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KANAB - A tourism official insists she can't. Shop workers vow they won't. Store owners say they don't.
But they all do - on the street, at their desks, in the hometown newspaper. They just can't stop gabbing and griping, yapping and sniping about the natural-family resolution.
For instance, a dairy distributor north of Main Street raises the issue without even being asked.
"I'm not worried about people boycotting Kanab," he says. "Those tour buses are full of elderly people, and they all need to stop here and use the bathroom. There's nowhere else for them to go."
Tyler Juber brings it up because he wants others to stop bringing it up.
"Natural-family this, natural-family that," the Kanab teen writes in last week's Southern Utah News. "Oh, this person said this and now I hate him. The mayor passed a horrible proclamation. Shut up!"
Welcome to Kanab, the southern Utah town oft written up - and frequently put down - since a City Council vote in January made it the only city to adopt the conservative Sutherland Institute's natural-family decree. Travel writer Arthur Frommer then urged a boycott, and a student scribe and business leaders scolded the mayor and council.
Mayor Kim Lawson is dismayed "the media has chosen to bother a community of 4,000 or less."
"The majority of Kanab residents, whether they are for or against this, just want the issue to go away," says Lawson, a resolute defender of the nonbinding resolution.
No one knows that more than Southern Utah News editor Dixie Brunner. Since the resolution's passage, her quiver of letters to the editor has overflowed with commentaries - from near and far, both for and against the resolution.
While many pen letters, Brunner says plenty of others plead with her to write off the whole hubbub.
"They say, 'Dixie, if you could just put something in the paper and say, 'We aren't going to talk about this anymore,' it would be done and . . . people wouldn't hate each other.'
"Don't you see what's happening?" Brunner, who is not LDS, recalls a Mormon friend asking. "Newcomers and people who aren't pioneers here want to come in and change our good values. . . .. What you're seeing now is a bunch of outsiders putting their ideas on us."
But Brunner sticks to her policy: Report all the news and run all the letters.
So the missives - and the malice - keep coming. Although the resolution mentions nary a word against anyone, she adds, it manages to offend nearly everyone: women, single parents, childless couples, widows and widowers, gays and polygamists - all who believe it devalues them or someone they know.
Kanab Furniture owner Gay Baird says the decree never was intended to inflame.
"It does not offend one way or the other unless you really read deep" into it, she says. "I'm thankful for it if it helps us raise our kids."
The mayor emphasizes he and Kanab leaders treat all people the same under the law - without prejudice and with tolerance. He argues gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered and others with "personalized or politicized" agendas have joined forces to foist their privates lives on the public.
"Tolerance, to me, is the acceptance of the individual always," Lawson says. "But it never includes acceptance of the act, of personal or politicized agendas."
The mayor denies using the resolution to thrust his LDS beliefs onto the masses, even though the document somewhat approximates his church's 1995 family proclamation.
"It didn't even enter my mind," he says.
It didn't with Brunner, either, at least initially.
"But it has evolved into that" for some, she adds.
That link surfaces in the lingo of Kanab residents, who often refer to the resolution as the "proclamation" - although the LDS Church has stayed on the sidelines in the dispute.
Kortney Stirland, a Kanab pharmacist and diner owner who is LDS and opposes the resolution, was told by two Mormons he should support it because the church proclamation urges "responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society."
The similarity between the resolution and his church's proclamation is one reason resident Bud Barnes backs the city's stand.
He says city leaders are right to hold up the traditional two-parent family as the ideal because household harmony and disharmony carry implications for taxpayers. He argues, for example, that too many children of all races are being reared by single parents.
"Grandmothers are raising their grandkids," Barnes says. "Of course, no one can deny many grandmothers are doing a heck of a job and their grandkids praise them. Even homosexuals raising kids can be successful, but the odds are against them. The 'natural family' is . . . the most successful at raising law-abiding kids."
Lawson says some LDS leaders have urged him to reconsider the resolution. Stirland says he has asked the mayor twice to rescind it. Lawson refuses.
"I don't need the resolution," Stirland says. "I've already got [the church's] proclamation. That states my belief on the family. . . . Most people don't support the resolution for the same reasons I don't - because of the contention and anger it has caused."
While they differ about whom to blame, everyone agrees the resolution has sparked a divide.
"It has torn this community apart," single mother Marina Johnson says.
Kanab furniture worker Ann Sorenson, whose husband, Jim Sorenson, is on the City Council, defends the resolution.
"If you are outside of Kanab, it's easy to come to a conclusion without the facts," she says. "Different ideas are wonderful, but the vitriolic hate this has caused is coming from the other side."
Stirland notes 81 of Kanab's 95 businesses have put up stickers welcoming everyone - regardless of religion, sexual preference or marital status - to Kanab.
"Hardly anyone who lives here wants to continue to talk about this. The city will heal. I think it already has . . . well, I can't say that."
l Kanab's City Council adopted a nonbinding natural-family resolution, which touts marriage between men and women as "ordained of God" and conceives homes as "open to a full quiver of children." It also promotes young women becoming "wives, homemakers and mothers" and young men growing into "husbands, home builders and fathers." Since its passage Jan. 10, women's advocates, gay-rights activists and others - inside and outside of Kanab - have decried the decree and even called for a boycott of area businesses.