Or, if you lack amateur standing, an editorial writer.

Jeffrey Nielsen is no crank. And, though all he has lost so far has been a part-time teaching gig, he may still claim kinship with those who have risked imprisonment or worse by speaking truth to power.

After this term, Nielsen will be out as a philosophy instructor at Brigham Young University. That is because he wrote, with his eyes wide open, a commentary published in the June 4 Tribune criticizing a political stand taken by his church, the church that owns BYU, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

BYU is a private organization, owned by another private organization. If it thinks it necessary to dismiss anyone for speaking out of school, it has that right.

It is the beauty of civil disobedience, though, that those who exact the punishment also take some risk.

BYU and the church will now be criticized in some circles as being overly harsh and for forgetting the mission of a university to tolerate and nurture different strains of thought. More importantly, Nielsen's dismissal calls attention - more attention than was raised by his initial writing - to one of his main points.

That point was that by taking a public stand in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, the church's leadership went beyond its normal role of defining moral behavior for its own faithful and sought to determine law for all Americans.

The church has an unquestioned legal right to take such a stand, but no expectation that it can do so without being itself labeled, by some, as speaking out of turn.

Dissent without risk, by individuals or institutions, scarcely qualifies as dissent at all. Without the possibility of retribution, dissent has little power to change anything.

This debate will continue, within the church and without, in public and in private. No matter the outcome, Jeffrey Nielsen will know that, when faced with the choice, he did his duty to his conscience rather than take the easy way out. And how many of us can say that?