One Utah

Rebecca Walsh is rapidly becoming my favorite local newsperson.  Her article in today’s Trib is yet another perfect example of her ability to accurately record the seriously messed up politics of Utah.

Walsh writes:

As is so often the case, Salt Lake City is acting out, testing the bounds of this big conservative family we like to call a state.

And like any good domineering father, West Jordan Republican Sen. Chris Buttars has whittled the willow switch himself. He has pounced on his annual anti-gay cause - nullifying Mayor Ralph Becker’s registry. And he’ll do whatever it takes, even inverting beloved conservative principles of local control and hands-off government to turn Utah into his version of a top-down patriarchy . . . Eagle Forum President Gayle Ruzicka and anti-gay attorney Frank Mylar sat behind them, acting for all the world like parents at a piano recital.
 . . .  Riverton Mayor Bill Applegarth, insinuating himself like a smarmy favored son, argued against government closest to the people. He begged lawmakers to protect his suburban city from the corrupting influences of the capital.

“I don’t always agree with what the Legislature mandates to us. But I appreciate the safety - that the Legislature is charged to guide and direct cities,” Applegarth said. Leave the decision, he said, not up to individual cities, but to the “great minds of the Senate, the wisest minds. You have the right to direct us.”

Like parents.

The glaring hypocrisy of Buttar’s butting into the city’s business is of course invisible to the small minded, cowering, pants wetting bigots known as Utah’s conservative legislative majority.  If it means abandoning all their other values, they’ll give Salt Lake City what-for for not kowtowing to their towering egos and tiny pricks (am I the only one who’s sure that Buttars and his cohorts suffer from button mushroom syndrome?  The metaphor works on two levels - the first about size, the second about growing up in the dark and being fed shit.).

Anyway, it’s obvious Walsh has been reading her Lakoff.  The whole nation as family metaphor works at a deep level here - from the perspective of the legislators like Buttars, Salt Lake City acts like a wayward child who must be firmly and finally put under the control of the strict father.  I honestly think Buttars and others like him are surprised that Ralph Becker is actually more liberal than Rocky - Rocky fit their stereotype of a liberal, Ralph by contrast is quiet, unassuming.  That he would “act out” like this is all the more surprising and all the more demanding of a smack down. 

In the conservative model of family, big daddy is always right, even, perhaps especially, when he unreasonably asserting his parental authority.  Lakoff examines the model - Riverton’s mayor even manages to invoke the contagion metaphor so common to this model in which a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.  (FWIW, contagion is also a common metaphor within Utah’s Mormon culture wherein people will avoid associating themselves with people who drink coffee or alcohol, have sex and generally refuse to engage in bitter self-abnegation for in the desperate hope that somehow, somewhere God might give a shit about them.)

And while I’m thinking about it - exactly what kind of God do these bigoted wingnuts believe in?  Think about it- if God is the omniscient, omnipotent, creator of the Universe and if the universe is even half as vast and wonderful as it appears, then the idea that God actually cares what people do while naked and if we have same sex marriage or not suggests that God is little more than feckless, petty thug.

This entry was posted Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Bigotry, Bigotry, Bullying, Chris Buttars, Gail Rusika, Homophobia, Privacy, Ralph Becker, Religious Fundamentalism, Republicans, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.