This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Washington • Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't attend another game of the Washington football team until the owner changes its "offensive" name. And it's not likely Reid will be invited to a game of his Southern Utah University Thunderbirds until he changes his own name.
It, too, apparently is offensive.
Reid, like me, is an alum of the Cedar City university. In 2011, the school honored me as the young alumnus of the year and at about the same time named its Center for Outdoor Engagement after the Nevada Democrat. He got a center, I got to throw candy in a parade.
He's kind of a bigger deal. Until recently that is, when the university said it would remove Reid's name from the center after some pressure from local residents concerned about the university heralding the name of a top Democratic leader.
SUU President Scott Wyatt said the decision wasn't about politics – "Harry Reid has a lot of good qualities that could be used to develop a great program and center," he told The Spectrum – but added that there was never any money raised for the center and Reid isn't widely known for his outdoor enthusiasm.
Cedar City Councilman Paul Cozzens put the concern more succinctly on why Reid's name needed to go. "This is a conservative base in Southern Utah and many people in southern Nevada also feel the same way," Cozzens told the St. George newspaper. "These people in Nevada do not espouse to Reid's political philosophies, and they told me they would not support the university or send any more of their children there, and this was coming from people who had already sent children to SUU, so long as Harry Reid's name remained."
Reid, of course, has become the conservatives' boogeyman right up there with Nancy Pelosi, and, of course, Barack Obama. Earlier this summer, Reid wrote a letter to the Washington NFL team's president railing about the team's name and spoke on the Senate floor arguing the name "is a sad reminder of a long tradition of racism and bigotry" and heralded the move by the Patent and Trademark Office to toss the team's trademark.
"This is extremely important to Native Americans all over the country, that they no longer use this name," Reid said in June on the Senate floor. "It is racist."
He is not alone in protesting the Washington team name. This newspaper banned the moniker's use as well.
SUU says it will keep Reid's name around – it just won't grace the Outdoor Engagement Center because, as Wyatt said, Reid isn't really associated with the outdoors.
Tell that to the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, which handed Reid the Hubert H. Humphrey Wilderness Leadership Award last week in honor of his leadership in wilderness preservation. The groups heralded Reid at a gala for authoring five laws that protected 3.5 million acres of public land and passing a major public lands bill in 2009.
Reid's name, for the record, was all over the event and the program. He even got to use it on stage.
Morning email » Snack on Political Cornflakes, our morning dish of political news. Join our mailing list by emailing cornflakes@sltrib.com or follow us on Twitter, @SLTribPolitics. Check back at politicalcornflakes.com for regular updates. Burr can be reached at tburr@sltrib.com or via Twitter @thomaswburr.