Hypocrisy thy name be Utah Legislature

TWO ITEMS CULLED FROM RECENT NEWS REPORTS

Ruzicka, Sutherland wage campaigns against gay rights
Backlash » Conservative groups see a common enemy: Common Ground.

Preserved from the Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_11564827
By Rosemary Winters The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated:01/27/2009 04:18:29 PM MST

Equality Utah's Common Ground Initiative — a push for legal protections for gay and transgender Utahns -- has drawn hundreds of marchers to a Capitol Hill rally, thousands of petition signatures and even broad-based support in statewide opinion polls.

The initiative also has ignited a backlash, led by defenders of "traditional marriage" who want to crush the effort.

Rather than "common ground," Gayle Ruzicka and the Constitutional Defense of Marriage Alliance are touting "common sense." And a Salt Lake City-based conservative think tank, The Sutherland Institute, wants Utahns to stand on "sacred ground" instead.

"The family is the central unit of society, and so our efforts in this regard are ultimately to protect the traditional family and protect marriage," said Sutherland spokesman Jeff Reynolds, who acknowledged Equality Utah has run a "very effective" campaign.


Buttars' committee kills first gay-rights bill

Preserved from the Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_11566435
By Rosemary Winters The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 01/27/2009 06:19:03 PM MST

The first of a series of gay-rights bills aimed at the 2009 Legislature died in the Senate judiciary committee today

Sen. Scott McCoy's SB 32 would have amended state law so that financial dependents - besides spouses, parents and children - could sue if a breadwinner suffers a wrongful death.

It is part of the four-bill Common Ground Initiative being pushed by Equality Utah to expand legal protections offered to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Utahns.

A standing-room only crowd listened to two hours of testimony for and against the bill before the committee, headed by Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, declined, in a 4-2 vote, to send the measure to the Senate floor. Only McCoy, D-Salt Lake City, and his Democratic colleague Ross Romero voted in favor of the bill.

McCoy's measure would have benefited same-sex couples but also other nontraditional households, such as one in which a grandmother relies on a grandson for financial support. Unlike spouses, parents and children, a wrongful-death designee would have to prove a financially dependent relationship with the victim to go to court.

McCoy said he plans to introduce the bill again in the 2010 session.


RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY

I find the hypocrisy exhibited in by Utah legislature on the subject of "protecting family values" utterly breathtaking.

It believes it is good and therefore does good in sustained family interests by picking on homosexuals. They confuse bullying with protecting.

Heterosexuals have done the most damage to marriage. In particular, wide government support of low wages, creation of simple divorce laws, tolerance of polygamy and mistresses.

If the Utah legislature really wants to protect marriage and the family, then it should mandate smaller gaps between the salaries of workers and employers, it should stiffen divorce laws, it should stop tolerating multiple simultaneous sex partners.

My family actually has a history of committed same gender couples, and our experience has been that they posed less threat to traditional family values than did certain of our multi-marrying, multi-divorcing, sexual multitasking heterosexual members.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The damage done to America marriage and traditional family life happened years ago. Unless American culture undergoes a massive cultural repentance, we cannot repair the the damage. Americans have accepted for far too long too many kinky heterosexual domestic arrangements as on a par with real marriage.

Ultimately, people will judge the concept of same-gender marriage on who they like best

Do they like their gay relatives best?

Or do they like best all the leaders who make strict legalistic definitions of what marriage is and is not, who tell gay couples that heterosexuals may do what they want, who tell gay couples that morality and decency requires separate but unequal domestic partnerships for all others?