My Letter to the Trib

Editors,

I cannot pick up my copy of the Tribune on any morning and not read how our misguided legislature seeks to marginalize, minimalize, and add to the burdens of those who are different but live among us. They may not look exactly like me, though I like salsa better than ketchup and tortillas better than Wonder Bread. They may not share my gender orientation, but their agenda, if there is one, does not threaten my marriage, my family or my values. I am an old Mormon bishop and I cannot sit still any longer and listen to the garbage coming from the hill from our ethnically challenged and homophobic legislators. They are a threat to me and the tranquility of my life.

I ask these erstwhile champions, protectors of our freedom, our race, our morality, wouldn't the world be a better place if you just enjoyed your lobbyist paid for Jazz games and junkets to the Caribbean, and left the rest of us alone? In spite of these legislators of morality as people of Utah, who are kind, compassionate, and caring, can we not find and share the things we have in common, celebrate our differentness, enjoy that which is unique about us all as children of a loving Heavenly Father rather than marginalizing and criminalizing so many among us?