If only he'd solicited a woman, some snickered, he might have kept his job.
Similarly, the message from this year's 10th refusal by the Utah Legislature to pass a meaningful hate crimes law is this: If bill sponsors would delete gays from the list of protected classes of persons, maybe the law would pass.
Brent Parker was lucky. If his secret had been uncovered by gay bashers instead, he might have been the victim of a crime that would only have been committed because of his sexual orientation.
Sixty-three percent of Utahns understand that logic and support an effective hate crimes law - Utah is one of only six states without one - and yet our elected representatives employ all kinds of euphemistic garbage to skirt the question of protecting gays.
The most common argument is that we shouldn't punish people for what they were thinking when they committed a crime - although apparently we can let them off for that reason, as the Nancy Workman case demonstrates.
Since the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, a social consensus has emerged that some crimes are particularly heinous because of the intention behind them. Some people seem to have trouble with that concept, but they don't really. They just use tortured logic as a smokescreen for bigotry.
Promoting that bigotry is a loud minority that cling to the illusion that there is such a thing as a "homosexual agenda" - and that this justifies intolerance. Apart from the desire of gays and lesbians to be left alone to live their own lives, such an agenda is a poisonous fiction fostered by the James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons of the world.
Maybe this is just the latte talking, but I hope some day for an honest public debate about sexuality in Utah.
While super-majority Republicans have to answer for everything that happens on Capitol Hill, there was bipartisan support for a hate crimes law, as well as for the second great moral failing of this Legislature: ethics reform.
When Sen. Greg Bell, R-Fruit Heights, introduced Senate Bill 102 (which would have lowered the reporting threshold for lobbyist gifts to legislators from $50 to $10), it landed in one of Democrat Karen Hales' committees. She supported it, but it died anyway. When her hate crimes bill, Senate Bill 181, ended up in one of Bell's committees, he supported her, but it also died.
Seventy-five percent of Utahns favor Bell's proposed limit on gifts from lobbyists, according to Dan Jones Associates, and another 76 percent favor banning legislators from spending campaign donations on themselves. Yet, Sen. Gene Davis, D-Salt Lake City, managed to miss important committee votes on bills that would have done both.
He later told me he would have voted against Bell's bill. His tortured logic (shared by many legislators) goes like this: Lunch is the only time he has to meet with lobbyists. Translation: Legislators are pocketing their per diems, then accepting gratuities from the very people whose access is threatened by ethics reform.
There are a lot of other excuses for these legal bribes, such as that the job is underpaid, but they all get shot down with one reply: No one is forced to run for office.
But really, why should legislators care what people think when voters don't hold them accountable? Over 90 percent of Utah legislators who ran for re-election in 2004 won. And they did it with campaign funds
that overwhelmingly came from special interests - 82 percent, according to the Deseret Morning News. Shockingly, 35 legislators (out of 104) received no campaign contributions from their own constituents.
Only one legislator received most of his money from residents of his district. Guess who? The one pushing reform, of course: Greg Bell.
Permit me a naive opinion, but the only way voters are going to get their elected representatives to pay attention to them, instead of to the people lining legislative pockets, is to take matters into their own hands. To learn how your representative voted on the issues, go to http://le.utah.gov.
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John Yewell is a regular contributor to these pages. He may be reached at johnyewell@yahoo.com.
