Your perception-versus-reality session which resulted in the recent [“Two-Faced Utah” cover story [March 5, City Weekly] cannot be taken seriously by any thinking person.
Your silly vignettes into modern Utah reality were not humorous and were largely narrow-minded. You make every case a slippery-slope connection, and apples linked to oranges are not good arguments. Some cases in point: Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., couldn’t get elected in Utah no matter how the districts were drawn up (we’re more conservative here); state Sen. Chris Buttars doesn’t represent the LDS Church or the rest of Utah—he’s a loose-lipped politician with no connection to LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson other than by faith.
Furthermore, disapproval of gays and lesbians does not make one a homophobe, no matter how you cut it. Some company making monkey puppets doesn’t make Utahns racist. Since when was there a problem with minority groups living in locales of their own choice?
“Out West” and “up North” have plenty of whites as well—you seem to insist these folks are forced there by some higher power, and that’s a lie. Also, if you look at any other state in the union, ethnic groups live where they’re comfortable. So, what’s your point? And Utah’s black population is 1 percent. So what? Since when are we to be obligated to make it larger? And why?
Marie Osmond is an entertainer, Gayle Ruzicka is a political power broker—no connection here, either. David Archuleta was never Utah’s “ambassador to the world.” I don’t know who hung that sobriquet on the poor kid, but he never should have taken it seriously—nobody else did once the applause faded.
But the kicker in all of these attempts is the one regarding the economy here being strong. What does the reality of a strong economy have to do with using the money to “kick gays in the ass”? Yeah, right, I’m sure that’s what everybody plans to do when they get their tax refunds.
Utahns don’t pretend to be something they aren’t. Stop trying to convince readers they do.
Tom Gandley
Sandy
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