Gay incident reopens Salt Lake City’s Main Street plaza wounds
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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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gay-incident-…
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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Utah Governor’s gay-rights stance honored
Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. will be honored by Utah’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community at this weekend’s pride festival. The Utah Pride Center and other LGBT organizations have picked Huntsman for the Pete Suazo Political Action Award. Huntsman is the first Utah governor to openly support civil unions for same-sex couples. Earlier this year, he also endorsed the Common Ground Initiative, a campaign for basic legal protections for gay and transgender Utahns that fizzled in the Legislature. The award is named for the late state Sen. Pete Suazo, who worked for years to pass hate-crimes legislation in Utah.
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Equality Utah uses the LDS own words in a new campaign for Gay Rights
The day after Proposition 8, a Mormon supported ballot measure that outlawed same-sex marriage, passed in California, the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints released a formal statement saying, “the church does not object to rights for same-sex couples regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights.”
Last week however, a Utah bill that would have allowed two people who live together and who are mutually dependent and named in a will or trust to a wrongful death court action if a tragedy occurred, was defeated in a state senate committee after opponents of the bill argued that offering any legal recognition to same-sex couples, including the right to sue when a breadwinner suffers a wrongful death, could lead to a court decision legalizing gay marriage.
This week in an effort to sway voters in that state and prevent other of Equality Utah’s legislative initiative’s remaining bills from going down in flames, Equality Utah has come out swinging with a major multimedia ad blitz that turn the tables and proclaims…
“The Church does not object to rights for same-sex couples …”
In a press statement Equality Utah said…
Several polls have indicated that the majority of Utahns support the reasonable and basic protections provided for in the legislation of the Common Ground
Initiative.
Yet lawmakers rebuffed one of the Common Ground Initiative bills last week, recalling tired arguments that the proposals are somehow an attack on traditional marriage.
Far from pessimistic about the ability of Utah legislators see passed the tired arguments that surfaced during last week’s hearing, Equality Utah has launched a media campaign to help raise awareness of the reasonableness and broad public support of the basic ideals of the Common Ground Initiative.
“We’ve modeled our legislative proposals directly from the statements of the LDS Church,” said Mike Thompson, Equality Utah’s Executive Director. “We’re talking about basic rights that have broad public support and have nothing to do with marriage. We hope this media campaign will help Utahns see passed the fear-based arguments used against this legislation.”
More of Equality Utah uses the LDS own words in a new campaign for Gay Rights
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Another gay-rights bill goes down in Utah
Another Common Ground gay-rights bill has died. But this one wasn’t killed by opposing state lawmakers.
This measure was done in by the sponsor herself.
Rep. Jackie Biskupski, D-Salt Lake City, decided Friday to pull her bill, which would have sought voter approval to repeal the second part of Utah’s constitutional gay-marriage ban (known as Amendment 3) to avoid confusion about which protections are the legal equivalent of marriage.
“I believe the second clause of Amendment 3 has been misconstrued by many and will continue to be a stumbling block for reasonable policies in the future,” Biskupski said in a news release from Common Ground Initiative backer Equality Utah.
“However, I believe that the other Common Ground bills have broader support and cannot be construed as having anything to do with marriage. “By pulling this bill,” she continued, “we hope to make a good-faith effort to demonstrate that the protections we’re talking about have nothing to do with marriage and in no way conflict with Amendment 3.”
Some feared Biskupski’s bill was a move to pave the way for civil unions, which recent polls show Utahns overwhelmingly oppose. “By dumping that bill, we are bringing attention to the most important items on our legislative agenda,” said Mike Thompson, executive director of Equality Utah, items that he says most Utahns favor.
See Legislature: Another gay-rights bill goes down
Salt Lake Tribune
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Utahns backing gay rights
While Utahns aren’t ready to let gay and lesbian couples exchange wedding vows or enter civil unions, most are willing to give them broader legal rights to inherit property, visit a partner in the hospital and ward off employment discrimination.
A Salt Lake Tribune poll finds that 56 percent of Utah voters support increased legal protections for same-sex couples — a potential boon for Democratic state lawmakers who intend to introduce a package of gay-rights bills this legislative session.
However, the poll shows overwhelming opposition (70 percent) to any changes to the Utah Constitution that would allow same-sex partners to enter civil unions. Utahns, 54 percent of them, also are wary of letting unmarried couples, including gay and lesbian partners, adopt or foster children.
See Utahns backing gay rights
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27000 letters urge LDS leader to back rights of gay Utahns
President Thomas S. Monson: You have mail - boxes of it.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) delivered 27,000 letters to LDS Church headquarters Monday - all of them asking the Mormon leader to support legal protections for gay and transgender Utahns.
The national gay-rights group has endorsed Equality Utah’s Common Ground Initiative, a collection of bills that would, among other things, provide rights to fair housing and employment for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Utahns and domestic-partner benefits for same-sex couples.
The movement was born in response to statements the LDS Church made in the wake of California’s Proposition 8 - which eliminated gay marriage in the Golden State - that the church “does not object to rights for same-sex couples regarding hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights or probate rights.”
Monson and other LDS leaders helped to get the gay-marriage ban enacted, urging members to donate their time and money to the campaign and, later, igniting opponents’ protests at LDS temples and calls for boycotts of Utah.
“The reason there’s such an uproar is every LGBT person in the United States was affected by it,” since Proposition 8 stripped away rights that had been granted to gay couples, said Jerry Rapier, a Salt Lake City resident and member of the HRC’s board of governors.
See 27000 letters urge LDS leader to back rights of gay Utahns
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