of our interactions have been full of love and respect and open-heartedness.”
According to Jenkins, however, Wilcox has not stepped into BYU Broadcasting offices for two months.
“Kendall was terminated for two basic reasons,” Jenkins said Friday. “He refused to come to work and he refused to communicate with his supervisor.”
Jenkins said the school was surprised by Wilcox’s claim about “a hostile work environment.”
That was something “he had said in a text message to his supervisors,” she said, “but this claim did not go through human resources or through [BYU’s} equal opportunity office.”
Wilcox did not return calls, but he did caution Facebook readers not to see his firing “as one more example of institutionalized homophobia on the part of BYU or the [LDS] Church.”
He is still optimistic that the Mormon community “is at a time in our history when we are proactively putting the destructive polemics behind us and treating each other with genuine love, respect and empathy.”
To that end, Wilcox is continuing to work on Far Between, a film that will document his journey to find a place in a faith that gives him no option but a life of celibacy and in a culture that pushes him to reject his religion. He is interviewing current and former Mormons, activists and defenders, those in mixed-orientation marriages, gays with longtime partners, writers, scholars, therapists, mothers, spouses and children to see how they manage that tension. The film’s tone will be respectful of all positions and experiences, he told The Salt Lake Tribune in July, letting the narrative take him in diverse directions.
He also created a nonprofit organization, Empathy First Initiative, to help improve conversations about homosexuality and other issues.
“No one is perfect at this, least of all me,” Wilcox wrote on Facebook. “But I do believe we’ve reached a tipping point at which — while keeping an eye to the sad events of the past regarding the [LDS] Church and homosexuality — we can all support one another in seeking truth, forgiveness and reconciliation.”
Together , he said, “we are making it better.”
© 2011 The Salt Lake Tribune
Saturday, November 19, 2011
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