Next month, even more Mormons than usual will descend on Salt Lake City for the LDS general conference in Utah’s capital. About a mile away, the state’s top gay bar, Club Jam, will be filled with its own quorum of the 12 apostles, “sacrament shots” and, likely, church prophet Moroni in the buff.
While the conservative Mormon church permeates Utah culture, it has spawned an equally vocal counterculture. This spectrum is playing out in the state legislature, where conservative Utah lawmakers last week passed a bill to resurrect firing squads a legal form of execution – and also saw Gary Herbert, the governor, sign one of the country’s most progressive anti-discrimination bills into law.
Club Jam manager Megan Risbon, a lifelong Utah resident, described the state’s dichotomy: “Wherever you have a really strong culture, you have a deeply strong counterculture,” Risbon said. “I think in Utah, especially Salt Lake, we’ve really developed that.”
There’s a thriving music and arts scene, and from 2000 to 2008, Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson was a progressive champion of LGBT rights, an opponent of the Iraq war and an advocate for impeaching George W Bush.
And with the anti-discrimination law, the state is showing that the Utah-brand of conservatism is not a cut-and-dry, strict adherence to Mormon tenets.
Governor Herbert made a point of holding a ceremony to sign the anti-discrimination bill last week. It makes illegal for people to make employment and housing decisions based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
The influential – and traditionally conservative – Mormon church has been credited for helping fast-track the bill through the legislature, which has many Mormon members. The bill grants exemptions to religious groups or places like schools and hospitals affiliated with a religion.
The Mormon church announced their support for the legislation in January in a rare public address. In the announcement, the church reiterated that it supports homosexuals, just not homosexual sex acts. Dallin Oaks, one of the church’s 12 apostles, also criticized LGBT groups for challenging the church.
“When religious people are publicly intimidated, retaliated against, forced from employment or made to suffer personal loss because they’ve raised their voice, donated to a cause or participated in an election,” Oaks said, “our democracy is the loser.”
Risbon, who was an active member of the state’s Democratic party, said that there is a movement in the church, especially its younger members, to become more welcoming. And she thinks moves like this are a part of that change. “At least I hope it is,” she said.
Then, of course, there is the Wild West-seeming firing squad bill, which passed in the legislature last week as well.
The measure is not as outdated as it seems – Utah inmates could choose to die this way before 3 May 2004, and if they did, they have the right to die that way still. Ronnie Lee Gardner chose to die that way and was executed in 2010.
Anti-death penalty campaigners have pointed out that the new law draws attention to the brutal nature of executions. “This particularly barbaric method does draw attention to the barbaric nature of the practice,” Anna Brower, a public policy advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, told the LA Times.
Though ultimately campaigners oppose this law: “We’ve rushed to make sure we have a way to kill people instead of questioning whether the death penalty is a responsible way to handle criminals in Utah,” said Brower.
The church said in a statement that it will “neither promote nor oppose capital punishment.”
Meanwhile, Republican state senator Mark Madsen is sponsoring a medical marijuana bill that is the first introduced in the state to propose a network of licensed dispensaries. Madsen is the grandson of the former president of the Mormon Church, Ezra Taft Benson.
Madsen recently sampled cannabis in Colorado, where it has been legalized for recreational use, on the advice of his doctor who suggested it as a possible remedy for the senator’s back pain. “Reefer Madness’ is neither medical research nor public policy, it’s propaganda, and we can’t be basing our policy on propaganda,” Madsen said.
