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It was heartening to hear that some of the leaders of the Utah Senate, specifically Orem's Margaret Dayton and Provo's Curt Bramble, want the Legislature to be much more aggressive in protecting innocent life.

"There is a compelling state interest in protecting the vulnerable among us," Dayton said at a Utah Capitol event Wednesday.

If the Republican leaders of the Republican-dominated body are serious in that belief, here are a few of the things they should be about come the opening of the annual session in January:

Expand Medicaid • Finally adopting Gov. Gary Herbert's "Utah way" substitute, Healthy Utah, would be a vast improvement over the status quo, a state that continues to leave many thousands of its vulnerable citizens without affordable access to real health care.

But if the lawmakers' real goal is to save innocent lives, then a full-on expansion of Medicaid, as envisioned by the federal Affordable Care Act, as accepted by many other Republican-governed states, would be by far the best step to both save lives and boost the state's economy.

Limit firearms access • The right of the people to bear arms is innate, but not absolute. If the people who run the Utah Legislature really care about the weak and vulnerable among us, they will spend some of their considerable political capital to craft some common-sense gun safety laws. Those would include tougher standards for Utah's concealed carry permits, allowing state universities to ban firearms and recognizing that the current open-carry standard strikes most civilized people as allowing thuggish people to frighten other folks to no good end.

Clean up the air • A new study from the state's own Intermountain Health Care shows that even when the air quality merely drops into the "moderate" level, the number of fatal heart attacks shoots up. This is just another data point to go along with the knowledge of how harmful our winter air can be to children and the elderly and the reasonable suspicion that an elevated number of stillbirths in the Uinta Basin is linked to increased oil drilling in the area.

Lawmakers' eternal reluctance to do very much at all to force an improvement in air quality — even just simple steps as updating the energy-efficiency portions of uniform building codes — stands in opposition to their stated goals of protecting innocent life. Because, apparently, it will cost somebody some money.

Welcome refugees • Gov. Gary Herbert's principled statements to the contrary, members of both the Utah Legislature and the state's congressional delegation have been carrying water for Islamic State terrorists by opposing any efforts to resettle refugees from Syria. Those refugees have long been the primary victims of Islamist violence. Making it a point to stand against receiving any of them is clearly falling into the terrorists' trap, sending the message that Muslims are reviled in the United States and that we are their natural enemies.

Fund Planned Parenthood • The best way to prevent abortion, and to also protect the future of young women and their families who would otherwise be forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy, would be to fully fund Planned Parenthood's sex education and contraception programs. The call by Dayton and Bramble to codify Herbert's refusal to do that, based on lies, does the opposite.

All of the above, of course, won't happen. Because what Bramble and Dayton mean when they say they want to protect the vulnerable is only that they want to find new ways to deny women their constitutionally protected right to choose.

Even those who sincerely believe that life in the womb deserves government protection come across as total hypocrites when they won't lift a finger to defend vulnerable life anywhere else.