Save the sea gull! New state flag’s critics will find anything to complain about, Robert Gehrke says.

When state Sen. Dan McCay met a group bitterly opposed to redesigning the state flag, he would often ask them what it was they liked so much about the existing flag.

Was it the state bird, the sea gull, on it that they thought was crucial to keep?

“Oh, yeah, that’s important. That’s got to stay,” they’d reply, McCay told me. The hitch is there is no sea gull on the flag.

In McCay’s mind, it sort of illustrated that most people never really paid much attention to the old flag and that the resistance to change is rooted in just that — resistance to change.

Even so, McCay said recently that, even after spending a full year gathering public designs and input and refining the new flag, he has been surprised at the amount of pushback he has received over the new flag and how passionate the opposition has been.

Indeed, poke around some of the posts on far-right social media pages and you get a hint of the animosity toward revising the flag — a lot of it directed at Gov. Spencer Cox, who has been a cheerleader for the new banner.

“It’s called perversion of a historic flag,” one Twitter user ranted after Cox posted an image of the new design. “Though not surprised, facists [sic] and communists like simple corruptible designs. But, far be it for you to listen. Arrogant closet far left wingers can’t handle feedback.”

“Maybe Governor Pro Nouns should act more like a governor instead of an interior decorator,” another said, taking a swipe at the time last year when Cox, while discussing state policy toward transgender students, shared his preferred pronouns.

No one has done more to organize opposition to the new flag than Andrew Badger, who ran as an ultra-conservative Republican candidate in Utah’s 1st Congressional District and lost at the convention.

Badger rebranded his campaign’s Facebook page into the “Save Utah’s Flag” site, where a small but vocal group rails against the change

“Governor Cox has chosen a woke flag that erases our history,” Badger said in a recent social media post.

The “wokeism” apparently stems from comments made by supporters that the new flag should represent everyone in Utah and reflect the diversity of the state. Others see the new flag as “canceling” the state’s pioneer heritage.

Some on the left, meanwhile, see the prominent beehive on the new flag as too closely tied to the pioneers and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

All of this got me wondering why people can get so worked up about something that, for most of us, has been an afterthought all these years. I’ve spent more time thinking about the Utah flag in the last year than in the previous four decades.

McCay said he was the same way originally. “I thought it was a stupid waste of time,” he said. After spending three years pushing for the change, he says he can’t imagine not doing it.

Some of the opponents are like he was initially — they don’t see the point. Others, those like Badger and company, are clearly more vitriolic.

“They take it to the next level,” McCay said, “trying to assume culture war motivations for why somebody is trying to change the flag.”

But why? Why does this bring out so much outrage?

Part of it could be flags themselves, which have taken on a special “signaling” role in our bitterly divided political landscape. In the run-up to the 2020 election — and after — it was pretty common to see Trump flags hanging just below the American flag. People proudly hang a pride flag or a transgender flag in front of their homes or businesses. Others fly the Blue Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter colors or whatever banner it is that says to their neighbors, “Hey, this is me. This is what I believe.”

Not satisfied with flying them on our homes, we’ve taken to sticking them on our cars, so drivers know if they’ve been cut off by a communist liberal or a fascist conservative — as if it makes a difference.

There is almost a tribalist loyalty to them, much the same way we wear the colors and even fly the flag of the Utah Utes, the BYU Cougars or Utah State Aggies.

“Politics are the new bright line,” my friend Julie Stewart, a sociology professor at Westminster College, explained. “Because some people feel that way, there’s a greater need to signal your identity to the outside world.”

There also may be a sense of nostalgia at play, she said, a yearning to cling to an idealized past as society rolls on.

“The urge to fly different flags or preserve the current ones is important in the context of the removal of so many statues and monuments of the Civil War … or even here in Utah the changing of Dixie State to Utah Tech,” she said.

There were, indeed, anti-flag posts that referenced the Dixie name change.

So I think all of those things probably contribute. And I think there’s one more factor: In such a divided society, certain people are hard-wired to oppose everything, fight at any change, search for conspiracies and secret combinations at every turn and assume the worst about everyone.

It’s how we end up with someone like McCay — who, keep in mind, sponsored Utah’s near-total abortion ban and the language that banned transgender girls from competing in high school sports — being accused of being “woke.”

Generally, McCay said, the opposition is most intense among those who don’t understand the reason for the change.

“They’re just assigning bad motives to something they don’t understand,” he said. “It might be indicative of what’s going on in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “There isn’t anyone pure enough to lead out on any specific issue. It just shows where we are at in our politics.”

That’s a pretty sad commentary. Because flags are supposed to be something we can unite behind. Even if you don’t think re-designing the flag was a priority — I didn’t — it’s done now and, frankly, turned out a lot better than I expected.