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“I don't think there's a racial [sic] bone in my body” by Lisa Hansen August 2006 A Mormon lawmaker who co-sponsored the Utah ban on marriage equality said on a radio show that the landmark 1955 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared public school segregation unconstitutional, was "wrong to begin with." State Senator Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, was responding to questions from reporter Tom Grover on Logan radio station KVNU-AM and discussing a bill that would allow the Utah Senate to remove a state judge from office at the end of the jurist's term if Buttars and fellow senators took issue with the judge's rulings. When Grover mentioned that "courts are the way for those in the minority ... to ensure (their) rights are protected," Buttars responded, "I don't understand that at all. You give me an example. I don't know of any example where the minority is being jeopardized by legislative action." When Grover mentioned the 1955 Brown v. Board of Education ruling as an example, Buttars said: "Well, I think Brown v. Board of Education is wrong to begin with. That's a whole other subject. Call me again and take a half-hour to talk about that." "I don't think there's a racial [sic] bone in my body," Buttars said in an interview on radio station KCPW Tuesday. "I don't see black and white. I see people. I always have." Buttars gained notoriety in December 2003, when he repeatedly called homosexuality a "perversion" and drafted a bill against marriage equality that was eventually passed. "For goodness sake, for years the gay and lesbian community has had us under a full-court press (saying) that two men having sex together isn't a perversion; it's a choice. That's baloney. So now they say: 'Let us be married.' But wrong is wrong, and a perversion is a perversion," Buttars said. "Marriage is between a man and a woman legally married," Buttars repeated in January 2004. "Anything other than that is sexual perversion."
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