Affirmation: Gay & Lesbian Mormons

Sisters Lindsay and Emma attended Buttars-Palooza event wearing T-shirts that read “If you can't say anything nice... Don't say anything at all.”

Group Storms Utah Capitol for ‘Buttars-Palooza’
Festival Held in reaction to Buttars’ anti-gay comments

From a story in The Salt Lake Tribune
February 2009

More than a thousand people converged on the Utah Capitol on Saturday, not for legislative protest, but to party. Couples, families and individuals danced on the south lawn to live music at "Buttars-Palooza," a festival meant to exploit the audacity of Utah Sen. Chris Buttars’ infamous comments about gays.

Saying that the Republican senators' comments comparing gay activists to Islamic extremists were so ridiculous that they didn't even rate protest, many revelers simply chose to respond in jest.

Saturday's festival comes following statements Buttars made to a documentary filmmaker in which he compared homosexuals to radical Muslims, called them the greatest internal threat to America and said they had no morals.

Tobin Atkinson, a former member of the Army's First Infantry Division, said Buttars’ words don't just reflect badly on Utahns, but all Americans.

"The greatest threat to America? I find that offensive," said Atkinson, a veteran of the Iraq war. "It's really revolting, and it's not what I signed up to defend."

Atkinson's wife, Marynell Hinton, noted Buttars’ lack of military service, saying: "For someone to say this is the greatest threat to America is clearly not someone who has ever faced an actual threat in his life."

Buttars’ Comments and Reactions

In an interview with documentarian Reed Cowan, Senator Buttars said that gay movement is “probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of.” He added that gay people practice “pig sex,” apparently meaning that the gay community engages in sexual acts that include defecation, group sex, and bestiality.

The LDS Church did not condemn Buttars’ comments. Instead, they issued a statement that reads, “From the outset, the Church’s position has always been to engage in civil and respectful dialogue on this issue. Senator Buttars does not speak for the Church.”

The LDS Church also issued an editorial in the LDS-owned Deseret News about Buttars’ comments.

Sen. Chris Buttars, who has since been removed from the Judicial Standing Committee he chaired, but a story in the Salt lake Tribune revealed that he was not removed because of comparing gays to fundamentalist Muslims or accusing them of practicing “pig sex,” but rather because he broke an agreement with the Utah Senate President Michael Waddoups not to make any more incendiary statements against the gay community.

Buttars told the media he has no intention of making a public apology for his words.

“In recent years, registering opposition to the homosexual agenda has become almost impossible,” Buttars wrote on the Utah State Senate Republican blog. “Political correctness has replaced open and energetic debate. Those who dare to disagree with the homosexual agenda are labeled ‘haters,’ and ‘bigots,’ and are censured by their peers. The media contributes to the problem. Increasingly, individuals with conservative beliefs are targeted by a left-leaning media that uses their position of public trust as a bully pulpit. This pattern of intimidation suppresses free speech.”