Supremes rain on Utah’s ‘gay pride parade’

The U.S. Supreme Court this week brought the state of Utah’s mad gallop into “gay marriage” to a screeching halt.

The liberal minority in that most conservative of U.S. states had been huzzawing and slapping high-fives ever since a federal judge on Dec. 20 overturned the results of the state’s 2004 referendum in which 66 percent of Utahans voted to define marriage as between “one man and one woman” in the state’s constitution. The judge ruled that this referendum somehow violated the “equal rights” clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The result? Gay couples in Utah stampeded to courthouses with all the enthusiasm of the Mormon immigrants of 1847 crossing the plains — but for a much different reason. They’d been legitimized! They could now be man and man and wife and wife! The Salt Lake Tribune, which beats the drums for every liberal cause in Utah (and which dislikes the Mormons and their church intensely) fell all over itself publishing story after story about the “wonderful” ruling, photos showing the crowds at the county clerk’s offices getting their marriage licenses, and — I suspect to the distaste of many — close-up pictures of gay couples kissing each other on the lips after saying their “I do’s.”  One especially offensive one, of two guys “doing the dirty” mouth-to-mouth, appeared at the top of the Tribune home page on Christmas Day, yet.

The Trib also has published at least one editorial urging the state of Utah to “follow the rest of the country” (all 17 states of it that have taken the plunge) and just give in and allow gay marriage to blossom like — oh, a thousand flowers, tastefully arranged, I suppose. That’s in addition to several op-ed pieces by Trib columnists. Those essays proved that everybody was on the same page of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

The Tribune’s regular comment posters were even more thrilled than they had been when Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney — or “Mittens,” as many of them sneeringly call him — in the 2012 presidential election. “Why, it was like the second coming of Che Guevara! All this and heaven too! And the Mormons are all bitter and frustrated about it! Ain’t it great?”

And then this Monday, the Supremes dropped their stink bomb on the celebration: “Gay marriage is halted in Utah until further notice.”

Or until the nine eminences decide just how to handle this hot potato which now seems to have almost as much momentum in the U.S. as Tom Dewey did in October of 1948.

Or until Hell freezes over. Whichever comes first.

The Trib and its liberal non-intelligensia were stunned — “knocked for six,” they’d say in Britain — at this turn of events. Suddenly their “gay marriage as our ‘We Are the World moment’ ” was coming all undone. The first story about the Court’s decision was posted at the top of the Trib’s home page, naturally, and the comments began piling up faster than Democrat votes in a Chicago cemetery.

And your humble correspondent here, who had delighted for months in posting comments that enraged the typical TribLib crowd, couldn’t participate, because he’d been banned from the site! Again. Got the news this time on Jan. 2, when I tried to type in a comment and got a big red banner above what I had written that said, “You are forbidden to post on this thread!” The Tribune doesn’t like regular posters who refuse to toe the party line: The Mormons are wicked, hypocritical liars; Utah’s drinking laws are ridiculous, and caused by said Mormons; all conservatives are stupid bigots; “gay marriage” is an idea whose time has come (pardon the pun). Well, you get the idea.

In one of my last permitted posts before I got consigned to the outer darkness, I had warned the giddy leftists on there that their euphoria might be short-lived once the Supreme Court received the state of Utah’s motion for a stay to the federal judge’s ill-advised (in my opinion) ruling to open the floodgates for homosexual marriage in their state. Turns out I was right, but, damn it, I don’t get to go on there and rub it in their faces! If it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have any at all. Oh, well, the regulars know my website’s name, so maybe they’ll read this essay and get mad at me all over again. Some of their favorite endearments when they reply to my posts are “Racist,” “Bigot,” “Old Corpse,” and “you fool.” The Trib has posting rules about not engaging in name-calling, but they always make an exception when it’s directed at me.

But that’s OK; when people squeal, you know you’re hitting them where it hurts. When they call you names, and ask why you don’t “keep your nose out of Utah affairs,” you’ve drawn blood.

How did I happen to start going onto a website way out in Utah in the first place? Glad you asked me that question. You see, for many years I’ve had a fascination for the story of the Mormon (LDS) church, how it originated, what the early Mormons had to go through, how they ultimately founded the state of Utah, and how they have succeeded in the world. No, I’m not Mormon; I wouldn’t make a good one, because they make a lot of demands on their members, and I’m lazy. Yeah, bet those of you who know me are really surprised to hear that, aren’t you? Yuk, yuk! But anyway, several years ago when Jimmer Fredette was the leading college basketball scorer in the country and was a senior at Brigham Young University, I began perusing the stories about him in the Tribune. Most of those who posted comments about them had little good to say about him, because he was a Mormon. So I began reading some of the straight-news stories, too, and posting comments on them.

I had heard that the Tribune represented “the other side of Utah,” but I didn’t realize how “other” it — and a certain number of its readers — really were. I discovered that the quickest way to be accepted as “one of the guys” on the Trib website, was to say as many snarky, sarcastic, hateful things about the Mormons and their church, as you could think of. The quickest way to become a pariah on there, was to defend the Mormons in any way (or the Republicans, or the Utah state government, or conservatives in general). Criticize President Obama, and you were automatically a “racist.” Don’t know how many times I got told that I was “late for your KKK meeting,” or such nonsense.

One poster found this website, and posted the name on the Trib website so the others could read a few of my stories on here and see what a “racist” I was (yeah, sure; same old accusation, different day). He also made a big deal out of the fact that I post sometimes on the American Renaissance website, which deals in what founder Jared Taylor calls “race realism.” Apparently that also put me beyond the pale. These Utah liberals are very racially naive.

I think it was my comments about the Dec. 20 judicial fiat that opened the doors for gay marriage in Utah that finally sealed my fate with the Trib this time, and got me banned again. I tried to prick the liberals’ self-inflated balloon of hubris about how gay marriage was now in Utah to stay, blah, blah, blah, by reminding them that the state administration would not simply sit back and let this happen without a fight, and that the Supreme Court was likely to issue a stay in order for the matter to be aired out thoroughly. Turns out I was right, although by the time the stay was issued (it should have been by the district judge, but he refused) I wasn’t in a position to say “I told you so!” Not on the Trib website, anyway. That’s where having your OWN, comes in handy, once in a while.

It was funny to see the reaction of the TribLibs when it published the story about the stay. First to come on were the Utahans who didn’t support gay marriage, but who had remained silent until that point. They were really crowing at the disgruntled leftists, throwing in a bunch of anti-gay slurs that were quite frankly unnecessary and which I was amazed the Tribune didn’t delete. Then the “pro-gay marriage” crowd came on, angry and frustrated as hell, screaming about “people being denied their rights” and “homophobia in Utah.” The last time I checked the counter on that Tribune story, late this afternoon, the number of posts about it was up to just under 8,000, and still counting. Today, the Utah state government announced that it would not honor the 1,000 or so gay marriages which had taken place in Utah since Dec. 20 — that is, not until the issue is settled one way or the other. That gave the TribLibs yet another excuse to howl in outrage. They’ve been in full screaming, morally superior liberal mode ever since Monday.

So what will be the outcome of all this pro- and anti- gay marriage hooha? I have no idea. Twenty years ago 90 percent of the American people would have laughed if you’d suggested that homosexuals should be able to get legally “married.” Now 17 states have approved it. It’s “all the rage”. I don’t really have a strong opinion about it, except to say that I think if “gay marriage” was such a logical, fair thing, it would have existed many centuries ago, just as traditional marriage has.

But I seem to recall an old saying … let’s see, what was it? Oh, yes: “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” Will we Americans be repenting about all this, a few years from now? Stay tuned …