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It took years of frustration for Michelle Turpin to risk her freedom, her reputation and her livelihood to stand up for what she believed was right and allow herself to be arrested.

Turpin, a successful tax attorney, was one of the "Capitol 13" arrested in February 2014 for blocking the entrance to a legislative hearing room to protest the Legislature's refusal to debate housing and employment protections for the LGBT community.

Anti-discrimination bills had been tried for years without success. Despite an obvious shift in public attitudes in favor of such safeguards, lawmakers opted against even bringing up the bill last year.

Turpin and the others decided they had to act.

She pleaded no contest Friday in Salt Lake City Justice Court to an infraction, reduced in a plea deal from the original class B misdemeanor charge of disrupting a meeting. Through a plea in abeyance, the charge can be dismissed in three months.

It's the same deal her co-defendants reached with prosecutors.

But when Turpin was facing arrest for refusing to budge from the doorway at the Capitol, she considered much harsher consequences.

"One [legislative attorney] said we could be charged with a felony," she told me after her plea. "I realized that I could lose my Bar license for that."

Turpin and her colleagues were held in jail for more than seven hours. She believes officials waited until legislators went home before letting them out.

The protesters' insistence of being arrested rather than move was a final act of outrage, Turpin said, for the treatment they had endured for so long.

While growing up in Salt Lake County, Turpin always knew she was different. She was good at baseball, she said, which concerned her mother, who tried to shift her interest to tennis.

When she came out as a lesbian in her 20s, her mom at first wouldn't accept it. But when her mother divorced her stepfather, a born-again Christian, she opened her heart and lived for a time with Turpin and her partner.

"Last year my mother rode in the Pride Parade in the PFLAG [Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays] float," Turpin said.

Turpin said she and her younger sister are lesbians. She added that her older sister, a devout Mormon married to a former LDS bishop, wrote a letter to the family proclaiming that her younger siblings were sinners.

So their mother takes turns on Christmas. One year, she spends the holidays with her Mormon daughter and grandchildren, Turpin explained, and the next she spends with "her homos."

Turpin said she has had a successful life because, as a lesbian, she had to work harder to prove herself to others — and to prove to herself that she was OK.

Many, however, go the opposite direction, she noted, and "develop a self-loathing, leading to drug addiction, homelessness and suicide."

With the legal case behind her, Turpin wants to work to change attitudes among religious adherents. As long as LGBT children are brought up in "oppressive" environments that teach they are bad, Turpin said, "more babies will be born into lives where they feel they don't belong … [leading to] more hopelessness and more suicides."