This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated.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.
You might be from Utah if, you think your state is just plain weird.
It might give you pleasure to think so. It might make you wince. You might have made your peace with it and have fun having the best story to tell your out-of-state friends and relatives at the next class or family reunion.
Well, Utah, don't get too cocky about it. You may not be as weird as you think.
Of course, just last week, when Utah was the site of yet another example of public school administrators showing themselves to be hyper-controlling, gender-discriminating, skin-o-phobic twerps, the reaction among many was, Only in Utah.
The case of the Bingham High Homecoming Dance — where perfectly normal party dresses were ruled inappropriate and perfectly fancied-up young women unconscionably made to feel dirty for wearing them — did come only a few months after the embarrassment of the Photoshopped senior photos in the Wasatch High School Yearbook, also in Utah. That's the one where sleeves magically grew and necklines artificially rose by no standard that anyone was able to discern.
But, according to a recent article in the estimable Guardian, such official slut shaming is, apparently, a thing. Similar incidents of public school administrators ordering young women to go home, cover up or spend the day in baggy, school-provided "shame suits," were reported in Illinois, Florida, New York and Oklahoma.
At Bingham, maybe 100 students staged a walk-out protest the next school day. At a Staten Island school, the day after administrators admonished some female students for dressing for hot weather, the percentage of their sister students who came to school in protest tank tops and disobedient short shorts soared. So there.
In Colorado, several high schools saw walk-out protests, too. But they were a fuss over curriculum, a proper response to a drive by some new members of one school board to push a program that emphasizes "the positive aspects" of American history and denigrates things like protest and civil disobedience — things the United States would not exist without.
It's not just schools. Outgoing Utah state Sen. John Valentine the other day publicly lamented the fact that the Legislature had grandfathered many liquor-serving restaurants out of the rule that they shield the eyes of impressionable children by hiding drink-mixing and bottle-opening behind the infamous "Zion Curtain." Only in Utah, some said.
That's a peculiar Utah wrinkle. But Utah is only one of 14 states where the state holds a legal monopoly on the retail sale of liquor. Liquor stores in other states where I have lived, Kansas and New York, are private (and they do refrigerate the beer). But they are, by law, small, often hard to see and forbidden to sell anything else. No chips. No club soda. No beer pong cups.
The annual fight to copy states such as Iowa and New Mexico and allow booze, or maybe just wine, sales in grocery stores — greatly increasing the state's tax take — is a perpetual loser.
The only sign allowed in the window of a Kansas liquor store is one that says, "Retail Liquor Store." It can't even say, "Al's Retail Liquor Store."
In the 1970s, Kansas Attorney General Vern Miller raided an Amtrak train traveling through the state to make it stop selling alcohol. He warned the airlines to go dry in Kansas airspace. By the time Miller ran for governor in 1974, he was the butt of jokes across the country and got beat by the only member of the Kansas Legislature to have a beard.
Some normalization of Kansas liquor laws, similar to those accomplished in Utah by Gov. Jon Huntsman in 2009, were adopted in Kansas in 1986. But it took a referendum, promoted by outgoing, term-limited Gov. John Carlin, who basically ran a third successful statewide campaign to get the voters to remove the words, "The open saloon is forever banned," from the state constitution.
Of course, Carlin also got Sunflower State voters to approve a state lottery at the same time. So maybe Utah does have some catching up to do.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, never took it as an insult when people called him weird.
Twitter: @debatestate