The ban, you might recall, was the school board's homophobic reaction to East High's Gay-Straight Alliance, a club students had started in order to address issues of being gay in high school.

The board couldn't single out that club for exile because a federal law, passed with the help of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, required public schools to give equal treatment to special-interest groups wanting to use the school facilities for extracurricular activities. That law was passed specifically to force schools to allow religion-oriented clubs to have the same after-school access as other clubs, but it had the collateral effect of preventing the school district from treating a gay club differently than other non-curriculum clubs.

To prevent gay students from meeting in a school-sanctioned environment, the board adopted a scorched-earth policy with the unintended consequence of depriving special-needs students of the full benefits of a public education that was afforded them by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Under that law, each special-needs student has an Individual Education Plan, put together by the student's parents and school counselors. The plan, for many students, included getting them involved in school clubs so they could develop social skills. Students with Down syndrome had little opportunity to mingle with other students in a social environment, so involvement in school clubs was the way to help them receive a full high school experience.

But the school board feared the gay club so much that it banned all other students from participating in non-curriculum clubs, and the special-needs students were shut out of a critical part of their educational development.

That story is relevant today because Sen. Chris Buttars, R- West Jordan, is introducing a bill for the upcoming legislative session that would ban gay clubs from high schools in Utah.

It is yet another example of Utah lawmakers being so narrowly focused on their own moral agendas that they are oblivious to the social and financial implications of their actions.

The Salt Lake City school board's faux pas, for example, not only damaged the special-needs students in the district, it cost the state $175,000 to defend the decision in a lawsuit. The policy was finally abandoned in 2000 and currently there are 14 gay-straight alliances meeting in public schools in Utah. Most of them have faculty or parent advisers and there have been no disruptive incidents at their respective schools.

Yet, Buttars has decided action must be taken because the clubs provide a forum for gay students. But school officials have said the clubs' members don't talk about sex, they talk about fitting in, which is all the parents of the forgotten Down syndrome kids wanted 10 years ago.

According to a national study in 2003 by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, 78 percent of gay students in public schools have heard derogatory remarks such as "faggot" or "dyke" aimed at them in school. Eighty-four percent have been verbally harassed, 39 percent have been physically attacked, 64 percent have been sexually harassed and 83 percent said faculty members rarely intervene.

The study also found that gay and lesbian students are four times more likely than their straight peers to skip school, three times more likely to drop out of school completely and four times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Buttars' ill-advised legislation, which if passed will cost the state a bundle of money in litigation, is deja vu for the Utah Legislature.

Its outcome will be no different than when the Legislature passed a law in the 1980s to regulate the content of subscription cable television programming, which eventually cost Utah taxpayers about $2 million before it was struck down by the courts. When attorneys kept warning lawmakers that the law was unconstitutional on its face and would be a waste of money, one legislator was heard to say, "I'm getting sick and tired of this constitutional crap."

It will be no different than the ill-fated and unconstitutional anti-abortion law passed in the 1990s, which cost taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars in a failed attempt to defend it.

The Legislature took the case out of the hands of then-Attorney General Jan Graham because lawmakers felt she wasn't committed enough against abortion and wasted another wad of money hiring an independent counsel.

Finally, they had to repeal a bill taking some authority away from the attorney general after public outrage over the power grab frightened some lawmakers about the viability of their own future political careers.