From time to time, well-meaning friends who have escaped the protective dome that seals off my home state from the rest of our sinful planet ask me why I stay in Utah. Their implied suggestion is that I, with my unorthodox (for Utah) interests and attitudes (not to mention my somewhat scruffy looks), might be happier if I lived in some place a bit more… cosmopolitan<\/i>. I don’t deny that they could be right. After all, I am an unmarried, childless, socially liberal, anti-authoritarian agnostic who enjoys the occasional distilled beverage and generally doesn’t care what people do (or don’t do) with their genitalia. My out-of-state friends are not misguided to wonder what could possibly keep me living in a place that is notoriously conservative, religious, provincial, family-oriented, and hostile to dissenters — in short, about as opposite from everything that defines my life as you can get. Nevertheless, my response to their concern is usually just a shrug and the somewhat lame proclamation that, “this is home.”<\/p>\n
\nUtah is<\/i> home for me, and even with the cultural incompatibilities that I frequently encounter here, I like this place. I like the climate, the landscape, and, yes, I even like much about the local culture, too. I like that I can trace my family history back to the original Mormon migration into this area, and I like that I’ve lived and breathed the local history that is fast fading from memory. Utah is my home, and I doubt I’ll ever live anywhere else.<\/p>\n
Still, that doesn’t mean that I don’t get twitchy when I see poll data<\/a> indicating that Utah is the most pro-life — i.e., that most anti-choice<\/i> — state in the union. (That one wouldn’t bother me if the state wasn’t also so dead-set opposed to teaching kids about contraception, but that’s a rant for another day.) It also baffles me to read that Utah continues to give President Bush ridiculously high approval ratings<\/a> despite his administration’s increasingly obvious shortcomings, merely because he belongs to the “right” party. But what really makes me hang my head in shame for living in Utah is when I read things like the Rosa Parks anecdote that appeared<\/a> earlier this week in Paul Rolly’s Salt Lake Tribune<\/i> column:<\/p>\n In 1992, Parks accepted an invitation to speak to the Salt Lake City Chapter of the NAACP. <\/p>\n The House, of course, did have time to recognize a high school cheerleading group, a county dairy queen, cherry queen and turkey queen, as well as a champion cowboy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Too busy. Uh-huh. Now, granted, Utah historically had little to do with the civil rights movement, owing to the fact that up until fairly recently the African-American population of the state numbered somewhere around a few dozen, but still… the least our elected officials could do is offer a little respect to a person who changed the frickin’ country!<\/i><\/p>\n What a disgrace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From time to time, well-meaning friends who have escaped the protective dome that seals off my home state from the rest of our sinful planet ask me why I stay in Utah. Their implied suggestion is that I, with my unorthodox (for Utah) interests and attitudes (not to mention my somewhat scruffy looks), might be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-color","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThen-State Rep. Joanne Milner, D-Salt Lake, remembers that she asked House Speaker Craig Moody, R-Sandy, if Parks could address the House for five minutes. Moody declined, telling Milner the Legislature was too busy.<\/p>\n