It may surprise you, but the LDS Church does keep up on its members' activities. There is an organization within the Church called the Committee for Strengthening the Members, which keeps files on members the Church considers potentially or actually subversive in some way. When Mormon intellectuals end up in an ecclesiastical court, euphemistically and alternatively entitled, 'Courts of Love,' they are sometimes surprised to find thick files on the table sitting next to their judges. You see, back in the day, the Lord revealed to his people that he wanted them to keep track of all of the nasty lies told about His Church.
His Church took Him seriously. The only problem is that many of the things they collected were not actually lies. Some of them were simply unflattering truths. When Joseph Smith ordered that the Nauvoo Expositor be destroyed, it was because the Expositor was going to print the unflattering truths that Joseph Smith was marrying many women, some of whom were already married, and that he had had himself anointed king of the Kingdom of God on earth. It was all true, but only a few people were supposed to know it, and they were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. Fortunately, poor William Law only suffered the loss of his press. It was Joseph Smith who lost his life when a mob murdered him at Carthage jail while he vainly emptied the chambers of a small derringer into the stairwell leading up to his second-story holding place.
Today unflattering truths continue to be a problem for the Lord's kingdom, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that unflattering versions of the truth are. When historian Michael Quinn discovered that the LDS Relief Society had been modelled on the male priesthood, and that women essentially were given the priesthood in the temple ritual, this unflattering version of the truth got him ex-communicated. Here I should simply say the truth, because it simply is true. I could multiply examples of this problem, but you get the idea.
The key thing for us Mormons is to remain silent about things that might diminish the good image of the LDS Church. President Hinckley has generously told us on Larry King that we can believe anything we like, so long as we don't publish it. Thank God Utah joined the United States.
Well, as I said above, the Church takes all of this very seriously. They have a divine mandate to do so, evidently. So in order to keep the spring pure, or keep the wolves out of the flock (choose your metaphor), the Church spies on its own members. This has been going on from at least good old Nauvoo, when Joseph enlisted the help of two young men to infiltrate the reformed version of the LDS Church started by William Law. It continued much more egregiously in the Church's cooperation with the federal government to turn in secret polygamists in the mid twentieth century. It flourished especially on the BYU campus, where Ernest L. Wilkinson (otherwise known as Ernie the attorney) placed spies in the classroom to make sure the twin pillars of modern paganism (from a conservative perspective) evolution and communism, were not being taught in the Lord's university.
It also continued in the entrapment of gay Mormons on BYU campus. Gay sting operations were used to weed out homosexuals from the university and the flock. Bizarre experiments using electro-shock and aversion therapy were used for a while to make gay men straight. Oddly they were largely unsuccessful. Now days they simply deny that there is such a thing as a homosexual person. Homosexual behavior is simply a sin like any other, which can be changed through repentance. I guess some people believe it.
Now is the great day of spying on intellectuals and liberals. By the way, the real trick to disparaging the Church's so-called enemies is to put the qualifier 'so-called' before any reference to them. So the intellectuals who disagree with the Church are not really intellectuals, they are only "so-called intellectuals." Gays and lesbians are "so-called gays and lesbians" because the Church refuses to acknowledge their self-proclaimed identity. To the leaders of the LDS Church, there is no such thing as a homosexual person. You see, when you have the only true church on the earth, you also have the authority to arrogantly deny people their own identity. But I digress.
The habit of spying on members to weed out people who think differently is so very deeply entrenched, that now the student body at BYU does it without any explicit encouragement. They are so 'righteous' that they take it upon themselves to report their professors to higher authorities for such cardinal sins as making them read books with curse words in them and the like. Did I say that I feel really glad to be an American citizen? Well, some of these poor professors end up losing their jobs over the accusations of students. A couple have been fired or threatened because of material in the very books that won them their jobs. It's kind of like China during the Cultural Revolution, when you make the whole nation judge, jury, and executioner, no one, and I mean no one, is really safe.
Simon Southerton wrote a book about Amerindian DNA providing no indication that there were Hebrews here, contrary to the teachings of the Book of Mormon. While the people at FARMS and FAIR were scrambling to find a way to make this not matter in the least, the Church initiated a 'Court of Love' for Simon Southerton on the grounds that he slept with another woman some years ago when he was separated from his wife. Don't worry, I don't buy their pretext either. By the way, just where did they dig this up? Was spying involved perhaps?
Back to the spying. I hang out at one of these Yahoo! groups where liberal Mormons vent because being liberal in the LDS Church is frankly miserable. Life as a liberal is really swell in an organization where being a Democrat has been half jokingly considered grounds to deny people privileges of full-faith membership, where people regularly praise conservative presidents and their policies as divinely inspired, and where any strangley non-conservative-sounding thoughts are greeted with deafening silence. You feel loved.
Anyway, some of the people on this group got the crazy idea of sending flowers to President Hinckley on behalf of all the gay people who felt excluded by the Church's explicit support for all efforts (legal and semi-legal) to stop gay marriage from happening. The nice thing about moral certainty is that you feel you can impose your personal values on absolutely everyone else. Well, the folks who were planning this wanted to advertize their efforts on a website. Funny thing is, as soon as they discussed a possible domain name for it, the domain name was bought up by someone else. Well, it turned out that a Mormon apologist was spying on discussion groups to gather intelligence on such efforts.
Imagine it. In a Church that claims (albeit somewhat erroneously) to be 12 million strong, a zealous defender spied on the activities of a few discussion boards and to frustrate them where possible. Was he commanded by higher powers? We'll probably never know. Did he need to be? I doubt it. When a mentally ill Cody Judy held a fake bomb to the head of one of the LDS Church's top leaders, the students in attendance at the meeting started singing 'We thank thee, O God, for a prophet." The young perpetrator, thinking they were singing to him, was caught off guard. Suddenly a bunch of college-age Mormon men jumped on him. Some were kicking him and saying, "Don't mess with the elders of Israel." Just think. They didn't know whether the kid had a real bomb or not. That didn't stop them. Now who's crazy?
