This is a long read but a good one by a Constitutional law professor and the then-President Rex Lee of BYU, a man held in high esteem in the Mormon community a generation ago.

At some point in his first term, someone called out the new Senator Mike Lee on the discrepancies between some of the stuff he was spouting and his dad’s scholarship on what the Constitution actually said. His dad had passed not long before.

Lee’s terse response was, My dad was wrong.

The Deseret News, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, posted an editorial today denouncing Lee’s vindictive, deceitful, and cruel posts on X that one could only describe as gloating towards the targets and survivors of the assassinations in Minnesota.

When Senator Tina Smith, who’d been on that hit list, wanted to ask him why he’d done that, he put his phone to his ear to fake a phone call and ran from her. She cornered him in the cloakroom to just, plain, talk about this and why he had done this, calling out to his sense of decency as if he had one. But that famous old-fashioned “collegiality of the Senate” tradition of the ages: she claimed it and offered it and he let her explain to him why what he’d said was so painful because he knew it would be front-page news (again) if he did not.

Lee often justifies himself by claiming he’s an upstanding member of the Church. Yeah, I’d love to be a fly on the wall when his bishop asks him if he lives a life of integrity in all things?

But here’s the thing: if the Church excommunicates you, they never say so publicly. Your choices are between you and G_d.

Nor can I remember any time when they’ve denounced someone publicly.

But that editorial did and they demanded he apologize to his victims.

And if he does not do so, and as publicly as that X post was, then anyone somehow still wondering about him has their answer.