As it was, the Nephi alfalfa farmer and state senator told a Tribune reporter a week ago that he was opposed to the advanced high school curriculum because it is connected with the United Nations, and, by six degrees of separation, to communism.

"Socialization has been a failure everywhere it's been tried," Peterson said. "Europe is bankrupt. The Soviet Union fell long ago. And China's had to reform its ways."

Peterson's comments are just one more example of xenophobia, racism and simple ignorance in the 2008 Legislature.

The hicks have harnessed this session. And they're dang proud of it.

They've held up a bill to require parents to strap their kids into booster seats, forced an environmental attorney to testify under oath and filled the House with credulous anti-global warming books and leaflets.

But they don't stop there. They also open their mouths.

We've all listened, ad nauseam, to West Jordan Sen. Chris Buttars' racist three-fer. He finally went to Calvary Baptist last week to ask forgiveness. "They're a wonderful people," he said, with typical tin ear. At least he finally recognizes he did something wrong.

Peterson also acknowledges making a mistake. He actually attended an IB class at West High School last week and apologized to the bill's sponsor, Rep. Carol Spackman Moss, D-Holladay.

But what about the rest of them? Sen. Scott Jenkins, R-Plain City, doesn't understand the big deal about torturing domestic animals.

"It's a customary farm practice to toss a litter of cats in the river," Jenkins mused on the Senate floor a few weeks ago.

Margaret Dayton, a self-labeled homemaker and Republican state senator from Orem, doesn't have the excuse of being a rancher from rural Utah. She encouraged Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance attorney Steve Bloch to testify under oath, after believing claims he had lied in an earlier hearing. Based on propaganda from the Eagle Forum's Education Reporter, she led the charge against IB as "anti-American," stalling $300,000 to fund the program in seven schools. (According to Moss, "wiser, more reasonable" lawmakers feared the story would go national and ended up scraping together $100,000 for the schools. And, when the Eagle Forum left her dangling, Dayton eventually admitted that the program "does a lot of good things in Utah.")

But Dayton's real concern seems to be the White Man's Burden. She lamented "the growing discrimination toward the white male family-oriented Christian male" in a scheme to kill a bill to help minority businesses - grandstanding, I suppose, for all the "white male family-oriented Christian males" in her district.

During debate of legislation that would have allowed teenagers to get protective orders against their abusers, Kanab Republican Rep. Mike Noel described how rural Utah takes care of that problem: "In Kane County, we have a way to deal with those people. It's not very pretty. Usually, the father handles it first. Then, there is a posse that goes out and takes care of the rest of it as we drag them across the sagebrush."

(Not such a charming picture of frontier justice when you consider the fate of James Byrd, a black man dragged to his death by white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, 10 years ago.)

The Cowboy Caucus of the 1980s and '90s has faded a bit in influence, but its rhetoric lives on.

"It's been particularly egregious this year - an eight on a scale of 10," says Tom Love, a public relations and marketing executive. "It reinforces our image. But every state has their eccentrics who say something that appears abnormal to the majority of us."

I could blame this on the Republican caucuses, the Eagle Forum's inexplicable stranglehold on the Republican convention process. Perhaps the Legislature's makeup is just evidence of the urban/rural split in Utah and our Wild West pioneer heritage. TV stations still give two forecasts - one for "Dixie," the other for the Wasatch. And Salt Lake City-raised Jim Matheson wears cowboy boots in the halls of Congress.

Or, this could just be the nature of small-time politics - small-time politicians end up getting elected.

Whatever the reason, the results are embarrassing.

"It hasn't been a session without blemish, but they never are," says governor's spokeswoman Lisa Roskelley.

So, while Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. fiddles with the shot size in mixed drinks, the lowbrows keep on speechifying.

Just three more days . . .

walsh@sltrib.com

Walsh