Gay Leaders in Utah Plan 5-Bill Attack in Legislature
By Kirk Johnson for The New York Times:
SALT LAKE CITY — Leaders of Utah’s largest group supporting equal rights for gay people announced a proposal on Monday to increase the rights of same-sex couples in the state, saying they saw a silver lining in the passage last week of a same-sex marriage ban in California.
The measure in California stripped away the legality of thousands of same-sex marriages and incited protest rallies and marches against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the ban’s major supporters.
But leaders of the rights group here, Equality Utah, said statements made by Mormon leaders in defense of their actions in California — that the church was not antigay and had no problem with legal protections for gay men and lesbians already on the books in California — were going to be taken as an endorsement to expand legal rights that gay and lesbian couples have never remotely had in Utah, where the church is based.
“We are taking the L.D.S. Church at its word,” said Stephanie Pappas, Equality Utah’s chairwoman.
Whether the proposal — a five-part legislative agenda to be sponsored by gay and lesbian members of the State Legislature — will end up being no more than a cleverly barbed piece of political theater or the opening of a genuine dialogue remained uncertain.
A spokeswoman for the Mormon Church, Kim Farah, declined to comment.
State Senator Scott McCoy, an openly gay Democrat who said he would sponsor the legislation with two openly lesbian members of the House of Representatives, said part of the goal was to find a positive outlet for the tensions that arose here as the fight raged over the California measure.
“We need to come back down and we need to think, ‘O.K., now that we are where we are, what is the way we move forward?’ ” Mr. McCoy said at a news conference here. “And the way that we move forward is to channel that energy and that anger and that disappointment into constructive channels.”
Mr. McCoy said that five bills would be drafted in time for the opening of the Legislature in January, all narrowly tailored to what church leaders had said they could live with in California.
No attempt will be made, he and other Equality Utah members said, to overturn Utah’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, passed in 2004. The group will propose, however, striking out language in the amendment that prohibits legal protections for domestic unions.
The proposed laws would also expand protections for same-sex couples in health care and hospitalization decisions, housing and employment and in inheritance issues in probate court.
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