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Utah state law now says a government employee can refuse to perform someone's marriage based on his or her religion and the sexual orientation of the affianced.

At the risk of offending the LGBT community, let me say that I love this law. But I'd love it even better if the escape clause were extended to the general public.

Imagine being able to get out of doing things we find odious simply by saying, "It's against my religion." Tax season is coming up. I'd try that religious beliefs stuff on the IRS but my wife says she won't visit me in Leavenworth.

Back to marriage. As a columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune, I can legally marry people. I have married people, including one of my coworkers.

However, thanks to my religious beliefs, I may now freely refuse to marry people I personally believe to be hideously ugly, mentally deficient, obviously unconscious, and/or creatures from outer space consisting mostly of slime and feelers. I also won't marry goats or members of the tea party.

If this sounds discriminatory, tough toenails. I have the law on my side, laws descended from such sterling examples as the following.

According to a story in this very newspaper (Sept. 16, 1898) Quong Wah and Dora Harris, both residents of Salt Lake, presented themselves to the county clerk for a marriage license.

There was just one teensy problem. Actually, there were two problems and they were huge. Quong was a "celestial" (Chinese) and Dora, who appeared completely white, was forced to confess to being a "quadroon," or a teensy bit Negro.

When questioned by a deputy clerk as to whether she considered herself "a negro or a white woman," Dora admitted to feeling mostly white. That made everything, including the law … black and white.

The Salt Lake Tribune: "[The deputy clerk] then explained that the laws of Utah forbid the marriage of Mongolians and Caucasians, and given the Caucasian blood predominating largely in the woman, he would decline to grant the license."

See it was legal for Quong — "a son of Confucius" — to marry a black woman, just not a white one. Dora and he were turned away unhappy and un-betrothed. They vowed to seek judicial action from a higher court.

Fat lot of good it did them. Like the rest of America, Utah would hang onto its anti-miscegenation laws for at least another 50 years, laws based on nothing more than social idiocy.

Quong and Dora vanished into history, denied the basic right to get married. The deputy clerk got off easy. He didn't have to resort to saying it was against his religion to perform their marriage. He had the entire state to do that for him.

On the bright side, we seem to be making progress. A person of one race can now marry a person of another race and it's nobody else's #%*&! business, including people who think it ought to be.

What was once presumed necessary to protect every little bit of one thing from defilement by even the smallest amount of another thing made perfect sense to people back then. It's laughable now.

As much progress as we've made, it would still be interesting to know what people a hundred years from now will be laughing at about us.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley. Find his past columns at http://www.sltrib.com/lifestyle/kirby/