This post deserves more time than I can give it here and I hope other authors here at OneUtah will feel free to append this post. Eric Ethington’s Weblog provides an excellent recap of the Sacred Ground Meeting this week, organized by the Sutherland Institute and the Utah Eagle Forum. This was apparently not intended to be a true public event, but apparently was intended to preach to the converted.

Read some of Eric’s description of the screening of attendees:

. . . the Sutherland Institute sent out an email to many of the prominent gay activist leaders in the community (Jacob Whipple and Michael Mueller) in the hours prior to the event letting them know they and their groups were no longer welcome to attend. This went so far as the young man who checked me in apologized for the extra security, saying, “there are supposed to be a lot of bad people trying to get in tonight, so we’re being very careful.” To enforce this decree, they pulled the list of attending people from Facebook, and listed them as banned from the event. Many people, not aware of this change, were actually forcibly removed from the event.

There were lengthy speeches by Paul Mero and State Representative LaVar Christensen which Eric summarizes in his post. He points out the most surprising failure of the meeting–to discuss the actual details and merits or flaws in the current bills before the legislature known as the Common Ground Initiative. Instead it was all about scare tactics and high-level generalizations about the effects of passing these yet undiscussed bills.

All in all, the only topic heard all night was Gay Marriage. Over and over it was flaunted as the stain on the Earth, and completely and irrevocably immoral and wrong. What was most noticeably lacking, was there was not one mention of a single bill in the Common Ground Initiative. Not once did they elaborate on how protecting people’s jobs and housing was going to bring on Gay Marriage.

It truly seems, that all these people can think of to do is scare people with a future topic, and hope they don’t pay attention to today’s issues. For if they do, it’s already been shown that these rights are the will of the majority of the state.

Paul is a sometime visitor to OneUtah, and I do hope he will visit here and explain why he failed to discuss the details of the bills. I suspect it’s because those bills just make too much sense.

h/t to Jenn at Utah Legislature Watch