At 9:30 this morning we’ll know the future of Senator Chris Buttars.
From Warchol:
The buzz at the Capitol this afternoon is that Buttars will be disciplined, exactly how is a matter of speculation. This would seem to be a replay of last year, when Buttars embarrassed the Senate by threatening a judge who had ruled against one of Buttars’ buddies.But slapping down Buttars this time will be even more complicated. Sen. John Valentine was dumped as president, in part, because he punished Buttars last year by removing him as chairman of the Judiciary Confirmation Committee.
When Waddoups replaced Valentine as Senate President, the first thing he did was restore Buttars’ chairmanship. It allowed Buttars to thumb his nose at the groups that were outraged by his routine racial and homophobic comments.
Under this scenario Senator Buttars will be no worse off than he was a year ago even though he has accused the gay community of lacking morals, smearing fesces on each other during sex and being the greatest threat to America (apologies to Stephen Colbert’s bears).
Thus, Senator Buttars gets two bigoted comments (“black baby” and “pig sex”) for the price of one. I would hope that the public finds this totally unacceptable and demands more should Senate leadership fail this morning.
Furthermore, how this is handled sends a message to the world about how Utah feels about Senator Buttars remarks. Does Utah find the remarks inexcusable or do we find them benign? Is Chris Buttars a representative Utahn or a bigoted exception?
I also fear how today’s press conference will effect Reed Cowan’s documentary, which is on the Church & Prop 8. If Chris Buttars is no worse off today than he was a year ago, Cowan could use that to unfairly use Buttars as a representative of your typical Mormon or Utahn. That would be unethical of Cowan, but would have extraordinary consequences if his documentary is a success.
-Tom
WOW! It was nice to see Michael Waddoups give everyone time for questions…NOT…Could he not delay getting on the floor by five minutes to answer everyone’s questions on this most important issue?
I’m sorry folks, Michael Waddoups is a grade-A jerk.
This is the problem that people like Buttars brings up.
The hustlers looking for a buck with their fraudulent “sensitivity” training seminars will now come out of their holes and try to force all of us into a baptism of their view of how we should walk and talk and think.
Because WE THE PEOPLE did not shut down this fowl bigot, WE THE PEOPLE now have to sit through Big Brother-esque seminars engineered to make us recite PC platitudes.
The only thing worse than homophobia is forced sensitibity training. Thanks to Pigsex Buttars, Utah will soon have both.
My typing skills need sensitivity training.
I am well aware of the grammatical errors in my previous post. Let us all just ignore them, OK?
Misty @ Saintless has a nice recap of the “after the presser” events, complete with confrontation between Gayle Ruzicka and Troy Williams.
Also, I thought this from the D-News article was interesting:
I would like clarification as to what and who said it. It was unclear what the outcome was.
Hypothetical question here. This is just for my own clarification. If I were to tell someone that I think pig-sex is disgusting does that qualify me as a bigot?
I think someone needs to create some type of graph with sex acts on the x axis and level of “tolerance” on the y axis. The graph could then be divided into quadrants indicating publicly acceptable levels of tolerance or intolerance. Such information would be useful to those who make public statements and would not want to inadvertently appear “intolerant” to a subgroup of people who enjoy mixing feces, a variety of body fluids, large groups of like minded individuals and their pets with sex.
Um, why is anyone surprised he feels this way. Most Utahans do if they were really honest. They hate gays.