Walsh: A step back for gay Utahns
Reading the headlines, the news isn’t good for gay Utahns.
Former Equality Utah Director Mike Thompson has moved to San Francisco, taking his organizing skills from Holladay to the Haight. He says it’s personal, not professional.
Then, Pride Week opened with what looks like a hate crime.
Christopher Vonnegut Allen was arrested after allegedly beating his gay neighbors — a man and a woman — bloody in Ogden. One victim needed surgery. You may not have heard of it. Prosecutors charged Allen with only one count of burglary.
And this week, two nice Mormon ladies from Santa Cruz decided to give their unwilling church one more chance to reconcile with its gay members and the LGBT community outside the flock.
While the rest of the country moves forward — New Hampshire, New York, Iowa, for goodness sake — this place seems perpetually stuck.
It probably helps that Thompson missed the headlines. Still, he’s optimistic.
“You can’t have a defeatist attitude,” he says. “You’ve got to press against it in order to even hope for a change.”
He points to Salt Lake City’s nondiscrimination ordinance and domestic partners registry, an anti-bullying law, polls that show Utahns supported the Common Ground Initiative (even if lawmakers didn’t).
“Maybe they’re not significant in some people’s minds, but there are measurables there,” he says. “People are having conversations. Change is going to come sooner or later.”
See
Walsh: A step back for gay Utahns
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/walsh-step-ba…
Utah prime location for gay-rights movement
Salt Lake City » Valerie Larabee is a lesbian, out and living in Salt Lake City, where the shadow of the Mormon church can feel long and cold for people who are gay. “My friends who don’t live here think I’m nuts,” said Larabee, a former Air Force officer and financial planner, who moved to Utah in 1997 and now runs the Gay Pride Center on Salt Lake City’s west side. While much of the country moves in fits and starts toward greater acceptance of gay people and endorsement of equal rights, the politically active Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the often ultra-conservative Mormon-dominated Utah Legislature have found themselves squarely on the opposite side of that trend. In the U.S., gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Utah has made it illegal twice: Once in statute and again when voters banned the practice in the state constitution. Undaunted, activists say the current political and social climate in many ways make this “the best time” to be gay in Utah. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community — especially along the population-dense Wasatch Front — is growing and energized. “I think we are the frontline of the culture war,” said Troy Williams, a former Mormon and the gay host of “Radioactive,” a talk show on public radio. “This is where the fight is and this is where the really exciting stuff is happening.”
Utah prime location for gay-rights movement
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/utah-prime-lo…
