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Opinion 
Anderson on Tack. Council Is Not.
Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson made a bold move Wednesday, Sept. 21 by signing an executive order extending health benefits to gay and nongay domestic partners of city employees.
Salt Lake City Council members are looking to provide similar benefits but, as is their style, they are trying to water down the notion of extending rights to gay men and lesbians.
The city council of 1997, a much more left-leaning council, passed an ordinance that protected employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Months later, the first item of business after the election of a much more conservative group of council members was to repeal the ordinance and replace it with an emasculated version that required hiring and firing be made solely on “job-based criteria.”
One of the first actions Anderson made upon his election was to, in effect, replace the nondiscrimination ordinance with an order that specifically enumerated “sexual orientation” as one of the protected classes.
Conservative lawmakers love to pretend that they are being inclusive and fair and come up with creative ways to make it look like they are doing just that.
Take the Utah hate crime law as an example. To show their compassion for all citizens, state lawmakers passed what they called a hate crime law that made it a felony to “intimidate or terrorize another person.” This approach allowed them to claim they passed a hate crime law without having to say the loath words “sexual orientation.”
The law, however, is unenforceable. It has no teeth, is overly broad and has yet to be successfully used. Worse, it has been used for the last seven years to quell any attempt at passage of a real hate crime law.
It makes one wonder if that was the intent all along.
The day before Anderson was to sign the health benefits order, conservative Council Member Dave Buhler floated in the press the idea of extending health benefits to parents, siblings and friends, saying, “we should be more inclusive than exclusive.”
That sounds all warm and fuzzy, but we all know such benefits would be too expensive and a huge burden on an already-shrinking employee benefits package. The benefits will ultimately have to be repealed.
It makes one wonder if that was the intent all along.
QSaltLake feels that the council’s effort to overshadow Anderson’s order is either misguided or an outright attempt to thwart the progress of gay and lesbian Utahns in our efforts to obtain equal civil rights.
We encourage our readers to call their city council members and ask them to abandon their attempts to over-extend health benefits and to work instead on extending equal bereavement- and dependent-leave benefits to the city’s unmarried couples.
Mayor Anderson’s tack was right five years ago and is right again today. |
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