We're Not Dealing With The Real World, We're Dealing With Utah. By Jeff Smith IF ONE IS truly tolerant, must he then tolerate intolerance? How then will humankind approach what surely must be its goal of perfect harmony, both within and without--inner peace and communal cooperation? I've been sipping a Coke and munching a Hershey bar and cogitating the ontological and teleological possibilities posed by the daily papers--as is my morning custom--and these questions fairly leapt from the pages of successive issues of the Star. The issue, as illustrated in news reports last Friday, is intolerance. The response--both predictable and, I think, valid and proper--is not to tolerate it. And while applauding the Star's editorial position, the moral high ground, a small, disquieting murmur from the little gray cells wondered if I might not be tumbling to a less-virulent form of the self-same intolerance that set the whole debate in motion. I reached for my Lucretius, but it exceeded my grasp. I am speaking, not in a metaphorical, Marlovian sense here, but in the temporal: De Rerum Natura sits for the nonce on a high shelf, past the grip of my curious fingers. Forced thus to take the philosopher's proxy, I will essay to resolve this issue: How about, say, intolerance really pisses you off, but, resisting the impulse to gut-shoot its practitioners, you make nice and, leading by your own good example, show the intolerant a better way? Purists may quibble, but somewhere between Lucretius and Ghandi we find a way that might work in the real world. The problem, in the instant case, is that we're not dealing with the real world, we're dealing with Utah. I raise this entire inquiry because of a small story concerning a fledgling organization at a Salt Lake City high school. A group of boys and girls at East High School sought to start a gay-straight student alliance. They ran into a little opposition, first in the persons of a lot of their fellow students, and then in the form of a four-member majority of the city board of education. It began innocently enough. A couple of dozen students at Salt Lake City's East High, gay, bisexual and even straight, decided to form a club. No big deal; school kids in Utah are positively bullish on extracurricular activities. There are--were--more than 30 clubs at the school. But the majority of kids, the majority of their parents, the majority of the school board, the majority of the state legislature, and the majority of the one attorney who represents the state board of education, didn't want anything that even whispers of homosexuality affiliated with their schools. So they tried to deny the gay/bi/straight organizers the right to get together. All they proposed to do when they did get together was to discuss the issues that affect them as young people trying to understand their own sexuality, in a society which frowns upon them. They had not planned to "use the schools as a place to organize orgies." This last quote comes from Doug Bates, attorney for the state board of education. Thank you, Master Bates, for these words of assurance. We are sure no one missed the implications of your compulsion to offer such comfort. The thing of it is, most of Utah is Mormon. Most of the school kids, most of the school boards, most of the school board lawyers, most of the state legislature. Eighty-five percent of the legislature, in fact, and that 85 percent strove mightily, and unsuccessfully, to draft a law that would outlaw the queers' club while still allowing The Beef Club to get together for burgers and stock reports, or the Students Against Drunk Drivers to cluck-cluck about Who-Hit-John, or the Future Homemakers of America to learn the missionary position, or any other of those wholesome Mormon missions. No dice. There's this silly business of the U.S. Constitution and the federal courts, which makes it plain that they either allow all extracurricular clubs, or none. After the legislature, the state board and the local board all failed to find a loophole, the local school board voted 4-3 to ban all non-curricular organizations. Of course the Beef Club and all the other straight gangs had a huge beef with the gays. "Everyone suffers because of the gays," said a Beef Club member. Bunch of bullies. The gays, I mean. It is indicative of the depth of antipathy and fear within the huge Mormon majority, that they would end all those generations of canning and quilting and raising 4-H prize cattle and sheep, rather than allow a few homosexually oriented or sexually disoriented kids to exercise their First Amendment rights. It is likewise indicative of the "otherness" of Mormon society in Utah that such a show of political and taxpayer-financed force was mobilized for a clearly unconstitutional crusade. I do not wish to make Mormonism a target for intolerance from any quarter, but one must draw aside the curtain when an American community clearly run by and for a single church denomination just as clearly puts the U.S. Constitution in a secondary position to its canon law. That, and I wonder what the official position might be on the time-honored tradition of sexual relations with ruminants and melon crops.

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