One Utah

If you want to solve a problem you have to know what it is.  If you solve the wrong problem (for instance invading Iraq to capture Al Qaeda) you make the situation significantly worse.  As, for example, solving Iraq has done.  Creating the problem to be solved is a bad sign - as when the Republicans turned FEMA into a crony patronage machine and then stood back while New Orleans flooded.  The Republican war on government created an environment in which the results of natural disasters would be made worse.

If you try to solve something that’s not a problem (privatizing Social Security), you simply waste your time and energy.  Or, for instance, if you decide your family needs therapy and check them into it - even though you are a healthy, functioning family.

In Utah, we often talk about the Religious Divide - and we mean the Mormon/Non-Mormon divide.  The recent Bobbie Coray brouhaha reminds me the dangers of solving the wrong problem.  Don’t get me wrong - I read Bobbie’s comment here at oneutah and the LTE in the Trib. 

I’ve been in economic development for 20 years here. One of our worst perceptions is that you cannot get a drink in Utah. As a Utah Alcoholic Beverage Control commissioner, I thought that I’d have an opportunity to eliminate quirky laws.

My intent is to be responsive to the public. I respect the ABC board’s mission, which is to make alcoholic beverages available to those who drink, while not interfering with those who want to be uninvolved with drinking. 

As the DesNews reported it: 

One law that needs to be reviewed, Coray said, is the requirement that there be a glass barrier in a restaurant bar separating the patrons from the alcohol. Servers are not allowed to pass food and drinks — even non-alcoholic ones — over the so-called “Zion Curtain.”

The intent of the law, Coray said, is to protect minors. But a better way than setting up the glass barrier might be to ban underage patrons from a restaurant’s bar area as other states already do, she said.

The Trib didn’t report it that way, instead saying:

Liquor control commissioner Bobbie Coray asked her colleagues on Wednesday to consider a rule to cover up bottles of booze displayed at restaurants because some diners may be offended at the sight of alcohol.

A glass partition between bartenders and customers required under current regulations may not be enough, Coray told her fellow liquor control commissioners at their monthly meeting. 

Coray, a lone holdout opposing liquor licenses for strip bars, now wants the commission to place more restrictions on glass partitions in restaurants. She called the partitions “a Zion curtain,” imposed to satisfy Mormons whose faith eschews alcohol. 

Coray has been the recipient of some pretty thorough responses.  Quite a bit of it has been creative, colorful and insulting.  Coray’s defense - she’s trying to solve a problem - has gotten me thinking about the challenging of correctly defining the problem.

In the case of Utah’s crazy liquor laws, Coray defined the problem as keeping minors away from alcohol and/or keeping non-drinkers separated from alcohol. Coray also talked about the impact of Utah’s daft liquor laws on tourism. Ironically, in doing so, she missed the primary problems as experienced by residents - the pointless maze of regulations that actually have the effect of encouraing over-consumption.

By talking about the effect of Utah’s liquor laws on tourists, Coray also reinforced the “Utah Mormons are a bunch of backwater rubes” narrative implicit in many critiques of Utah liquor laws. It runs something like this - sophisticated travelers from other places come here and confront our quaint liquor laws and walk away thinking we’re not cosmopolitan and sophisticated. This has two effects - first it plays into the often articulated feelins of drinkers in Utah and it encourages non-drinking Utahns to tell themselves that these outsiders can learn to live by our rules when they’re in Utah and not the other way around.

Coray’s generally well-intentioned effort to bring some form of sanity to Utah’s liquor laws ran into the pre-existing divide and the usual inability to talk across it. The complex system of Utah society is not amenable to changing our liquor laws into some semblance of rationality.

For non-Mormons, it’s almost impossible to really understand the Mormon aversion to alcohol. Within the non-Mormon context, even absolute non-drinkers don’t object to alcohol being displayed, advertised, or present.

Over the weekend, I visited with an acquaintance - in this person’s house, there was a small bar stocked with her family’s favorite beverages, including vodka, whiskey and beer. The bar wasn’t surrounded by neon lights or stripper poles. It was simply a matter of fact presence in the house. The very casualness of it (and the casualness elsewhere in Houston with which alcohol and bars were treated) stood in contrast to Utah’s deeply uptight relationship with alcohol.

Almost every aspect of Utah law and society concerning alcohol serves to increase rather than decrease anxiety with regard to alcohol. The seemingly random hours at state liquor stores (there are several stores within reasonable distance of my house and all seem to operate on different hours and with different policies). The rules governing alcohol purchases in grocery and convenience stores seem equally random and mysterious. Such rules serve to create anxiety when making alcohol purchases - is it legal to buy a drink now or is it still too early in the day? Rules about alcohol in restaurants result in the same experience of anxiety. I can’t, for instance, sit in a restaurant bar, get a cocktail, carry it to my table and order wine with my dinner without finishing or throwing away my cocktail. I can’t order an after dinner drink without finishing or throwing away my wine. Such an experience serves to make one more conscious of alcohol consumption in an unhealthy way. For Mormons, who already have significant anxiety regarding alcohol, Utah’s regulations serve to reinforce their anxiety. It’s a feedback loop.

Those who imbibe, already frustrated by Utah’s nonsensical laws, responded to Coray’s suggestion within an established script - expecting even more random and bizarrely restrictive regulations rather than the creation of a more sensible system designed to serve the needs of those who drink rather than concerns of those who don’t.

Given the rather profound anxieties concerning alcohol found within Mormonism, such reforms seem unlikely. To put it simply, Mormonism as lived creates rather than aleves anxieties around alcohol consumption. I think I mentioned before the phenomenon of Mormon youths overindulging - to the point of extreme illness and hangovers - and then swearing off demon rum the rest of their natural lives. In a culture in which there are no models for responsible, reasonable alcohol consumption, such behavior is unavoidable if not inevitable. To whit, alcohol is seen as a wholly problematic. Adults who drink generally learn when to say “Enough” and by such example teach their children the same thing. Kids hear adults say, “I’ve had two, time to stop” or “We’re planning on drinking tonight, so Jim is going to drive us home.” Such conversations don’t occur in Mormon households. Kids never see adults make responsible choices; when they rebel against their parents, they choose alcohol and they overindulge to the extreme, engage in truly regrettable behaviors. What for the rest of us is a grey area, becomes a clearly delineated black and white, good and evil area.

Where alcohol is concerned, Utah’s Mormons simply do not trust its non-Mormons. It comes back to the rules of morality - there is no responsible way to break the rules, and drinking is against the rules. When people start talking about responsible drinking, Mormons don’t trust them. Conversely, non-Mormons don’t trust Mormons on the topic of alcohol. For non-Mormons, the way in which Mormons assume their version of morality should be enshrined in law makes Mormons suspect the minute the minute they talk about the subject. Utah’s political culture is infested with the processes of Mormonism; members of the state legislature of have been known to slip up and refer to one another as Elder and Sister. Such slips are not wholly accidental as Legislative meetings can take on the tenor of a priesthood or sacrament meeting in which core assumptions about Mormon morality and views of world are presumed to adhere and be held by all persons present.

And so Bobbie Coray’s suggestion that we reconsider liquor laws, occurring deeply within the system causing the problems, could have done nothing more than get the response it got. Tourism is the achilles heel of Utah liquor laws - we like tourist dollars quite a lot. If those dollars dry up because of our laws, we’ll seriously consider changing our laws. Ironically, to make changes necessary to actually address the problem, it is Utah’s non-Mormons who must be put in charge of drafting the laws.

And that is not going to happen anytime soon.

This entry was posted Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 7:28 am and is filed under SLC Politics, Salt Lake City, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.