Who funds my sybaritic lifestyle?

Last updated on: November 20, 2018 at 6:43 am by Dan Peterson

Who funds my sybaritic lifestyle? 2018-11-20T06:43:16-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Palm Cove, north of Cairns, Australia (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

Early this morning, we flew northward to Cairns, and then drove from Cairns to Port Douglas. We are, now, much closer to New Guinea than we are to Sydney or even to Brisbane. This is an area of Australia that I’ve never seen before. It’s tropical, and ot reminds us quite a bit of Hawaii. Along the drive up, we stopped off at a place called Palm Cove for a bite to eat. Absolutely gorgeous. And a good place to look out over the Great Barrier Reef, about which I’ve heard all my life.

Incidentally, my anonymous Malevolent Stalker, who has devoted much of his life over the past fifteen years to inventing and then lamenting my many depravities, is now suggesting that my trip here may have been paid for by innocent donors to the Interpreter Foundation.

It’s a serious enough (and plausible enough) charge that I judge it to merit a flat denial: My travels here are not in any way underwritten or supported — not even slightly — by the Interpreter Foundation.

My finances are none of his business, of course, but I’ll say this: I’m delivering an invited lecture at a university in Sydney on 27 November. That explains my being here in Australia, and partially pays for it. My travel here also does not come at the expense of tithe payers. My wife is paying her own way, and we’re both paying our own way for the goofing-off portions of this trip. (We like to travel.) Some of my expenses have been covered by a fund set up at BYU by a specific donor (whom I know very well) for the express purpose of developing and maintaining relationships between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Islamic world. My remarks in Sydney will be directed to the question of Islam in Australia and the West, and she explicitly endorsed drawing on her fund in partial support of my coming here.

As always, my Malevolent Stalker’s suggestions of unethical or mercenary behavior on my part are malicious but wholly without merit. This is what he does: His online pseudonym is adopted from a character in a television crime show — a vengeance-obsessed sociopathic hacker, stalker, and serial killer who plays mind games in order to manipulate proxies into carrying out murders for him. (My stalker can dream, can’t he?) But I want people to understand very clearly that their donations of time, effort, and money to the Interpreter Foundation are not, in any way, supporting me, let alone supporting my wife. Not so much as a cent. My wife and I are ourselves donors to Interpreter — of money, labor, and time. We don’t profit from it. Quite the opposite.

The Interpreter Foundation’s expenses are visible, accessible to anybody who wants to look, online:

Expenses

We’re not playing tricks here. There are no hidden funds for lavish travel. No games. Our editorial costs go for source-checking and page layout. The content-editing is done by generous volunteers at no charge. The principal leaders of the Interpreter Foundation are entitled, under our bylaws, to $500 annually in compensation; none of them has ever asked for so much as a dime of that possible reward. Just so you know.

Posted from Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia

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