Gay incident reopens Salt Lake City’s Main Street plaza wounds

Posted on July 25, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized

It’s the wound that won’t heal. The rift that won’t close. And earlier this month, two gay lovers’ purportedly innocuous late-night kiss — though LDS Church officials insist it was far more amorous than that — ripped it wide open.

Utah’s simmering religious divide boiled over — once again — at the geographical and philosophical intersection of church and state: the Main Street Plaza in downtown Salt Lake City.

“It is a scab that will continue to be peeled away — and may never heal,” says Dani Eyer, the former ACLU director who fought to preserve First Amendment rights on the plaza.

Matt Aune and Derek Jones say they held hands, kissed and then squabbled with security guards on the LDS Church-owned square. Salt Lake City police issued a ticket for trespassing. In protest, supporters of the couple staged a “kiss-in” last Sunday outside the plaza and plan another such demonstration today.

The LDS Church — a faith to which 60 percent of Utahns belong — defended its right to regulate “inappropriate behavior” on the plaza.

“What we’re seeing now is a manifestation of what should have been obvious from the very beginning,” says former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. “This block of Main Street never should have been conveyed to the LDS Church. It was a recipe for ongoing resentments between the LDS Church and those who are not members.”

The church bought the strip of Main — from North Temple to South Temple — in 1999 after then-Mayor Deedee Corradini and the City Council, with the only two non-LDS members dissenting, signed off on the $8.1 million deal. But the controversy burned for five more years as federal courts were asked to settle the prickly issue of whether the church could govern expression on the plaza and whether the city could retain a public right of way (as outlined in the original deal).

“It was meant to be for everybody,” Eyer says. “Where people come and go their constitutional rights go with them.”

After a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2002, First Amendment activities returned to the plaza. But demonstrations by anti-Mormon protesters — including cries of “whore” and “harlot” hurled at newlywed brides — “sustained divisions” that “reached to the point of hatred” between Mormons and non-Mormons, Anderson says.

In the end, he agreed to trade the public easement for cash and LDS land to build a west-side community center.

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