Salt Lake tribune: State of Utah Takes an Ugly Path

While the ruling that struck down Utah's ban on same sex marriage is on appeal to the 10th Circuit, the State of Utah has been doubling down on its efforts to discriminate against and stigmatize same sex couples.  All the while, of course, state officials are pretending to support the "Christian values" - e.g., hate and bigotry - which are a hallmark of the Mormon Church and other anti-gay churches.  In a main editorial, the Salt Lake Tribute bitch slapped those in the state's leadership who are pursuing this ugly path.  Here are editorial excerpts:

In rapid succession, the official Utah position on same-sex marriage has gone from mainstream conservative to merely retrograde to downright nasty.

In fairness, it is not only, or even primarily, Utah’s laws and policies that have changed. It is the rest of the world that has moved, with a speed seldom seen in such matters, away from a one-size-fits-all view of marriage to a live-and-let-live acceptance of what’s now called marriage equality.

It is disappointing that the state’s lawmakers and law enforcers have not yet caught up. But they will have to. 

The arguments put forth Thursday by Utah’s hired legal eagles in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals will soon be brushed aside, if not by that tribunal, then by the U.S. Supreme Court, and by the march of human progress.

Meanwhile, the state is engaged in a rear-guard action against families it does not like. It is trying to block the adoption petitions filed by at least two of the some 1,200 same-sex couples who were legally wed after Judge Robert J. Shelby ruled in December that Utah’s Amendment 3, banning same-sex marriage in the state, was unconstitutional.

The fact that the state is going out of its way to stop the legal formation of two — or more — secure, intact and loving families clearly puts the lie to the argument that the official defense of Amendment 3 is not, in lawyer-speak, "animus" against same-sex couples and their households, but a reasonable state effort to encourage the legal formation of, well, secure, intact and loving families.

The core of the many district court rulings allowing same-sex marriage is Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion holding, in the case that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage act, that DOMA was an impermissible denigration of the many children who live in such households.

Utah’s state attempt to block these adoptions is exactly the kind of cruelty that Kennedy was talking about. And, if there is any justice, it will be another example the backers of same-sex marriage will use to prove that Utah isn’t out to protect families, but to harm them.

Ouch!!  Yes, the editorial is harsh, but it is sadly 100% on target.  There is very little in the way of love for others in today's fundamentalist Christian belief and by extension in the modern day Mormon Church.  Instead, false and feigned piety are the norm and  the real goal is to denigrate and harm others who are not members of the ignorance embracing cult.