March 2nd, 2009
There must have been two different parties on Saturday in Salt Lake City, both of them sharing the name “Buttars-Palooza.” How else would one explain the two very different estimates of crowd size. First, the Salt Lake Tribune:
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’ now-famous comments about gays.
The LDS church-owned Deseret News had a different estimate:
The crowd of 300 or so cheered and waved rainbow flags.
“We are all here as part of something larger, something that is a little bit more threatening to Chris Buttars than the gay-rights movement,” said Araveni Olivares, a local activist. “We are part of a lasting movement for civil rights and social justice.”
The Deseret News’ coverage has taken a considerable turn lately, so much so that News reporters recently refused to allow their names to appear in their stories’ bylines in protest over editorial policy changes. Two well-respected editors, Chuck Gates and Julianne Basinger, were demoted after having criticized the paper for tailoring the paper’s content to be more pleasing to LDS readers.
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Tavdy
March 2nd, 2009
You know, I never imagined that Mormons would be cool with hallucinogens. Hell, I never imagined they’d be cool at all.
;-)
cowboy
March 2nd, 2009
Now, now. Is it bash the Mormons time again? There are some “cool” Mormons out here.
adam kautz
March 2nd, 2009
The whole Buttars incident is the very reason that us gays need to use their words against them in this case the mormons. We need to make average Americans understand that 90% of all mormons view lgbt americans in the same light as those monsters that flew those jets into the trade towers and the pentagon. If people see that these people are that out of touch it will destroy their evangelizing efforts with the public and force these assholes to apologize to us and america for even implying that we are like the terrorists. I had no problem with the mormon church until they compared me with Osama Bin Laden. Now there will be hell to pay. I intend with all my being to destroy all the mormons evangelizing efforts with the public until they issue a true heartfelt apology.
Johnson
March 2nd, 2009
Utah has certainly gotten a lot of bad press in the last year or so, and it seems to get worse every day.
John B
March 3rd, 2009
Cowboy – unfortunately the “cool” Mormons are few and far between.
Unfortunately the few cool members can not offset the hardliners, which are still the vast majority. And when push comes to shove, the cool ones will ultimately “act like sheep” and bend to the will of their stronger brotheren (of course I would say “stronger women” too, but the church treats women as nothing more than child bearers).
Todd Bennett
March 4th, 2009
I was at Buttars-palooza on Saturday. It was a cool event, but there were NOT 1000 people there — I’d guesstimate perhaps 500-600 tops.
Which, unfortunately, means Des News (pronounced D’Snooze) had a closer estimate.
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