Mero, Sutherland Lose Face With LDS Church, Take Up Another Ridiculous Position Against Gays
by Rosemary Winters
The Salt Lake Tribune
A conservative Utah think tank now says Salt Lake City’s anti-discrimination ordinances can stay on the books as long as the Legislature tweaks them to exempt religious organizations and their followers.
Sutherland Institute President Paul Mero says that would create a “level playing field” for religious freedom.
Religious organizations and their subsidiaries — for instance, the LDS Church and Deseret Book — already are exempt from Salt Lake City’s new laws protecting gay and transgender residents from housing and employment discrimination. So are businesses with fewer than 15 employees and landlords who rent out portions of their own homes.
Salt Lake City will fight any legislation that attempts to expand the religious exemption, says Ben McAdams, Mayor Ralph Becker’s senior adviser.
“The exemption would swallow the rule,” he says, if any person of faith could be excluded.
This ‘stink tank’ group is without credibility. Sutherland Institute is one of the most vociferous gay bashing groups in the state, and it tries to do it under the cover of sophistication, thus all these biased reports are produced as if they come from real academics, and always as if they are the ‘Mormon Think Tank.’ They must be wondering why they aren’t the apostles.
Sutherland Institute! How pretentious!
When the LDS Church announced its support of the Salt Lake City ordinance giving equal protection to gays in housing and employment it caught the Sutherland boys with their pants down. The devastating part of the announcement was that the LDS Church hadn’t had the courtesy to tell Sutherland in advance. How could the church do that to them? After all these years of carping the church line they deserved advance notice on a change of policy—but they didn’t get it. That was one of the most beautiful parts of the church announcement—-that Sutherland is all puff and blow, especially when standing naked in public.
Now, after ice and heat on their badly bruised egos, they come out with this absurdity!!
The newly meek Mero has now confessed that “I trust that my church can see around corners that I cannot.”
So now he and his group, to save face, is taking the stand that since the church has carved out an exemption for itself that it is an exemption that should extend to all individuals of faith who hold the same objections to homosexuality.
Mayor Becker responded quickly and perfectly, ‘that exemption would swallow the rule.’
The Sutherland boys aren’t happy that they are going to have to give up discrimination. They think people of faith ought to be able to discriminate. ‘That’s what we’ve been doing, and we want to keep on doing it, and we should have a right to do it,’ is their thinking.
Even the LDS Church leaders have finally come to the conclusion that it is not fair or just to deny gays an equal opportunity in society. Sutherland (Mero) hasn’t yet realized that the purpose of the church announcement was to carve out a place in our society for gays, not for people of faith.
Times are a changing Sutherland boys. The cloak of the church has been removed and your bigotry is exposed.
Last month, the city passed two measures that ban housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The policy, a first for Utah, received a rare endorsement from the LDS Church. The church reiterated its opposition to gay marriage but praised the protections for gay and transgender people as “fair and reasonable.”
At the time, Sutherland dismissed the church’s endorsement as a “public-relations opportunity” and called on the Legislature to overturn the “unsound” ordinances.
But at a forum broadcast online this week, Mero says he studied the church’s statement and, “personally speaking, I trust that my church can see around corners that I cannot.”
Still, he says, the anti-discrimination rules “clearly infringe on religious freedom.”
“Were it not so, there would be no need for a religious exemption [for churches and their wholly owned subsidiaries],” he says. “It’s only fair and reasonable to preserve these same protections for all people of faith in Utah.”
McAdams say the city’s religious exemption mirrors those found in the state’s fair-housing and employment laws, which bar discrimination based on characteristics such as race, religion or sex. Salt Lake City’s law, he adds, is consistent with the U.S. Constitution.
“We are confident that we will hold the ground” on Capitol Hill, McAdams says. “My advocacy at the Legislature is focused on expanding protections for the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community — not narrowing them.”