How unfortunate that professor Bob Goldberg touts as praiseworthy an apparent goal of the University of Utah’s Mormon studies program: “fostering ... respect” for “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its institutions, history, and people” (The Tribune, Sept. 21).

Professor Goldberg himself may respect the supposedly divine Mormon doctrine of racial segregation, the still-standing Mormon scriptural claim that black skin is a curse from God, the church’s continued anti-gay discrimination in the secular domain, the Mountain Meadows massacre, or Mormonism’s counterfactual history of the pre-Columbian Americas. Personally, I do not.

Either way, the appropriate goal of unbiased scholarship in history is to uncover truth, not to foster respect by predetermination, be it the history of the KKK, the Nazi party or the Mormon church.

Gregory A. Clark

Salt Lake City