(Salt Lake City) An assortment of investor groups represented by the New York City comptroller says Salt Lake City-based Zions Bancorp isn’t doing enough to protect gay, lesbian and transgender employees from discrimination.
But the banking company’s board is urging shareholders to vote against a proposal sponsored by the comptroller’s office on behalf of five city pension funds to amend the regional bank’s equal employment opportunity policy.
The amendment will put to a vote at the company’s annual stockholders meeting May 28. It would explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, according to a preliminary proxy statement released by Zions.
If it is approved, the board wouldn’t be bound to change the bank’s discrimination policy but would consider the idea, according to the proxy.
Zions says the company’s current policies already achieve the objectives of the proposal.
“The company really has a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of discrimination that would cause an employee to perform poorly in their job, meaning if they were troubled by discrimination and it resulted in poor performance, we would have to address that,” said James Abbott, investor relations director at Zions.
The 10-member board agreed unanimously to oppose the proposal. Abbott said the company believes a culture of discrimination could drive out highly productive employees, which might hurt its revenues.
The company also believes it’s up to cities and states to extend protection to gays and lesbians. Such protection exists in liberal-leaning Salt Lake City, but not throughout the rest of conservative Utah.
In an e-mail to The Salt Lake Tribune, comptroller’s office spokesman Greg Bell said the pension funds have a long history of submitting similar shareholder resolutions with the purpose of advancing equality while protecting the investment interest of shareholders.
“All employees should feel safe and accepted in the workplace,” Bell said. “Secondly, a work environment free of fear and harassment is good for the productivity and morale of employees, and the reputation and sustainability of companies.”
The pension funds own 918,244 shares of Zions common stock, about 0.6 percent of the 150.4 million shares in circulation.
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Utah House Rep. Christine Johnson, an out lesbian, does not plan to run for another term. But that doesn’t mean her gay rights activism is taking a back burner.
“I’m not leaving because I’m giving up on the fight in Utah,” Johnson said , according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “We …
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Prosecutors won’t pursue a case against two men accused of trespassing on LDS Church property earlier this month.
An LDS Church security guard detained a gay couple on Salt Lake City’s Main Street Plaza on July 9 after observing the pair “kissing and hugging,” according to a police report.
Derek Jones and Matt Aune were cited for trespassing after refusing to leave. The incident led to two kiss-in protests against the church in Salt Lake City and one in San Diego.
Aune has said the couple’s display of affection was modest, but officials with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns the plaza, released a statement that the two men were “much more involved” than a “simple kiss on the cheek.” It said the couple “engaged in passionate kissing, groping, profane and lewd language, and had obviously been using alcohol.”
In a statement released Wednesday, Salt Lake City Prosecutor Sim Gill said the trespassing case against Jones and Aune has been dropped.
Gill said despite that Main Street Plaza is owned by the church, there “continues to be a mistaken belief by many visitors that there is a public right of way.”
See Prosecutors drop case against gay couple accused of trespassing on … Salt Lake Tribune -
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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.
See Gay incident reopens Salt Lake City’s Main Street plaza wounds Salt Lake Tribune -
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o Salt Lake City is stepping out, urging a new anti-discrimination law that actually includes sexual orientation and gender identity in the traditional list of those affected by housing and employment discrimination.
Take that, all you legislators who have squashed any such thinking on the state level, arguing disingenuously that “choosing to be gay” is not grounds for civil rights protection. Mayor Ralph Becker, a Democratic representative for 11 years, knows all about that ruse.
And one of the most fascinating things is how the city’s Human Rights Commission got there: Its members sat down and talked to people in five “dialogues on discrimination” late last year. No lectures, no surveys. Just conversations about classism/poverty, people with disabilities, racism, faith and sexual orientation.
Kilo Zamora, whose nonprofit Inclusion Center trained the commissioners, says the opener was, “How’s the city doing, and do you think there’s discrimination here?”
As people talked, it became evident that race, gender, class, income and religious biases “we thought we had buried in the ’60s were much alive in our communities,” he says.
People were shocked. “Are you sure?” they would ask. “I never knew racism was still alive!”
See McEntee: Discrimination is still with us Salt Lake Tribune
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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
Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 05/29/2009 09:09:52 PM MDT
There is no denying that the decision of the California Supreme Court to uphold Proposition 8 is a setback for gay families and anyone who supports marriage equality. But the reversal is temporary.
One day in the not-too-distant future — years maybe, but not decades — Prop. 8 will be seen as the swan song of the old order. California’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage garnered 52 percent of the vote in November, but it was the last gasp of an atavistic and deeply negative conception of homosexuality whose grip on the American psyche will soon be broken for good (and good riddance).
Gay marriage is coming to America.
The speed at which gay marriage went from a wedge issue that Republicans used during the 2004 election to roust religiously conservative voters to the polls, to its wide acceptance today, is nothing short of a political tsunami. Five states have now legalized same-sex marriage either by statute or court order: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine. The last three did so in the few months since California’s Prop. 8 case was argued. With the momentum building throughout the Northeast, measures legalizing gay marriage are considered viable in New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire.
The polls are reflecting this rapid shift in the cultural landscape.
See Blumner: Gay marriage will come Salt Lake Tribune
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As more states take up the debate on same-sex marriage, some advocates of legalization are taking a very specific lesson from California, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dominated both fundraising and door-knocking to pass a ballot initiative that barred such unions.
With the battle moving east, some advocates are shouting that fact in the streets, calculating that on an issue that eventually comes down to comfort levels, more people harbor apprehensions about Mormons than about homosexuality.
“The Mormons are coming! The Mormons are coming!” warned ads placed on newspaper Web sites in three Eastern states last month. The ad was rejected by sites in three other states, including Maine, where the Kennebec Journal informed Californians Against Hate that the copy “borders on insulting and denigrating a whole set of people based on their religion.”
“I’m not intending it to harm the religion. I think they do wonderful things. Nicest people,” said Fred Karger, a former Republican campaign consultant who established Californians Against Hate. “My single goal is to get them out of the same-sex marriage business and back to helping hurricane victims.”
See Backers of gay marriage trumpet the Mormon church’s work against it Salt Lake Tribune
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Mike Thompson, who over the past four years has helped build Equality Utah into a respected advocacy group for LGBT rights, has resigned his post as executive director. The former oil company executive is relocating to San Francisco to work in the nonprofit field, according to this article. The Salt Lake Tribune (Utah) Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
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.”
Salt Lake Tribune
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