Tag Archives: Utah

Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars has introduced a bill that would repeal the Salt Lake City school board’s recently instituted anti-bullying rules. Pride In Utah reports: Speaking at a meeting for the anti-gay group Eagle Forum, Buttars said: “We’re in big trouble in our public education system. I didn’t realize how much until a month ago when I was asked …

In a continuance of the march to full LGBT rights for small town and rural Americans, yesterday Grand County, Utah granted housing and employment protections to its gay and transgender residents. The Salt Lake Tribune reports: That means one in four Utahns, living in 10 communities from Moab to Logan, are protected from discrimination based on their sexual orientation or …

Administrators and parents at a Utah elementary school are upset because a man who lives adjacent to the school has posted the above signs. Leonard Ridley lives next to Art City Elementary in Springville. He recently posted three signs on his fence, facing the playground after he read news about the recent rash of gay suicides. “The signs of course …

Much noise is being made about the Mormon Church’s so-called softer position on homosexuality. HRC’s Fred Sainz went on MSNBC to talk about it, but Pride In Utah, who has read the new Mormon Handbook, says don’t believe the hype.

Pride In Utah reports that activists from a new group calling themselves Justice Vanguard interrupted last night’s gubernatorial debate to demand candidates address the bullying and suicides of LGBT youth.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square last night to denounce remarks by LDS Apostle Boyd Packer, who called gay people “impure and unnatural.” Packer’s speech, delivered during the LDS Church’s 180th Semiannual General Conference, hit a nerve, protesters say, because it came after a string of gay teen suicides in the national news. Boys as young …

So much for that LDS make-over. Same-sex attraction can be overcome and any type of union other than marriage between a man and a woman is morally wrong, an LDS apostle told millions of Mormons on Sunday. “There are those today who not only tolerate but advocate voting to change laws that would legalize immorality, as if a vote would …

The Washington Post tracks the states looking to copy Arizona’s racist anti-immigrant law. Lawmakers in Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah, which have already taken steps against illegal immigration, say that Arizona-style measures have a realistic chance of passing when their legislatures reconvene in 2011. The Obama administration sued Arizona in federal court Tuesday, charging that the state law usurps federal …

Utah has carried out the wishes of convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner and executed him by firing squad. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court refused a request to stay the execution. Gardner, 49, is only the third person in 33 years to die by firing squad in the United States. He was killed at 12:20 a.m. MST (2:20 a.m. ET), a …

A Utah judge has agreed to a prisoner’s request that he be executed by firing squad. Two other prisoners have been executed by firing squad since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Both executions took place in Utah. Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, was given the choice of being killed by lethal injection or shot by a five-man team of …

Yesterday the Utah Senate delayed approval of a long-running federal grant providing assistance to people with HIV, the Ryan White Act. Utah Senate president Michael Waddoups said coldly, “Doesn’t Obamacare pay for this?” The grant program is named after Ryan White, a teenage hemophiliac who died from AIDS complications in the 1980s after contracting the HIV virus during a transfusion …

Utah House Majority Leader Kevin Garn (R) has resigned. The decision comes two days after his admission that he’d paid $150,000 to a woman in return for her silence that they’d partied nude in a hot tub when the woman was only 15 years old. While GOP leaders scramble to find a replacement for Garn, new accusations surfaced Saturday from …

Utah GOP House Majority Leader Kevin Garn has admitted that in 1985 he skinny-dipped in a hot tub with a nude 15 year-old girl and has paid her $150,000 since 2002 in return for her silence. The devout Mormon and “family values” advocate was married at the time. With his wife by his side, Garn yesterday told reporters: “I expect …

Here’s yesterday’s press conference by hoaxers Patriots For A Moral Utah. It actually comes across better on video. The spokeswoman totally nails the type. “We don’t hate homosexuals, we just don’t want them to cram their members down our throat.” HAH. And they’ve just put up a website. BTW, I don’t think the protesters are in on it.

As suspected, the Patriots For A Moral Utah and their Final Solution was a rather elaborate hoax intended to dramatize the frightening escalation of anti-gay rhetoric by Christianist groups. Two of the hoaxers are members of the Utah environmentalist group Peaceful Uprising, although that organization appears uninvolved. Jesse Fruhwirth at Salt Lake City’s alternative newspaper City Weekly is unamused. As …

Hoax or real? Calling it “Utah’s Fair Solution”, a group called Patriots For A Moral Utah is holding a press conference today to announce legislation that would force all homosexuals to leave the state. The bill would create a transportation system for shipping all gays out of the state and would criminalize any Utah citizen who “harbors a remaining homosexual.” …

Utah state Senators are considering a plan to rename Martin Luther King Day to include mention of rifle manufacturer John Browning. A plan is circulating under the radar in the Utah State Senate to share the holiday honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., shot to death in 1968, with one of the country’s most famous gun makers. The …

Buttars wants to save Utah’s crippled budget by doing away with the 12th grade. Students immediately formed their own Buttars PAC.

Yesterday the documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition debuted at the Sundance film festival in Utah as two dozen anti-LDS protesters rallied outside the venue. The activists were there to show their support for the film and to protest the efforts of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to pass Proposition 8, the successful 2008 California ballot initiative that …

Salt Lake City’s new anti-LGBT discrimination law exempts churches and religious groups. The Sutherland Institute wants that exemption extended to anybody who believes in God, which would effectively gut the law from having any use at all. The ordinances protect gays and lesbians from discrimination in housing and employment. Sutherland Institute president Paul Mero says churches and some organizations have …