Liz, you are more than welcome to read any of the postings and publications upon which I've based my remarks on the SCMC. If I were you, I would start with the chapter in Quinn's The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power entitled (If I recall correctly) "Shadow Governments". You can also read various accounts relating to this online, including, I believe, one from Lavina Fielding Anderson.
Also, for the record, Coggins, a.k.a. Loran, a.k.a. Loran Blood, has had his butt kicked repeatedly and painfully by many on here, not only me. The sad fact is that, despite all his intensive Google-based education, he still cannot defend certain ugly aspects of Mormonism.
You see. There he goes again. Apparently, Quinn's sophisticated scholarly screed T
he Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power is the only book Scratch has ever read outside of some works of Foucault and Books by the Tanners. He shows virtually no working grasp of the corpus of LDS scholarship upon the subjects that exercise him so. He shows very little working knowledge of political economy history, political theory, western philosophy, or any othe number of subjects that impact the strong and dogmatic positions he takes on modern political and social issues.
My education is not Google based, but literature and experience brassed (as if there's something wrong with Google. The Internet is the most powerful educational tool ever invented by man. Interesting how many here disparage it) Scratch hopes beyond hope that by repeating over and over again that he and others here have kicked my butt (strange, I don't recall this ever occurring), that the sheer repetition will make it so. He's done this to others here as well.
Scatch's primary problem is that he does not have the mind or intellectual temperament of a philosopher or serous thinker, but of a political activist and polemicist. These are different kinds of intellectual styles and key in coloring the way in which a person sees the world and conceives of the manner in which debate takes place.